Are Government school building stats on solid foundations?
6 July, 2010 - 00:00 -- Full Fact team
Education Secretary Michael Gove was scathing in his attack on the previous Government's Building Schools for the Future programme when announcing its cancellation yesterday. But is his use of school building statistics stuck in the past?
When the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme was announced in February 2004, it was hailed by the previous Labour Government as the biggest school-building programme since the Victorian era.
Announcing the scheme’s cancellation to the Commons yesterday, Education Secretary Michael Gove said BSF had failed to live up to such a billing, calling it “massively flawed”.
In a debate in which both Labour and the Conservatives have accused the other of providing misleading information, Full Fact looks at the evidence by which BSF’s success or failure is judged.
The Claim:
In his statement to the House, Mr Gove presented quite the catalogue of perceived failings of the BSF programme.
He accused the scheme of being “characterised by massive overspends, tragic delays, botched construction projects and needless bureaucracy.”
To illustrate his point, he claimed: “The last Government were supposed to have built 200 wholly new schools by the end of 2008; they had only rebuilt 35 and refurbished 13.”
Is this a full and fair obituary for the BSF programme?
Analysis:
Partnerships for Schools, the non-departmental public body set up by the Department for Children, Families and Schools (now the Department for Education) to oversee the Building Schools for the Future scheme produces a list detailing the progress made on BSF projects.
This shows that by the end of 2008, 34 entirely new schools had been completed, as had 14 refurbishments of buildings; very close to the figures cited by Mr Gove.
A further 13 ICT projects had been finished under the BSF scheme within this timeframe which were not mentioned by the Education Secretary, bringing the total number of schools affected by BSF at the end of 2008 to 61.
However is this number as short of the project’s ambitions as Mr Gove suggests?
Since the programme’s inception, the timeframe for the opening of new schools built under the Building Schools for the Future has been in a state of flux, and Full Fact unearthed a number of different projections besides the figure of 200 proffered by the Education Secretary.
Partnerships for Schools estimated in May 2005 that 157 schools would have opened by the end of 2008, as the chart below illustrates:
Pricewaterhouse Coopers, the official auditor of the BSF scheme appointed by the Government, produced even more conservative estimates in its first annual report in 2007, predicting the opening of 63 new schools under BSF by the end of 2008:
Full Fact asked the Department for Education for the basis of Mr Gove’s assertion that 200 schools were projected to have been built by 2008, and it directed us to the Department’s original launch document from February 2004, from which the below figure has been taken:
Whilst seemingly justifying the Education Secretary’s claim, the National Audit Office (NAO) – who reported on the progress of BSF in February 2009 – sounded a note of caution.
Spokesperson Phil Groves told Full Fact: “The NAO also used the 200 figure to illustrate how the initial timeframe offered by the Government was too ambitious.”
“However we also found that big improvements have been made since then, so the 2004 predictions aren’t really the best measure of the programme’s present success,” he added.
The NAO report also contests the Education Secretary’s assumption that BSF was beset by “massive overspends”.
Its report notes that although the projected costs of BSF in 2009 were around 13 per cent higher than forecast in 2004, this wasn’t a result of over-spending.
“DCSF has increased the scope of the programme and building cost inflation has been higher than originally estimated, but the cost of individual schools has been contained at a level similar to previously built PFI schools,” the NAO found.
Conclusion:
Whilst Michael Gove uses accurate figures when describing the progress made in building schools under BSF, they are not the most recent available, and ignore findings which suggest the delivery of the programme has since improved.
This makes the Education Secretary’s wider claims that BSF was subject to “massive overspends [and] tragic delays” seem somewhat dated.
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