Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what estimate she has made of the average cost per (a) square metre and (b) pupil for schools built under the (i) School Rebuilding, (ii) Priority School Building and (iii) Building Schools for the Future Programmes.

The National School Delivery Cost Benchmarking report published in October 2022 shows the average cost per square metre of new school building projects built using the Departmental construction framework between 2012 and 2020. The report can be found here: https://documents.hants.gov.uk/property-services/NationalSchoolDeliveryBenchmarkingreport.pdf. The data presented in this report also shows that the Department has been delivering building projects in primary schools between 13 to 30% more cheaply than Local Authorities over the time frame of 2012 to 2020.

The Department has continuously improved its approach to building schools since the Sebastian James review of Capital in 2011, which highlighted many issues with the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme introduced under the last Government in 2004. The review identified that projects delivered under the programme were overly bureaucratic and not designed to target poor condition, did not support high quality, did not meet standardised specifications that work for education, and did not deliver value for money and economies of scale from central procurement and delivery. These are all are now prioritised when building schools. Millions of pounds have also been spent addressing failures in design left by the BSF programme to ensure schools are suitable to deliver an effective education.

The National Audit Office’s published report on Capital Funding for Schools found that, on average, whole school rebuilds delivered by the Priority School Building Programme were around one third cheaper per square metre than schools built under the Building Schools for the Future Programme.

The School Rebuilding Programme builds on the success of the Priority School Building Programme. It is delivering schools to an even better specification, with buildings that are designed to be carbon net zero in operation and more resilient to the effects of climate change. The sample size for completed projects delivered by the School Rebuilding Programme is currently too small to draw any conclusions on the average cost of this programme.