Hundreds of old and leaky schools throughout England are waiting on builders being assigned to them for much needed repairs. This is despite the fact that they are on a “flagship” government rebuilding programme.
Over 500 schools are on the scheme. But by the summer, contracts were awarded to construction companies to rebuild on 62 out of the hundreds. The BBC explored the reason with industry experts saying that construction companies are nervous about taking such contracts on in case the costs end up exceeding their budgets.
But the Department of for Education (DfE) says that the programme is still on track with forecasts being made before high inflation affected the construction industry.
The School Rebuilding Programme was announced in 2020. It had aimed to rebuild or refurbish around 500 schools within a decade. Construction was scheduled to begin in 2021 at a rate of around 50 schools annually.
But the National Audit Office (NAO) said that the DfE forecast was optimistic, and that it would not complete as many as it had planned. 23 schools out of the hundreds planned had been completed so far with 490 still waiting. Many do not even have builders on board.
The DfE originally planned for 83 contracts to be awarded by March 2023 but a BBC Freedom of Information (FOI) request found that just 62 had been issued by June 2024.
The programme, according to the DfE, was on track and original forecasts were made before events such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine affected industry prices. Schools, it added, take an average of two to five years to build and that some sort of work had begun at just under half of the hundreds of projects, though it did not say what type.
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