Examination of Witnesses (Questions 613-619)
MS SALLY
BROOKS, MR
MARTIN LIPSON
AND MR
TIM BYLES
6 DECEMBER 2006
Q613 Chairman: Can I welcome Martin Lipson,
Sally Brooks and Tim Byles to this session of the Committee. As
I think you will know, because I know that some of you have been
here before, not sitting in the hot seat but listening to some
of our deliberations, the Sustainable Schools Inquiry is a very
important one for us. It has, we understand, £45 billion
of tax-payers' money. That is a lot of money and a lot of commitment,
and we are very keen to see, in the fullest sense, that this programme
does deliver sustainable schools into the 21st century. I understand
that Tim Byles has only just come in post five weeks ago. We will
not give you any allowance for that, Tim. We will expect you to
know everything!
Mr Byles: Thank you, Chairman.
Q614 Chairman: Can I ask which of
you wants to lead off. I will give you two or three minutes just
to say where you think we are with Building Schools for the Future
and how that links to the Sustainable Schools, and then we will
ask you some questions. Would you like to start?
Ms Brooks: Can I start?
Q615 Chairman: I am calling on you
first, Sally, because at the last session we had you did a lot
of nodding and shaking your head, and this gives you the opportunity
to tell us why.
Ms Brooks: I was in the audience
and I knew some of the answers, so that is why. I am Sally Brooks,
I am Head of Schools Capital, so I have the six billion pounds
capital spend as part of my remit and within that is the two billion
a year BSF. I think where we are on Sustainable Schools through
the whole capital programme is we are getting there but we are
not there yet. I think we have moved on a lot from where we were
a few years ago when we were just using the capital that we had
for repairs and maintenance because we had such a backlog. At
that point we had two or three billion a year which we were giving
to schools and local authorities just for mending leaking roofs
and repairing boilers. We moved on from that to be more strategic
and targeted, in terms of looking at some kind of educational
transformation in a small way around science laboratories, technology
blocks, that kind of thing, and then, with Building Schools for
the Future and now the Primary Programme, we are looking much
more at strategic transformation of the whole school estate, and
I think that that strategic transformation is what gives us the
opportunity to be truly sustainable, because it allows you, first
and most obviously, to build 50% new schools and that allows you
to be much more sustainable in energy use terms but also in other
areas. With the other 50%, you still have got a significant amount
of money to deal with issues like energy management, but because
it is strategic and across the whole estate it allows local authorities
and schools and their partners to think about whether schools
are in the right place, whether they are the right size, whether
they are serving the right communities, whether they have the
right extended school links with the community, whether they are
delivering long-term personalised learning, whether their IT is
right. It allows people to be strategic, and that gives you the
most bangs for your bucks, if you like; that allows you to think
radically. If by "sustainable" we mean schools that
are rooted in their communities, that serve the long-term needs
of their communities, that have had the possibility of delivering
21st century learning with 21st century teaching methods (and
we do not necessarily know what they are going to be in 50 years'
time, so the flexibility to do that well), and I think the strategic
nature of BSF allows us to do that, but we have only just started
on that journey and we are learning as we are going. So we are
on the way, we have not reached it yet, but I think we are generally
agreed on the direction of travel.
Mr Byles: As you have said, this
is a very ambitious programme and it represents a considerable
commitment from central and local government as well as the private
sector. The more structured approach that Sally has just been
talking about is starting to evidence a much more positive way
forward in contributing to educational transformation and locating
that within more broadly based and owned strategies which are
held locally as well as contributing to the national programme.
The task here is to try and get the best of what the private and
public sector can do together for a public good outcome, and that
involves taking a view about how education in secondary schools,
in my case, is delivered, not just in terms of today but into
the future, and so pupil place planning and new development in
a local authority area are all key components as well as where
we are starting from now. A further challenge is to balance targeted
investment through Academies, for example, with an approach for
a whole area and balancing the needs for a targeted intervention,
where there is particular need, here and now against the needs
of the whole estate, and every child in that local authority area
is in itself an interesting challenge. My impression, and it is
early days for me, is that there are a number of issues which
need further development. The capacity of local authorities and
the way in which they are preparing for what is a major procurement
for many of them (and I speak as an ex-local authority chief executive)
is something which needs attention and is something which we are
working on hard, and balancing the needs and expectations of private
sector partners with the public sector is also a dialogue which
we are learning from and will continue to learn from through time.
Mr Lipson: Picking up from what
Tim has just said about the capacity of local authorities, I am
very interested in that because my organisation provides support
to local authorities in the skills and the capacity they need
to run these projects as clients, and I think it is important
to look at what has happened perhaps over the last eight to 10
years. We have moved from procuring one school at a time to procuring
large groups of schools together, and that brings a considerable
need for new and extra resources and skills into the client organisation.
Procuring is no longer a simple matter, because we are not often
just procuring a group of schools, we are also procuring the life-cycle
for those schools in that there are services bundled in with the
building contracts, and so a great deal of upfront work has to
be done by the client organisation, with all its support advisers
and organisations lending support, to make sure that risks are
properly evaluated. So you have very large teams working in the
client organisation procuring these projects. This is all to the
good, because you do get, as both Sally and Tim have said, a strategic
approach, you get more bangs for the buck, you actually do get
value for money from these big projects, but they take longer
to procure than a single school would have done, considerably
longer, and our view, I think, in our organisation is that that
time needs to be used well to make sure that the risks are properly
dealt with, that the contract that is finally entered into is
a really good contract for both parties, and then you will have
a long-term success.
Q616 Chairman: Martin, why was your
organisation set up and by whom?
Mr Lipson: 4ps is 10-years-old,
we are actually in our 11th year now, and it was set up by the
predecessors of the Local Government Association.
Q617 Chairman: Your funding comes
from where?
Mr Lipson: Our funding comes from
top-slicing of revenue support from Government to local authorities.
Q618 Chairman: How do you describe
your organisation, the state of it?
Mr Lipson: How do I describe the
organisation?
Q619 Chairman: Yes. What is it? Is
it a not-for-profit company, or what is it?
Mr Lipson: We are a local government
central body. We are constituted as a non-profit company.
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