Councils in need of special school places have expressed “unease” over the need for a repeated review and approval of new building projects, saying any further delays risk provision opening late.
A senior Department for Education official this week confirmed the new administration was “working through urgent decisions and taking time to understand those”.
Bracknell Forest in Berkshire was one of 30 council areas selected last March to receive a new special free school in wave three of the programme.
‘Unease’ of special school reviews
At the Education Estates conference in Manchester this week, a council official asked Jane Balderstone, the DfE’s director of construction delivery, what was happening.
He said the project had been “going fine…the lawyers are all happy, but four weeks ago we were told the minister has called everything in so they can’t even give us a start date now”.
“If that’s true, when will we know that our project can go forward? The big trouble we’ve got for that is if it drags on we will have a problem delivering those spaces to young people when they’re needed.”
Balderstone replied that it was “genuinely a case of working through urgent decisions and taking time to understand those as a new government”.
Grainne Siggins, from the council, said that “due to government changes, this scheme is required to be re-presented to ministers for approval”.
“Bracknell Forest Council is currently awaiting the outcome of this review, and a response is expected imminently.”
Lincolnshire was one of 16 areas selected in March this year to receive a new special free school in wave four of the programme.
At the conference, Eileen McMorrow from Lincolnshire County Council also asked for an update.
“Local authorities have a sense of unease at the moment, because it feels very quiet. So just wondered if there was an update.”
Balderstone said there was not, but “we’re working through those, as you would expect, and we will come back to colleagues as soon as possible”.
Martin Smith, the council’s assistant director for children’s education, said it “took this opportunity” to ask for reassurance that the new school’s importance was recognised and that progress would be made soon.
Labour commits to projects
Stephen Morgan, the minister in charge of school estates, this week recommitted the new administration to continuing with the school rebuilding programme and annual condition funding awards.
It comes after the BBC reported that of more than 500 schools selected for rebuilds, contracts had been awarded for just 62.
Asked if rebuilds would go ahead as planned, Balderstone said for schools given indicative start dates it was “still our plan that we will come to those schools around those indicative start dates”.
Tim Warneford, an academy funding consultant, said: “My sense is in absolutely every area, whether it’s school rebuilding programme, whether it’s RACC projects, whether it’s special projects, anything that you name, there seems to be an absolute dearth of comms.
“It may be, to be fair to them, that they just want to lift up the bonnet and understand what’s going on.”
He said there was a “ton of goodwill” for the new government’s agenda, “but at some stage, the elephant in the room is a £15 billion backlog funding requirement”.
In 2021, the DfE estimated repairing or replacing all defects in England’s schools would cost more than £11 billion. That figure is likely to have increased, with the National Audit Office last year warning of a £2 billion annual gap in funding.
“We would hope at some stage that we would be communicated with in terms of … what we can expect,” Warneford said.
Labour said little during the election campaign and since about how it will approach capital funding, with much of it hingeing on the budget and spending review later this month.
According to reports, chancellor Rachel Reeves is weighing up whether to change fiscal rules to unlock extra borrowing to provide more capital cash for projects such as schools and hospitals.
CIF under review
But the new government has ordered a review of the system for maintenance funding to schools, as concerns grow that the current set-up is “too complicated”.
Officials are also working on a “education estates management portal” to bring together its interactions with trusts and councils over site issues behind a “single front door”.
Dr Jonathan Dewsbury, the department’s director of education estates and net zero, told the conference on Monday it knew there was “room for improvement” in how the condition improvement fund (CIF) and the school condition allocation (SCA) programme functioned.
Asked whether CIF was working, he said the government was “really keen to make sure that consistency of funding continues. But I think our conversations with the sector and with responsible bodies, in particular those small trusts that access CIF, it’s perhaps too complicated and not in some places as accessible as it needs to be.
“That’s what we need to work through and work out a better way of thinking through that type of programme.”
Lindsay Harris, the deputy director of education estates, said the DfE in the next year would look at the “whole mix of how we provide maintenance funding, SCA and CIF”.
He said the 2025 CIF round, which will open shortly, would follow “roughly the format that it’s taken in recent years. Then we’ll be reviewing in parallel for 2026 onwards, but I don’t know what that will look like yet.”
Morgan told the conference the government was “committed to improving the condition of school buildings through annual funding, fixing the problem of RAAC and continuing the school rebuilding programme”.
But he said that, “as demographic shifts in the coming years, the estate will have to serve new requirements”.
That meant “thinking beyond just rebuilding. In the long term, we want to rebalance our approach, prioritising sustainable maintenance and retrofit for energy efficiency and climate resilience.”
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