Examination of Witnesses (Questions 760-779)
JIM KNIGHT
MP AND PARMJIT
DHANDA MP
24 JANUARY 2007
Q760 Chairman: Ministers, could I welcome
you to this session of the Select Committee and say that it is
a pleasure to have both of you here because you share responsibility
for these particular issues on sustainability and bullying. We
are well aware, and you will be aware, that they are both very
important inquiries for us, but the one on sustainability involves
an enormous investment of taxpayers' money into schools for the
future, and to get those right is of paramount importance. I am
going to give the chance to you, Minister Jim Knight, to say something
to open up if you wish.
Jim Knight: Thank
you very much, Chairman. I am delighted that we have got the opportunity
to come and discuss, as you say, what is a really important programme.
I have not prepared an opening statement; I know you have got
a lot of ground that you want to cover and I am happy to maximise
the time rather than going on at some length with something, having
already submitted written evidence which I am sure you have enjoyed
reading.
Q761 Chairman: What a refreshing
change that is! Let us get straight into questions. Could you
tell us, Minister, first of all, how many new schools has this
Government built or totally refurbished since 1997?
Jim Knight: The estimate that
we make which we can be confident about is a figure of around
800. I would confess to you I have a degree of frustration about
being able to pin that down more accurately but, where, for example,
local authorities use a targeted capital fund to rebuild schools
or fully refurbish them, as they have in my constituency—I
have got a number of different examples of new schools that are
opening at the moment—we do not collect that information
from local authorities, such is the spirit of delegation. That
is something which I am looking to address with officials so that
we can give a more accurate figure, but the figure which we can
be absolutely confident about is the 800 one that we are using
at the moment.
Q762 Chairman: That is a lot of new
schools.
Jim Knight: That is a lot of new
schools, yes.
Q763 Chairman: If you can give us
an estimate of how many schools were built in the 10 years running
up to 1997 and how many since 1997 that would be quite good to
get on the record.
Jim Knight: What I said last week
in a speech in north London was that we have built more schools
in the last five years than the preceding 25 years.
Q764 Chairman: Those schools that
were built at that time, were they just new versions of the old?
Jim Knight: You mean in the last
10 years?
Q765 Chairman: Yes.
Jim Knight: There is a range of
different circumstances, but principally you would have circumstances
where schools were crumbling and just needed replacing for their
own sake; you would also have a number of other circumstances
where for organisational reasons, for example, there would be
a number that would be a merging of infant and junior schools
which would form a single primary, then a new school results.
In my own constituency, the first BSF to open using the quick
win process was in Birmingham. I opened that in June, which was
two new special schools moving on to a mainstream site, so there
are good educational reasons as well as organisational reasons
to make that change.
Q766 Chairman: How many BSF schools
have been built already?
Jim Knight: In terms of the quick
wins, literally just a handful. The first full BSF that has gone
through the whole process will open in the middle of this year.
Q767 Chairman: Where will that be?
Jim Knight: In Bristol.
Q768 Chairman: Could you tell us,
looking back over the last 10 years, when was it that the Department
became aware that there was more of a challenge than just building
new schools, that there was a challenge around the sustainability
of that design and build?
Jim Knight: I think when David
Miliband had my job as Schools Minister, when a lot of the detailed
work was done around putting together BSF, that would be the moment
when agreement was forged across Whitehall that we needed to do
more than just the substantial increases we were making in the
schools capital fund, that we needed a much bolder statement of
purpose and a commitment that moves beyond CSR processes across
Government. It is quite a remarkable commitment that we have been
able to make to refurbish or rebuild every secondary school by
2020 because it cuts right the way through the CSR processes for
years to come.
Q769 Chairman: Help us forensically,
who first committed us, the Labour Government, to do that, to
set that challenge of rebuilding every school? There is some debate
about who first said that in public, was it the Prime Minister,
was it David Miliband? When did it come about?
Jim Knight: To be honest, Chairman,
I cannot give you a categorical answer. I have been somewhat focused
on the slightly scary prospect of how to ensure that this money
is well spent and spent on time rather than thinking about who
first thought of it, because it seemed such a good idea, why would
I question whose idea it was in the first place? I will just get
on with the job.
Q770 Chairman: It is quite important,
is it not, to know when this all started? What you have just described
is 800 new schools being built, so we were well on to building
schools and suddenly this vision of Building Schools for the Future,
it was a watershed, was it not? Whoever said it, it is different.
Jim Knight: There was a realisation
when the Labour Party was in opposition that we had a big problem
in terms of our school estate. We would make some estimation around
the state of the school estate which says that currently schools
are spending about £1.5 billion of revenue per year on building,
grounds maintenance and cleaning when in order to just maintain
a steady state on schools you would need around £2 billion
a year to be spent on the school estate. That is current figures,
but back 10 years ago the overall schools capital budget was only
£700 million, so we were woefully underspending and allowing
the school estate to deteriorate when we came into power and that
is why there has been that steady increase in funding which has
been coming in. I have got the figures year on year in front of
me and we are now up to a budget of £6.4 billion. In terms
of significant leaps, which perhaps would be the implication as
to exactly when there was a crushing realisation we had to do
more, I would say it has been a steady improvement over time.
Q771 Chairman: Minister, you did
mark out David Miliband. As a Committee, it is important to ask
and forensically to know where this came from and, of course,
he was a very significant policy person in Number 10 before he
was elected as a Member of Parliament. In a sense, that is what
we are tracking, but we also want to track when was this decision
made that Building Schools for the Future was not going to be
like the schools for the future that had been built already, that
they were going to be different. You were the Sustainability Minister
in your previous job, were you not?
Jim Knight: Elliot Morley was
really leading on sustainability in Defra when I was on the Defra
team.
Q772 Chairman: I do not want to flatter
you, but you were known to have a real and genuine interest in
sustainability.
Jim Knight: Absolutely. I think
that the conceptual change to properly integrate education, design,
ICT, as well as building into the schools capital projects, which
is the hallmark of BSF and the way it is designed to include sustainability
as well, would have come with David Miliband in 2003-04 when he
looked at some of the experience of NHS LIFT and the way you could
design procurement in that way but also looked at how you integrate
all of the outputs that we are after to transform education through
a capital investment.
Q773 Chairman: This is what was fascinating
when we visited Merseyside in this respect only last week, that
word you just mentioned, "transform", and this is why
forensically I am trying to get you to go back with this. When
did the transformation of quality of this process creep in because,
as we see it, from the evidence we have taken and the visits we
have paid, there was some stage at which something in the Department
happened. We were not building schools just to replace the old
schools because modern schools are nicer than old crumbling schools,
but suddenly there was this change that they should not only be
sustainable in terms of being greener, better designed and having
less of a carbon footprint, but that they should also transform
two things, the quality and nature of teaching and learning in
the future to a different kind of teaching and learning, so it
would be appropriate, and they should be at the heart of the transformation
process in communities in terms of regeneration. That is why we
are interested, that is the evidence. What I am trying to get
out of you is, when do you think that happened and who was responsible?
You think it was Miliband.
Jim Knight: And Charles Clarke,
Secretary of State at the time. He would have informed some of
the sustainable development end of it, in particular, and that
element, I think, has been building steadily as we have gone on,
so in 2005 the BREEAM "very good" standard was applied
to schools.
Q774 Chairman: What date was that?
Jim Knight: I have got 2005, but
I do not know what date in 2005 but I can let you know.
Q775 Chairman: It was not until 2005
we got a BREEAM standard?
Jim Knight: That was when the
"very good" standard applied, as I recall, but equally
we continue to work on this area to see whether we can go further
and do better. March 2005, was the date.
Q776 Chairman: That is comparatively
recent.
Jim Knight: Yes.
Q777 Chairman: So when Miliband,
or whoever it was, changed the nature of the discussion around
that policy—You are getting bits of paper passed to you,
I have had one passed to me which points out that the original
prospectus for Building Schools for the Future did not have the
mention of energy, carbon or sustainability in it. Why do you
think that was?
Jim Knight: I think when you listen
to the Prime Minister, when you listen to a number of ministers,
talk about the environment, carbon neutrality, carbon emissions
and climate change, the way those issues have risen up the political
agenda has been marked over the last few years. The Prime Minister
says that when he was elected in 1997 the environment was not
a doorstep issue, it was not a priority issue with the electorate.
It is now and we reflect that along with everybody else.
Q778 Chairman: I see. That is the
history of the programme. I think most of us in questioning you
this morning will not be hung up too much about the lag in the
programme of BSF, let us clear that out of the way. I think all
members of this Committee would rather see a good programme of
Building Schools for the Future rather than a deficient one that
was delivered on time. Why do you think there has been this lag
in building schools?
Jim Knight: I think there are
a number of reasons that can be summarised around that, that we
underestimated the complexity and the ambition. It would be easy
for my comments to be interpreted as a criticism of local authorities
for not having the capacity, and that has been at the heart of
a lot of the difficulty, but I do not think that they should be
blamed for that because there will be very few people in local
authorities who have got experience of procuring this size of
project and something as transformational as this. I think it
would make a lot of people quite nervous, the responsibility of
having to do so, because it will be the biggest thing they will
do in their working lives and to get them to be in turn imaginative
and to take some risks in order to achieve the transformation
that we talked about earlier has proved quite a challenge. We
use people like the LGA's 4ps to try and build that capacity and
there is more we need to do there. We are now asking the National
College of School Leadership to build capacity amongst school
leaders themselves, to understand how to go through the design
process and to achieve the maximum for their own school. We are
looking to involve CABE, the design advisers for us, at earlier
stages and more thoroughly and strategically in the process so
that we can get around some of those problems of capacity, ensuring
that all of our policies are aligned properly. That is where we
have to take some responsibility in the Department so our policies
around structures are properly aligned with BSF, that is something
we are trying to sort out now, and making sure that best practice
is properly being spread and we have certainly started. The nature
of the prioritisation of the waves of BSF was those areas that
needed it most, both in terms of the state of their school buildings
but also in terms of the level of deprivation and educational
need, because this is a transformational project in educational
terms so it makes sense in my mind to have started in those areas
where educational performance has been struggling the most and
where they can gain quickly from that transformation, but those
are simultaneously some of the most challenging areas to do that
work.
Q779 Chairman: You chose those not
because they were Labour seats but because of deprivation.
Jim Knight: That really is a nonsense
story. We have had quite a few nonsense stories recently about
BSF but that probably takes the prize. It is done fairly and squarely
on the basis of need. What we did not do and what we have now
done with wave 4 and the announcements of the wave 4 authorities
that we made at the end of last year was also adding to that their
deliverability and their ability to deliver on time and on budget
and those later in that block of three will be those that need
more work on capacity and all the reasons why we have the delay
at the moment.
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