Building Schools for the Future Progress Report

HERTFORDSHIRE COUNTY COUNCIL

Education panel

TUESDAY 23 JANUARY 2007 AT 10.00 AM

BUILDING SCHOOLS FOR THE FUTURE PROGRESS REPORT

Report of the Director of Children, Schools and Families

Report Author: Lindsay Martin 01992 556718

Executive Member: David Lloyd

Local Members: Sherma Baston

David Cullen

Michael Downing

Tanis Kent

John Lloyd

Robin Parker

1.  Purpose of report

1.1 To inform members of the Panel of the success of the County Council’s bid to be in Wave 4 of the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme.

2. Summary

2.1 Following a report to Cabinet on 24 July 2006, the County Council submitted a “Readiness to Deliver” submission to the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) bidding for Wave 4 funding from the BSF programme for Stevenage. On 14 December DfES announced the list of authorities funded in Wave 4, including Hertfordshire. At the time of writing the ‘Launch Event’ for all Wave 4 authorities is awaited on 18 January and an individual remit meeting shortly after.

2.2 The indicative funding is £133.5m for building work and £12.6m for ICT hardware. The next stages of the process are the submission to, and approval by, DfES of a “Strategy for Change” document, part 1 by the middle of March and part 2 in the summer. The draft of Part 1 will submitted to Cabinet on 19 March. These will be followed by the submission of an Outline Business Case at the end of 2007/beginning of 2008.

2.3 Five “areas requiring further development” were identified from our “Readiness to Deliver” submission (for example, the development of second specialisms, personalised learning and 14-19 diplomas) but there is as yet no indication of how, or at what stage in the process, these are expected to be addressed.

2.4 Some members will be aware that the area review of secondary and special school provision in Stevenage has started as part of the programme of such reviews agreed by Cabinet in November 2005. It will be necessary to align the detailed timetable for the review with the timetable set by the DfES for the various approval stages of BSF.

3. Conclusions

3.1 Members are asked to receive this report and to note the timetable for future elements of the approval process.

4 Background

4.1 A copy of the Cabinet report of 24 July is attached as Appendix 1 and the County Council’s “Readiness to deliver” submission, excluding appendices, is attached as Appendix 2.

4.2 Since the Cabinet report in July:

·  a Project Board has been established, chaired by the Chief Executive, the membership of which is set out in Appendix 3

·  a core project team has been established which has been meeting weekly

·  leads for each key area of the Strategy for Change documentation have been identified

·  arrangements have been made with Mace and Place Group to support officers and to assist with the development of an ’education vision’ for Hertfordshire

·  a series of visioning workshops, led by Place Group, has been held for schools, partner organisations and other stakeholders, and further workshops will be held up to the end of January

·  the data packs for the area review of secondary and special school provision have been despatched to all stakeholders and the consultation process for them starts in January

·  work has been put in hand to identify the staff and consultant resources necessary for the satisfactory completion of future requirements on the County Council both for BSF and the area review of school provision.

4.3 Further reports will be made to Panel at appropriate stages in the process.

5 Financial Implications

5.1 Whilst the authority has received an indicative allocation of funding totalling £146.1m, as set out in paragraph 2.2, the likely proportions of funding in terms of PFI and conventional funding is unknown at this stage. It is also unclear how the element of conventional funding will be delivered; by way of grant or supported borrowing or a mix of the two. The final balance of this funding will be critical as to whether this programme can be delivered

5.2 Based on experience of the early schemes, the likely expectation is that the authority provides support for some 10% of the scheme costs. These costs and any further waves will need to be planned within the authority’s overall medium term financial capital strategy.

5.3 Cabinet have already approved an element (£750k) of the capital resource earmarked for Stevenage (totalling £3.281m) for the costs of developing the initial documentation. The cost of getting to the Local Education Partnership (LEP), based on the experience of other authorities, is estimated at £3m. This cost could therefore be contained within the overall resource earmarked for Stevenage.

Appendix 1

HERTFORDSHIRE COUNTY COUNCIL

CABINET

MONDAY 24 JULY 2006 AT 2.00 P.M.

BUILDING SCHOOLS FOR THE FUTURE

Report of the Director of Children, Schools and Families

Author: Lindsay Martin, Head of School Access

Tel: 01992 556718

Executive Member: David Lloyd

1. Purpose of the report

To update Cabinet on this major Government initiative and set out the next steps which Hertfordshire needs to take relating to it.

2. Summary

Building Schools for the Future is the Government’s major capital investment programme in secondary schools. It is a 15-year multi-billion pound programme which aims to rebuild or refurbish every secondary school. Following the recent confirmation by the DfES that Stevenage is in Part B (2008 – 2011) of the programme, this report sets out what the County Council needs to do to benefit from this programme, the financial and staff investment required, and the implications of the Government’s required method of procurement.

The Resources Panel considered this report at its meeting on 4 July and made the following comments to Cabinet:

Any comments from the Education Panel on 18 July will be reported separately.

3. Conclusions

Cabinet is asked to consider this report, including the implications of the procurement process, and to agree to the next steps set out here including the financial and staffing implications.

4. Background

4.1  Building Schools for the Future (BSF) is a national programme to lift educational attainment through a complete transformation of England’s secondary schools. It is a programme of rebuilding and renewal to ensure that secondary education in every part of England has 21st-century facilities in 10-15 years from 2005–06, subject to future public-spending decisions.

4.2 School buildings and services are important to pupils’ education. They should support an education vision of high expectations, specialism and excellence, local collaboration, workforce reform, children’s services, community involvement and high-quality teaching and learning.

4.3 Over the last two years the DfES, Partnerships for Schools (PfS), pathfinder and other authorities early in the programme, Partnerships UK, 4ps and other local government bodies, schools and the private sector have been involved in extensive consultations and preparatory work which has resulted in:

·  recognition of the need for strategic thinking regarding innovation and transformation;

·  the development of a new model of procurement and estate management to enable investment in schools to be delivered more quickly and at lower cost, and to enable them to be maintained over their whole lives;

·  the development of innovative and thought-provoking ‘exemplar designs’ to encourage people to challenge thinking about what schools are, and how they should be built; and

·  PfS being fully established as the delivery vehicle for BSF, responsible both for working with the Department on the national programme, and with all local authorities in the programme to scope their educational vision, define their investment strategy and procure and deliver their programmes.

4.4  Transformational change: each local BSF project is part of a wider programme to achieve transformation in educational standards. Local authorities and schools have to demonstrate a holistic approach to the planning of their individual projects. This approach will need to be founded upon:

·  transformational change – creating radical improvements in educational outcomes and schools organisation;

·  a clearly articulated education vision – it is vital that locally-developed projects are driven by a vision of what can be accomplished through transformational change;

·  a strategic assessment of what this means for a local authority’s education estate, how its current provision matches up to it, and what the gaps are;

·  a statement on how the project integrates with the wider community – how the project joins up with other service providers such as health, leisure and social services to ensure a complementary approach and the proper integration of services; and

·  a business case for all individual BSF projects which shows how they fill the identified gaps and contribute towards achieving the vision, including:

Ø  project sustainability – investment must be protected by ensuring that schools are well cared for throughout their useful lives;

Ø  effective delivery – a new approach to procurement will simplify and speed up the delivery of future projects; and

Ø  value for money – a long-term national programme will create economies of scale by allowing new approaches to design and construction.

5.  Procurement

5.1 BSF will be delivered through a new model of procurement and asset management, the Local Education Partnership (LEP), designed to meet the specific objectives of BSF – to deliver a long term, strategic programme, integrating ICT with building investment, to achieve an outcome that meets the transformational education objectives of local stakeholders. The LEP takes the form of a joint venture between PfS, the local authority and a private sector partner.

5.2 When most local authorities become involved in BSF for the first time, they will set out to procure a LEP private sector partner, and their first project, in parallel. This public private partnership (PPP) arrangement is designed to be able to deliver projects using both conventional capital expenditure and private finance initiative (PFI) credits. The LEP is designed to be a long term strategic partner for the authority, formalised under a strategic partnership agreement (SPA), so that it can deliver the long term specific requirements of the local BSF programmes.

A full suite of standard documentation in relation to the LEP approach has been prepared by PfS.

6.  Exemplar designs

6.1 The development of exemplar designs is an illustration of the kind of innovative approach which BSF makes possible. During the BSF preparatory stage, the DfES commissioned multi-disciplinary teams including designers, construction industry representatives and educationalists who worked with partner schools to develop a series of designs: five primary, five secondary and one all-through school. These responded to a challenging brief of changing educational needs, demonstrated how high standards of school building design can be achieved within DfES area and cost guidelines, and helped to streamline the development and procurement process. The resulting designs provided some exciting and innovative solutions and the ideas and concepts described should assist authorities to create ‘Schools for the Future’.

6.2  All the designs are affordable within the net costs per square metre that the DfES currently allocates to new projects. The DfES has also demonstrated,through realcase studiesof secondary schools, that refurbishments can also achieve genuinely transformational outcomes, and can often provide better value for money.

6.3 The Building Research Establishment has developed for the DfES a version of the Building Research Establishment’s Environmental Assessment Methodology (BREEAM) for schools, which will make it easier and cheaper for schools to be assessed for sustainability. The DfES is making it a requirement for funding new schools that the aim is for a ‘very good’ or ‘excellent’ rating under this assessment.

7.  ICT

7.1  Information and communications technology (ICT) is a core part of the programme and a key transformational challenge, especially given the pace of technological development. The introduction of BSF funding enables a step change in the level of ICT provision in secondary schools in England. Local authorities are required to think strategically about how they are going to develop and use ICT providedthrough BSF as part of their overall programme to raise standards. This will involve making full use of the opportunities provided bynew investmentin a way that takes account of and embedsthe use of ICT across the curriculum, and within the buildings.

8.  National partnership arrangements

8.1 Planning for and delivering individual schools is, of course, locally led, by individual local authorities and many local authorities have already taken significant steps towards developing a local education vision shared across their communities. Given the scale of the BSF programme, DfES has established a specialist agency, PfS, to ensure that these aspirations are achieved. The DfES shares management responsibility for PfS with Partnerships UK, reflecting the need to bring education and project delivery experience together in a programme of this scale. DfES retains responsibility for policy, overall wave funding approvals, the management of other key programmes and the responsibility for approving the BSF education visions and business cases.

8.2  To be successful, DfES and PfS will need to make sure the programme achieves both the national and local visions. PfS will assist local authorities to demonstrate that local projects do so at key stages. This will involve local authorities, PfS and DfES working together throughout.

8.3 The diagram overleaf shows the relationship between the local authority and other partner organisations:

8.4 PfS has been established to co-ordinate the national delivery of the programme and to provide support for local authorities on behalf of the DfES. This includes working with local authorities in developing their local education vision and strategy, delivering their individual projects and providing procurement and project management assistance through designated PfS project directors. PfS will look to build on the many strengths of local authorities, and will respond to their needs, with a view to complementing rather than duplicating their role.