Partnerships for Schools

MAKING EDUCATIONAL TRANSFORMATION A REALITY: DELIVERING BUILDING SCHOOLS FOR THE FUTURE

Tim Byles Chief Executive, Partnerships for Schools

Transforming the learning and teaching environments of all of the secondary schools in England, allowing teachers to teach and young people to reach for excellence and deliver their full potential. This is the ultimate goal of the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme.

Partnerships for Schools was set up in 2004 to manage and deliver BSF, the government’s flagship capital-investment programme to rebuild or renew all of England’s 3,500 secondary schools over the next 15 - 20 years. While this is clearly a programme that has energising national aspirations, transforming the vision into reality is very much a locally - owned, locally - driven and, ultimately, locally - delivered programme.

While it will see every state secondary school rebuilt or refurbished during the lifetime of the programme, BSF is much more than a buildings programme. Beyond bricks and mortar, the exciting opportunity that we have through BSF is about creating environments in which young people feel much more engaged, develop a sense of worth and believe in themselves and as a consequence, become motivated to unlock the talent that every single one of them has. It is about providing teachers with high-quality learning environments in which they too feel valued and inspired. It is also about putting our schools back in the centre of their communities, so that they become hubs that help revitalise whole areas. In sum, the programme is a significant lever that will help improve facilities and engagement in our state schools to such an extent that, in terms of opportunity, they are able to compete with the best of what the private sector has on offer.

I believe that there are four key pillars that underpin the successful delivery of the programme as a whole:-

Pillar 1: genuine local partnerships

Buy-in and genuine local engagement is absolutely non-negotiable. This is the first time that local authorities have been asked to consider the needs of their entire schools’ estate strategically, rather than the piecemeal school-by-school approach of the recent past. To deliver this, we have developed a new partnership model that establishes genuine long-term partnerships with private-sector providers.

The Local Education Partnership (LEP) model and associated standard documentation are designed to deliver efficiencies in time and costs and will help stakeholders to keep a firm eye focused on delivery. This approach will foster a true sense of partnership, and we are urging local authorities to follow the excellent examples of pathfinder projects, where new partnerships have been forged and where the ultimate beneficiary of these relationships is our young people.

Pillar 2: design that enables excellence

Good design is clearly essential in our new schools and it can make a significant difference in simple ways - if you get the basics right, you can positively affect behaviour and engagement. We want high-quality, stimulating environments; spaces that provide natural daylight and good ventilation so students don’t nod off in class and where they aren’t distracted through worries about bullying.

A new school will not overnight make the class bully see the error of his or her ways, but it can - through thoughtful design - reduce the physical opportunities for bullying in the school grounds. Going forward, new layouts such as wider corridors and standardised toilets near staff rooms will make it much harder for a bully to use these spaces to threaten and intimidate.

Thoughtful design can also enhance creative aspects of school life. Dedicated space for dance, drama, music and art makes an invaluable contribution to a young person’s experience of school. In turn, this can make a world of difference to their sense of worth and self-esteem, providing a far more positive start to their adult lives.

Schools must also be responsive to needs of the wider community that they serve. Done well, our new schools can be real agents for change, not only improving the outlook of those who learn in them but also by becoming hubs that re-energise local communities. All schools are expected to become ‘extended schools’ by 2010, whether through the provision of breakfast clubs and after-school care for pupils, adult learning, public access to libraries, venue and facility hire for community groups or through joined-up funding with health and social services.

Pillar 3: innovative use of ICT

Closely allied to the overall design of the school is the innovative and integrated use of ICT. BSF heralds a step-change in the level of ICT provision for all secondary-school pupils, equivalent to £1,675 per pupil.

Imaginatively designed buildings are only brought to life by what actually happens in them, and ICT provides that critical link between buildings and learning. Today, the classroom need no longer be constrained by four walls. Through ICT, “chalk and talk” will be replaced by “any time; any place; anywhere” personalised and lifelong learning. Virtual platforms, wireless access and handheld or portable computers can stretch learning environments beyond the classroom wall, to libraries, social spaces and homes. Today’s technology offers incredible opportunity for drastically changing the way young people learn and engage at school. BSF provides the means to open up that technology to every young person in England.

Fundamental to the thinking behind BSF is the concept of area-wide, managed ICT services for all schools within a local authority. The main aim is to achieve better value for money and economies of scale through aggregated procurement and to link the performance and availability of ICT services to a comprehensive contractual payment mechanism that promotes high standards. The other aim of the managed service is to free schools from the burden of procuring and managing their own ICT systems, allowing them to focus on their core business of teaching, learning and enhancing the life chances of the young people who come through their doors.

A move to an area-wide online learning environment is central to the educational transformation envisaged by BSF. It is the case that in future, an increasing number of students aged 14+ will not take all their education in a single location. BSF ensures that they will have access to their desktop, e-portfolio, individual learning plan and licensed content from any location on the wide-area network and from home.

Pillar 4: sustainability

Overall, schools are thought to contribute up to 15 per cent of public-sector carbon emissions. We recognise that there are real challenges in designing ‘carbon neutral’ schools, not least because of the additional cost. It is generally accepted that offsetting carbon emissions is a valid means of becoming carbon neutral (this is already widely accepted in travel where flights, events and publications are promoted as carbon neutral through offsetting). Carbon-neutral buildings may not be possible in all cases, although school buildings in the future could, for example, meet all of their energy demands from renewable sources.

Through education and observation, we can increase pupils’ awareness of sustainability issues, embedding good practice into everyday life. So, in the design of a school, we might include monitoring devices that not only assist those that operate school buildings to reduce carbon emissions (and also other key environmental elements such as water and reducing waste), but also provide learning opportunities for pupils to recognise their environmental impact, both within and outside the school gates, and make positive changes accordingly. Catalyst Lend Lease has adopted a three-part approach to low-energy design in their Lancashire BSF project. Alongside reduced energy consumption and renewable energy solutions, “sustainable systems as learning tools” bring sustainability into the classroom and the curriculum using displays and read-out panels, and online information on the schools’ carbon emissions, energy and water consumption.

In creating these new schools we also consider the pollution, waste and emissions created by the construction itself. For instance, the partnering agreement between Bristol City Council, one of BSF’s pathfinder local authorities, and their construction partner Skanska includes several Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) relating to sustainability. These relate to reducing construction waste, use of recycled materials in construction, monitoring of CO₂ emitted during construction, impact on bio-diversity, use of local labour and resources, and the promotion of students’ awareness of environmental sustainability.

BSF: delivery and progress

2007 is the year of delivery for BSF. At the time of writing, 11 BSF projects have signed for the delivery of new buildings, with several more in the final stages of procurement. These projects represent contracts worth over £2.5bn committed to school improvements and transformational education across England.

Now that we have seen several projects through to financial close, we have a better picture of how a BSF project will run. We have already shared lessons learned with the local authorities in later waves of BSF, and the experience of the pathfinder projects has been used to refine and develop the processes and the standard documentation that we use.

In addition to our core responsibility for delivering the BSF programme, we have also been charged with the delivery of the government’s Academies programme. While this programme is designed to focus on turning round individual failing schools, replacing them with 400 new academies, it is critical that local authorities continue to think through their estate-wide needs, and resist the temptation to revert back to a school-by-school mindset. Unless this is done positively and effectively, we run the risk of not delivering the best from these marvellous opportunities to ensure that all young people in an area, have the very best chance to fulfil their potential in life.

The integration of academy delivery into BSF allows PfS to harness the same economies of scale for the Academies programme that are applied to BSF. The standardisation processes and procurement model - the Local Education Partnership (LEP) - specially developed for BSF, will deliver significant savings to the Academies programme.

Academy sponsors also benefit from the involvement of PfS, as they will no longer have day-to-day responsibility for the timing, cost and quality of schools’ design and construction, and they will gain from the more integrated local authority support.

Looking ahead

By the end of the 2007/08 financial year, about a dozen BSF schools will have been opened, and from 2009/10 this will have ramped up to around 200 new or refurbished schools every year for the duration of the programme. Having now met and spoken to pupils in several new and refurbished schools, I can confidently say that the impact of these new BSF schools on education will be truly transformational.

Exciting times lie ahead for the Building Schools for the Future programme. In the coming months local areas will begin to see and feel the difference that this unprecedented investment will make to the lives of our young people and to our communities. For more information on BSF, academies and the work of Partnerships for Schools, go to www.partnershipsforschools.org.uk.

Biography of Tim Byles CBE, Chief Executive, Partnerships for Schools

Tim Byles joined Partnerships for Schools in November 2006. He was previously Chief Executive of Norfolk County Council, where his achievements included raising the council's performance substantially, creating a wide range of public private partnerships for improved service delivery, and developing trading subsidiaries turning over more than £100m per annum.

Before joining Norfolk in 1996 as one of the youngest chief executives in the country, Tim was Director of Economic Development at Kent County Council. During his time in Kent and Norfolk, he was involved in large-scale schools and commercial premises procurement projects.

Tim has worked extensively with central government in his roles as Chair of the Local Government Chief Executive's Taskforce, the Local Government Construction Taskforce, and the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives (SOLACE), a position he held for four years. He also served as National Procurement Champion for the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister.

Tim received a CBE in the 2006 Queen's Birthday Honours list, for services to Local Government.