Government reports don’t often make scintillating reading. But the Review of Education Capital by Sebastian James is an exception. Colloquially known as the James Review, it’s an investigation into Building Schools for the Future, a programme of capital expenditure on schools overseen by the last government. It also contains various proposals as to how education capital might be better spent in future.
Sebastian James is the group operations director of Dixons Retail and, reading between the lines, it’s clear that he’s appalled by the level of inefficiency and waste he uncovered. You would expect this to lead to eye-popping rage — after all, it’s taxpayers’ money that has been going up in smoke — but the tone of the report is closer to existential despair. From a successful businessman’s point of view, the wrongheadedness of the last government’s approach to capital expenditure was on such a massive scale that it goes beyond anything likely to result in frustration or anger.
As with so many government initiatives, the road to hell was paved with good intentions. The idea behind the BSF programme was to refurbish England’s crumbling secondary school estate. It was initially costed at £45 billion, but this was revised upwards to £55 billion as the completion date stretched ever further into the future. By the time Labour left office, £8.65 billion had been spent with some 310 schools benefiting from BSF investment. That’s an average cost per school of approximately £28 million. That’s 20 per cent higher than it costs to rebuild a school in Denmark, 25 per cent higher than in Sweden and 40 per cent higher than in Ireland.
Why did BSF schools cost so much? For one thing, the process of applying for funding was needlessly bureaucratic. On average, each local authority that submitted a bid invested £4 million on ‘pre-procurement’, money spent almost entirely on consultants and lawyers. Typically, the ‘pre-procurement’ process took between 18 and 20 months, largely thanks to the sheer level of paperwork involved and the need for borough-wide ‘consultation’, i.e. local authority junk mail.
Then there were the design costs. Each project was supposed to prioritise ‘educational transformation’ and armies of architects and educational consultants were employed to bring it about. This was boilerplate NuLab mumbo-jumbo, the educational equivalent of voodoo economics. ‘In our workshops and through our wide-ranging call for evidence we were unable to find any coherent definition of what was meant by “educational transformation”,’ writes James.
Not surprisingly, the architects employed to work on BSF schemes advised their clients that the key to bringing about this ‘transformation’ was to spend tens of millions on bespoke buildings. Absolute nonsense, of course, a point I’ve made many times before and bringing the ire of the architectural profession down on my head in the process. Here is the damning conclusion of the James Review: ‘We spent some time in workshops and reviewing evidence of the impact of buildings on learning outcomes and discovered that… there is very little evidence that a school building that goes beyond being fit for purpose has the potential to drive educational transformation.’
Oh well, I hear you say. At least some local authorities ended up with some fantastic-looking schools — glass boxes that have won Stirling Prizes and will be acclaimed as early 21st-century masterpieces by future architectural historians. Er, not quite. No process was put in place to assess the merits of the designs of BSF schools until 2009, and the upshot is that many of the buildings are not fit for purpose. To give just one example, Unity City Academy, a new school in Middlesbrough, cost £27 million and is so poorly designed that its energy bills are 67 per cent higher than the average for academies. It was built in 2004, but already the roof needs fixing.
Sebastian James’s main recommendation is that the Department for Education should confine itself to building schools that are sturdy and practical. He also advises the Department to duplicate some of the systems in place in Tesco and Dixons whereby building costs are engineered down by between 10 and 15 per cent per annum. Let’s hope somebody up there is paying attention. We can’t afford to waste any more taxpayers’ money on building giant Rubik’s Cubes when so many schools are falling down, including those built by the last government.
Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator
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