FM 100 Poll: one in five glad to see BSF gone

29 July 2010

The government’s scrapping of Labour’s flagship Building Schools for the Future programme was a good thing, according to one in five facilities managers.

The £55bn BSF programme was set up in 2005 to rebuild and redevelop England’s 3,500 secondary schools by 2020. It was also to act as a catalyst for local regeneration efforts by linking new schools with housing and regeneration schemes.

But earlier this month, with harsh words including “shameful” and “tragic”, Conservative Education Secretary Michael Gove scrapped around 700 school projects that were being considered and wrapped up the programme altogether to save money.

“Any initiative which can lend itself to such monumental wastage in money deserves no less treatment,” said one irate FM who noted that her response was a “rock-solid ‘yes” tp the question.

“As BBC News summed it up just after the recent announcement, highlighting a central London Academy school, the kudos -- and money -- was being channeled into the pockets of the architects and developers.”

The costs of such schools are “monstrous”, she continued, when the schools are locked into maintenance and support costs for significantly lengthy periods of time, decades rather than years.

Another respondent, although in favour of scrapping BSF, had concerns about the Conservative idea of so-called free schools – parentally led set-ups in local empty premises including shops and warehouses, and which are independent of local authority control.

Some “serious thought would have to go into the suitability of some of these empty buildings,” she said. “The physical environment is very important to a child's learning experience but it doesn't take cost to get it right.”

Also, it may not be so easy as first thought to get suitable empty premises for free schools. “With the average school student population being in the hundreds or more, unless the store was Debenhams in Oxford Street, the space does not exist.”

Similarly, how robust will these free school facilities be compared to that of regular schools? “The level of wear and tear will be much higher,” said a respondent.

Procuring a major long-term project like a large British school was never going to be a short, sharp and sweet exercise, said one respondent who believed the BSF programme should have remained.

“While BSF was not necessarily a slick and efficient method of procuring new and refurbished schools, any procurement process that spends hundreds of millions of pounds on school buildings needs to be robust to ensure best value. As such, it cannot be a quick and dirty procurement exercise.”

Although he was not an “educationalist”, he said, he was “convinced that the physical environment and condition of educational facilities have an impact on pupils learning experience and also on their enthusiasm to learn and also the enthusiasm of the teaching staff to teach”.


“Scrapping of the BSF programme has an even greater impact on those schools which are in poor physical condition but which have been looking forward to being part of a planned BSF programme,” a respondent said.

The government can scrap BSF, but what it cannot scrap is the need for more modern schools to replace the ones that are substandard.

“While the title BSF will disappear over time, the investment is still required,” he said. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the Con-Lib coalition re-instated BSF but under a different title, although maybe not for as much as the original £55bn.”