The Government has thrown a lifeline to school building projects, and small-scale refurbishment work in particular, as part of the measures announced in its Comprehensive Spending Review.
The Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme was axed within days of the coalition coming into power and overall spending on capital projects will fall by 60 per cent, but the Ministry of Education says it is determined to spend what remains more wisely. It is committed to spending £15.8 bn by 2014-15 on schools' infrastructure.


'Following the decision to end the wasteful BSF programme, there will be enough funding to meet demographic pressures and maintenance needs. The independent review of education funding will ensure that the Department's capital budget is allocated in the most cost-effective way and targeted where there is most need.'

Greater use of offsite fabrication and more focus on smaller scale refurbishment projects could allow school projects to meet the Government's cost cutting agenda despite a 3 to 4 per cent reduction, in real terms, of spending over the next four to five years.

The £55 bn BSF scheme foundered because of massive cost overruns and delays on the major flagship projects it attempted. Secretary of State for Education Michael Gove is believed to favour lower cost approaches that could still deliver improvements.

The costs of improvements under BSF were between £1,000 and £2,000 per sq m and the plan was to rebuild or refurbish every secondary school in England by 2023. Of the 715 projects halted abruptly by the new coalition government, almost half were planned as refurbishments and HVCA President Martin Burton believes this is where the real value for money can be gained.

'The BSF obsession with major 'signature' projects obscured the fact that smaller refurbishments of thousands of rundown school buildings should have been the priority,' he said. 'Rather than ploughing vast amounts of (now non-existent) taxpayers' money into a small number of very large projects, the Education Secretary would achieve far more and for a greater number of schools by taking a more pragmatic approach. He will also save a lot more carbon that way.'

According to the HVCA, the flawed procurement process meant that very few of the contractors who initially bid for BSF work actually ended up on the projects. Once the work was won, the builders would go back to their bad old habits and indulge in the usual destructive round of Dutch auctions, cutting out many of the specialist firms who had originally come up with the best ideas.

'By re-focusing on the thousands of small and essential refurbishments that school managers are desperate for, we can create a slimmer, leaner and more effective scheme that also keeps many smaller local specialist contractors on board and retains their expertise,' said Mr Burton, who is projects manager at Delron Services Ltd (DSL), which refurbishes and maintains hundreds of school buildings in the South of England on behalf of local authorities.

'We know from our local authority clients that their budgets are already being squeezed, but they do have some money to spend on schools - we have to make sure we come up with realistic and value for money choices for them,' he added.
Mr Gove stated ahead of the Spending Review that his department would work with 'councils, sponsors and the construction industry to ensure we bear down on costs and bureaucracy so every new school is built in as cost-effective and efficient a way as possible'.

He is thought to favour greater use of offsite prefabrication as a means for getting some of the halted projects up and running again as this approach would speed up delivery and reduce waste.

Murdo MacDonald, business development director of building services offsite specialist Ormandy Group (see the box opposite), said the Government would also benefit from reduced professional fees and better reliability by taking this approach.

'Given that engineered systems are skid-mounted, factory-built modules designed and constructed for a specific application - this can be replicated in other areas of the project which, in theory, will reduce the design fees,' he said.

'Some in the industry may see this as passing the design responsibility and the performance guarantee to the supplier/manufacturer,' added Mr MacDonald. 'What is not taken into consideration is the reduction in the design, procurement, build costs and the installation time compared to a traditional on-site project.'

Champions of the offsite approach point out that the client always wins because there is no 'bartering' for each component of the project. This reduces time wasted on procurement and gets the solution on site far ahead of traditional schedules. It also improves quality by taking the variables created by multiple suppliers sourcing multiple components out of the system.

And the offsite fabrication approach is seen as a way to overcome the problem of shortage of skilled staff. The project is approached more as a manufacturing process because there is less time and activity on site, so that allows the supplier to build up and retain expertise under one roof.

'Offsite will clearly play an increasingly important part,' said Mr Burton. 'However, we also have to plan for the 'distress' purchases when a school's 40-year-old boiler plant falls over. Building services contractors will have to move quickly to plug the gaps, but must also be sufficiently flexible to try and get a more energy efficient solution in there at the same time.

'None of this will be easy, but there is a greater sense of realism in the Department for Education these days and that gives us a chance.'