UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 140-i

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

EDUCATION AND SKILLS COMMITTEE

 

 

SUSTAINABLE SCHOOLS

 

 

Wednesday 6 December 2006

MS SALLY BROOKS, MR MARTIN LIPSON and MR TIM BYLES

Evidence heard in Public Questions 603 - 749

 

 

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Education and Skills Committee

on Wednesday 6 December 2006

Members present

Mr Barry Sheerman, in the Chair

Mr Douglas Carswell

Mr David Chaytor

Mr Gordon Marsden

Fiona Mactaggart

________________

Memoranda submitted by DfES, 4ps and Partnerships for Schools

 

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Ms Sally Brooks, Divisional Manager, Schools Capital (Policy and Delivery), Department for Education and Skills, Mr Martin Lipson, Programme Director, 4ps, and Mr Tim Byles, Chief Executive, Partnership for Schools, gave evidence.

Q603 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 twenty-first 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.

Q604 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?

Q605 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 per cent new schools and that allows you to be much more sustainable in energy use terms but also in other areas. With the other 50 per cent, 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 twenty-first century learning with twenty-first 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 ten 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.

Q606 Chairman: Martin, why was your organisation set up and by whom?

Mr Lipson: 4ps is ten years old, we are actually in our eleventh year now, and it was set up by the predecessors of the Local Government Association.

Q607 Chairman: Your funding comes from where?

Mr Lipson: Our funding comes from top-slicing of revenue support from government to local authorities.

Q608 Chairman: How do you describe your organisation, the state of it?

Mr Lipson: How do I describe the organisation?

Q609 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.

Q610 Chairman: I wanted get my head round that. Sally, can I ask you: this all sounds very exciting and interesting, but your department and government in general tend to make mistakes when doing new things. This Committee has looked at new things that the department has done, much smaller than this, and mistakes can be made. If there is a major project in the private sector, a massive project, it is a feeling that I sometimes get, listening to you and others describing the challenge, that you are learning as you are going along, and there is a bit of me that thinks that, if this was a commercial organisation, you would get all the ducks in a row first and then say: we have got our team together, we have got a programme and now we start moving it forward, rather than this perception I am getting from what you, Tim and Martin have said that you get started and hope it will all turn out right on the night.

Ms Brooks: Yes, that is a fair point. There is a temptation to sit for two years in a department trying to work out how it is going to work and get it all right, then start and then discover all the problems, but until you start you do not really know what some of those problems are going to be. I think the department, before I arrived, set this up and did recruit people externally, like me, who have got a construction and school development background, and we set up Partnerships for Schools to be the real experts in delivering the programme because we acknowledged that central government departments do not have a terribly good record with delivering major capital projects. So, I think we did a lot of the work but we did not do everything because you will only learn by doing. You will understand the basics about cost control, programming, capacity and project management but you will not understand all the issues around local authority funding processes. We have had seven, eight, nine big issues around VAT, around supported borrowing funding, around levels of investment which would not have been spotted until you started. It was a very ambitious timescale, and we have slipped from that and we need to acknowledge that, but I think we got as much as we could do ready, and we did set up PFS, which was crucial in terms of giving a very hard-nosed delivery focus to the programme that was not swayed by ministerial decisions every five minutes. I think we have done okay. I think there were things we could have spotted before we started that we did not, but I do not think there were many. I think most of what we have learnt since we started are things we would only have learnt by doing.

Q611 Chairman: This whole programme has come for the department as a great shock. Basically, the Treasury said: "Look, this is a very ambitious programme and it has got to be delivered through the Department for Education and skills."

Ms Brooks: I was not there.

Q612 Chairman: You were not there?

Ms Brooks: No.

Q613 Chairman: How do people work with the Treasury? Surely the Treasury are peering over your shoulder all the time?

Ms Brooks: We have worked very well with the Treasury. I think they are keeping a close eye on it. We talk to them regularly about all the funding issues. They are aware of our slippage. In fact, the Prime Minister's Delivery Unit is, as we speak, doing an assessment of where we have got to on delivery of BSF so that we can take those lessons learned forward, but I think the Treasury generally have accepted that it was an incredibly ambitious programme. I think we are all agreed that targeting it on the most deprived and low-achieving areas of the country was always going to be a very, very big task, because those local authorities are under extraordinary pressure, and the decision was made that that was the right place to start because of raising standards. Within that come extra challenges. I think, generally speaking, the Treasury has acknowledged those extra challenges were there, and we are working together on making sure that we learn the lessons going forward.

Q614 Chairman: What bit of the Treasury are you talking to most of the time?

Ms Brooks: The education spending team we talk to a lot, and the PFI team. Those are the two main bits we talk to.

Q615 Chairman: You talk to them more than you talk to Number Ten and the delivery unit?

Ms Brooks: Yes, we talk to them as well, but the delivery unit is a one-off, intense two-month evaluation programme which we are going through at the moment.

Q616 Chairman: In terms of the way that you told us the history, that was interesting, because if you take an authority like mine, Kirklees, where Huddersfield sits, of course, being an early PFI authority, we have rebuilt a lot of our school estate. You sort of left that out as though all you have been doing is mending the roofs and building a few laboratories over a period of time. Actually a big PFI programme has been going on in the country. Why did you leave that out?

Ms Brooks: I forgot it. I think the PFI programme was the next step, if you like, from the early repair and maintenance, but I think what we have done with BSF is on the strength of PFI, because all of our PFI is now in BSF. We have taken it all and put it into BSF - half of the funding in BSF is PFI the other half is convention - but we have built on the strengths of PFI. Also there are some weaknesses to PFI, there are some things that could be improved. One of the things that BSF does is, because it sets up a long-term local education partnership, which is to deliver wave after wave after wave of Building Schools for the Future in one local authority, we have looked at how we could improve PFI, and one of the criticisms of PFI is that it is fairly computational and that there are huge bidding costs for one-off projects. We now have a one-off bidding round at the end of which we now have a long-term programme which can be up to half a billion pounds, if not more in some big local authorities, with partners within a local education partnership who are incentivised to deliver improvements year on year and to work with the local authority and, importantly, to work with the local authority and the schools around educational transformation, around integration of ITC and personalised learning as well as buildings and maintenance. We have moved on from a situation where the PFI contractors were, I think, talking about looking at, "We are there to build a building and then maintain it, clean it", and so on, to a situation where most of our BSF bidders are coming in with educational advisers, with ICT people, with a kind of hopefully integrated team prepared to address more than just the building, prepared to understand they are in a long-term relationship with the local authority and the schools to deliver buildings and educational transformation. So we had the PFI; we have moved on from that now.

Q617 Chairman: When you talk to people on the ground, and we have been visiting schools, as you know, there does not seem to be that amount of expertise available to some schools in terms of the rush that they have in order to meet a BSF deadline. I wondered who brings in the expertise. I can understand where the construction expertise comes from - it is well established - you expect a major construction company to know about buildings and running them and maintaining them. When we listen to ministers they talk about personalisation of learning. If you say, "What is going to be in this twenty-first century school that is different than 30 children with a teacher, throw in a couple of white boards and computers?", and they say, "Oh, it is all going to be personalisation", where is the expertise around what is going to be in there? What is this personalisation in a sustainable school?

Ms Brooks: Where is the expertise? It is a challenge, because what we have at the moment is schools that are getting on with their day job who are not necessarily understanding how you can get involved in a major transformational design, and the support is not necessarily there at the moment. We are working on that with the National College for School Leadership and others to work with the end users to help make a bridge between the educational thinking that is happening at the moment and how they are going to have their new building designed. So, when you talk about things like personalised learning and you talk about access for pupils from anywhere so they can access from home, they can access from libraries, they can access from their own schools, they can work at their own pace---

Q618 Chairman: It is all about IT, is it?

Ms Brooks: A lot of it is about IT.

Q619 Chairman: Personalisation is IT really?

Ms Brooks: No. I think personalisation, in as far as it affects Building Schools for the Future, a lot of that is about making sure, not just that the ICT allows pupils to have access wherever and whenever but that the spaces that you are designing into a school allow small, quiet work spaces that individual pupils can access, that they allow group spaces where a group of people can sit together and work around a single white board on a project, that they allow places where 60, 90 people can sit together in a lecture hall and see what is happening and where, in fact, schools can link with other schools so that you can have experts coming into one school to give what would be a very valuable lecture at secondary level and schools in the area can link in through their IT and appreciate it.

Q620 Chairman: That is interesting, but who has got the expertise on this personalisation in the department?

Ms Brooks: We talk to our curriculum people. The curriculum people tend to have the expertise.

Q621 Chairman: So the curriculum people, if they came in here, would be able to tell us what personalised learning is all about?

Ms Brooks: They would probably be able to tell you better than me.

Q622 Chairman: But you do have a regular dialogue with them?

Ms Brooks: Yes, we talk to all our curriculum people. We talk to our Extended Schools people, we talk to the curriculum people, we talk to specialist schools, we talk to almost every single bit of the department.

Q623 Chairman: So a whole group of you get together in the department and say: "This is a school for the future, this is the way it will be built." You have got experts coming in saying: "This how you make it sustainable environmentally", do you?

Ms Brooks: Yes.

Q624 Chairman: Then you have another group saying: "This is what the school of the future will be like in terms of IT and personalisation", and all that?

Ms Brooks: Yes.

Q625 Chairman: So the full set is there?

Ms Brooks: The full set is there, but also the full set is in PFS because the PFS education team are the ones that work with the local authorities and the schools on their early education provision, which comes into their BSF strategy for change. So, if you like, the department sets the overall policies and the overall expectations around personalised learning, around Extended Schools around workforce reform, around almost every area, and we then work with PFS and their education team are the ones that work with the local authorities to help them.

Q626 Chairman: Let us ask Tim what he thinks.

Mr Byles: I think that is a key point. The linking between what we know best at the moment at a national level in terms of all the areas you have just been discussing - sustainability, personalisation and so on - does need to be translated into the real world in which teachers are delivering in local communities and expressed in terms, starting from where they are, that can allow that process to develop through time. One of the key things that I think Building Schools for the Future delivers is flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances, to build on the best of what we know already and for that to have resonance with what local people want and the way in which people delivering these services locally can see it benefiting them.

Q627 Chairman: How does that work out for someone in a school in Bristol? When we went down there they said, "Look, we are in this wave. We have got to do it in a hurry." Where do they get the support? They did not seem to be thinking they had all this expertise coming from you or anyone else?

Mr Byles: I certainly would not want to say that everything is perfect now. I do not pretend that. It is a process. If I can comment on the point you made earlier on: does the private sector get all their ducks in a row before they start something? I can tell you, that is absolutely not the case. What we are seeing with the public and the private sector in relation to this programme is doing our very best to set this in the best practice of what we know and what we see coming but recognising that this procurement process, the nature of the partnership between central, local government and the private sector, is something which we are all learning from, public and private, and I make no apology, in fact I celebrate that learning in moving the process forward and delivering efficiencies and effective investment through time.

Q628 Chairman: Before you got involved in this and worked out how many schools and how many ways over how much time (and, as Sally has said, it is not just simple building, this is a very complex delivery of the building: the delivery, the maintenance, what goes in it is a multi-faceted skill-set) did you do an evaluation of whether there was the capacity in the system to do this?

Mr Byles: If I can, with my recent history and look forward more than back, what I can say is that, in terms of the wave which is just about to be announced, each local authority has gone through a readiness-to-deliver assessment. So we have looked at the capacity of the authorities and the scale of their ambition and tried to reach a sensible judgment about the ability to move forward in it.

Q629 Chairman: But some of the most deprived local authorities are least able to---

Mr Byles: Absolutely correct. That is why the support needs to vary according to their capability. The project support from Partnership for Schools, for example, or, indeed, from 4ps, which is very important in boosting capacity in local government, needs to be tuned to a sensible assessment of what their local authority capacity is and what the capacity of the local partnership is to deliver this. That process has developed through time and it has got to the point I have just described to you. The very early projects, I am quite sure, did not have that degree of preparation. That is part of the learning which we have all found very helpful and I expect to get better for the future, and, as Sally mentioned earlier on, this programme did begin with some of the most challenged authorities in the most challenging areas.

Q630 Chairman: You have not answered me about the private sector. Is there the capacity in the construction industry and are there the specialists in these things to do what needs to be done?

Mr Byles: If you are asking me a question about the capacity of the construction industry, the answer is, yes, there is that capacity, and we are looking very carefully at the impact of large-scale investments and the known impact on the construction industry around the country as we look at the judgments going forward of the effects of BSF, which is a very large programme but, in terms of the overall scale of the construction industry in this country, is not predominant, but those things do need to balance. Where there is a particular skill shortage is to do with project management expertise to local government, and that is why we are particularly looking at ways of drawing in the people who have that kind of expertise perhaps in other sectors who could apply it into this one, we are looking at capacity building programmes in the public sector to manage these programmes, but I am not seeing the kind of constraint that I think you are asking about in the private sector delivery perhaps.

Q631 Chairman: I remember very well that when PFI really got started in the educational sector the very people you are talking about were the scarce resource; you could not get them for love nor money. We are talking about a situation in this country where we already have scarce skills in this area, and you have got the Olympics in 2012 with an enormous draw on that kind of capacity. Are you still sure that you are going to have the right quality of people to deliver on this?

Mr Byles: In terms of private sector construction capacity to deliver, I am feeling much more reassured now. There has been some recent modelling by the Office of Government Commerce, in fact, on exactly this question, and I believe their work is going to be published soon; and that goes exactly to the point about which you are asking, and that is why I am feeling more reassured about that point. I am actually more concerned about the project management capacity in local government.

Q632 Chairman: Let me bring in Martin.

Mr Lipson: Before I comment on this, perhaps I could try and answer a question you asked earlier about the origins of Building Schools for the Future, because I was around then and my colleagues were not. In fact, it did not get started in a rush at all. There was about 18 months of preparation going on in the department when they set up the shadow organisation, which then became Partnerships for Schools, and we in the Local Government Organisation were---

Q633 Chairman: What year was that?

Mr Lipson: That was 2003. We started work on it in 2003. It did not get launched, effectively, until--

Q634 Chairman: The historian in me (and I am sure Gordon shares this) wants to know when did you know there was going to be a Building Schools for the Future programme?

Mr Lipson: I think at the end of 2002, early 2003.

Q635 Chairman: Who told you?

Mr Lipson: The department. We have close working relationships with the department because we have been supporting the PFI programme that you mentioned, including Kirklees, for over eight years previous to this, so we know a great deal about this area and the local authorities involved.

Q636 Chairman: You understood that this was a Treasury-led initiative, did you?

Mr Lipson: No, I am not quite sure that is where it came from.

Q637 Chairman: Where do you think it came from then?

Mr Lipson: My impression is it came from the department. It probably came from various parts of government, but it emerged as a very strong concept.

Ms Brooks: It came from David Miliband in January 2003. He was the Schools Minister and it was his baby, his project. When I arrived I worked closely with David Miliband and he was passionate about it. The basis of it was, in fact, the LIFT model in the NHS, which was the first of this kind of global partnership.

Q638 Chairman: The minister for schools, who is a middle ranking minister, you are saying it was his idea, with a £45 billion spend, and he had not had long conversations with the Treasury before?

Ms Brooks: He had had long conversations with the Treasury, yes?

Mr Lipson: I think a lot of the work in working out the detail of how this would be done was done by another organisation called Partnerships UK, which had put together the ideas and is the half owner of Tim's organisation, Partnership for Schools. There has been quite a lot of work done to put that idea together. I just wanted to correct any impression that it was done in a rush, and we were very pleased with the extent to which local government was involved in the discussions in that early stage. Turning to the point that we have been discussing more recently, I completely endorse my colleague's concerns about the capacity in the local government sector because I think what we have here is a huge programme, which is very exciting, and a lot of the local authorities involved in the programme are, indeed, very excited about the possibility of transforming secondary education and they are very bought into the ideas, but they are finding it difficult in the relatively limited market, which you have referred to, of experts and professionals. With lots of projects going on at the same time nationally, there is a limited pool of really good experts. So that is, I think, one point. One point that perhaps has not come out very clearly is that it is the local authority that has to assemble the procurement team. It is they that employ all the advisers. They use in-house expertise when they have got it. The larger authorities do have sustainability experts, they do have procurement experts, but smaller authorities have to buy that expertise in, and I would say that it is a limited pool that they are fishing in to get the really good people to help them with their projects, and that is critical for the success of the future generation of schools. If they do not get the right expertise, then you will not get a very good result, and we have seen some evidence of that.

Q639 Fiona Mactaggart: I wanted to come in on the point that Tim was making. He was talking about OGC doing a further report. I was quite struck when I looked at the OGC report on construction, demand and capacity that it did not, I thought, really consider Building Schools for the Future as a kind of big elephant in this pot. It talked a lot about Crossrail and about the Olympics, and so on. One of the things that I was anxious about was that this programme has almost been a ghost creeping into this thing. Are you saying the OGC has now really recognised the size of Building Schools for the Future and its impact, because it has not really shown that yet?

Mr Byles: I am not aware of the history you are just describing. All I can tell you about is the discussions I had last week with the people in OGC who are producing this analysis (and I believe have produced, but I am not sure if it is going to be published) which does take into account the impact of BSF in this wider world.

Q640 Mr Marsden: I wonder if I could start with you, Tim Byles. I want to try and get clearer in my mind the precise nature and remit of Partnership for Schools. Certainly, if I look at your background before coming to it, it is a very solid and a very impressive one in the procurement sector, is it not?

Mr Byles: Thank you.

Q641 Mr Marsden: What about the skills that Partnership for Schools has to be an adviser as opposed to a procurer?

Mr Byles: There are a range of skills in the organisation. Some are to do with helping local authorities establish their educational vision, as Sally has told you about, so we have people drawn from that sector in the organisation, and it is their job to work alongside local authorities to produce this strategy for change. There is a team of people who are experts in procurement and in the establishment and closure of deals such as private finance type transactions, and they provide very specialist advice at the back end of this process on putting those things together. We have a legal team who are specialists in documentation (in particular the use of standard documentation that can be used as a basis for these transactions) that can help with training and development of all participants in working that through, and we also have a design team who are working very closely with colleagues in CABE, for example, to make sure that the design inputs are appropriate and tested appropriately at the early stage. So, we have expertise that goes from the visioning process to the closure process, and we try to tune our intervention alongside the capacity of the local authority in question, in particular to carry these things forward, because there is enormous variation in the knowledge, skills and ability of individual local authorities.

Q642 Mr Marsden: As we have already heard. Structurally that sounds fine, but in the reality of pressured projects, particularly the ones we are talking about, particularly the examples the Chairman has given, how are you going to make sure that the holistic concept of what you are trying to do does not get lost in the pressures to deliver? Your position, as I say, is key to that. How are you going to make sure that you are not just Mr Power Driver and you remain Mr Motivator.

Mr Byles: Thank you. I will memorise both of those two things. Vigilance is an example of it and so is assessment. I have mentioned this readiness to deliver assessment, and, as we move forward into wave four, what we are establishing with each local authority is a memorandum of understanding between Partnerships for Schools and the local authority in question where we are all very clear about what we all think the starting point is and confident in the knowledge that through time circumstances will change.

Q643 Mr Marsden: Can I interrupt you there because we have had this before. Do you see your principal client in this context as the local authority or as the school?

Mr Byles: I am not sure I would describe it as a principal client. I certainly see us having a key relationship with the local authority and also with individual schools, but much of our work is centred through the local authority and with various schools, in some cases a very large number of schools, that make up a wave area within a local authority, but that means that as we are getting the vision part right, if I go back to the beginning of the process, we are sitting down with people from each of those schools as well as the director of children's services trying to take a view across the whole estate so that we can reach a common view about what educational transformation actually means across the board.

Q644 Mr Marsden: I was going to come on to educational transformation and come to you, if I may, Sally. It is a lovely phrase "educational transformation", and you have given some examples of what you think it means, but does it actually reflect also a differing approach within the department to types of education? What I mean by that is, is it based on the provision of different sorts of schools rather than some of the rather vaguer concepts that we are talking about in terms of personalised learning which you yourself have already said is something still to be defined?

Ms Brooks: Yes, I think it is based on departmental policy, which includes provision of a range of different kinds of schools, provision of choice and diversity. I think (to go back to the question: "Who is the client?") under the White Paper the local authority is the strategic commissioner of education in its area but not necessarily the direct provider. So, as strategic commissioner, we would expect a local authority, through BSF, to commission a range of diverse providers of education. That is what we expect, including, where appropriate, academies, including the expansion of successful schools, including bringing new faith providers and others into that area.

Q645 Mr Marsden: That is very much at the heart of this educational transformation as well as the practical things about having broader multi-use spaces and the personalised learning agenda and all the rest of it?

Ms Brooks: Yes, as well as extended schools, extended hours, community use - as well as all those things.

Q646 Mr Marsden: I am glad you mentioned that because I would like, if we get a chance, to return to how far this programme is embedded in extended hours and community use. I want to pick you up on this point about educational transformation and also perhaps to ask Martin Lipson to comment. I have been looking at the two written submissions that you have given. I will be kind and say there is a degree of creative tension between you and local government on this. In your paper you talk about BSF, including academies and BSF plans, and you are very bold about it. You say, "Projects that contain innovative academy proposals within their plans are likely to progress more rapidly to approval", but in the paper that has been submitted from 4ps they say, again fairly boldly, "Transformation has a chance of succeeding in some authorities, but the inclusion of academies is already getting in the way of a strategic approach to BSF for some authorities. As a result, we believe government should suppress any further major educational initiatives while authorities are developing and implementing their strategic approach through BSF." How do you reconcile that? To the outsider it looks like you have got horns locked there.

Ms Brooks: I think in the early days of academies, when BSF was just starting and academies were being delivered separately, there was tension, I accept that absolutely. What we have done (and again this is about learning as we go along) is we have now integrated the delivery of academies into the Building Schools for the Future programme and PFS are now delivering that; so I think it has got a lot better. In the early days the department was dealing directly with sponsors delivering the buildings through the department, which is never going to be a long-term success because it is not what our core business is, and there was some tension. What we have done in the last year to 18 months is integrated academies into the BSF programme. Sponsors now occupy a similar role to the governors of voluntary aided schools in BSF in that they are consulted and they are very involved in the design of the buildings, and so on, but the local authority is the commissioner. I think it is working a lot better.

Q647 Mr Marsden: Do you share that assessment, Martin Lipson, and, if you do, why did you say the rather sharp things that you did in your written submission?

Mr Lipson: I think it is the view of a number of local authorities and the Local Government Association that academies are quite a challenging thing for some authorities to deal with where they have strategies for dealing with underachievement. In schools that did not start going in that direction, federating schools and other solutions exist as sometimes quite effective means of dealing with underperformance. I think (and this is perhaps only for a minority of authorities) when they have to consider the appropriateness of academies as part of their strategy, it is not necessarily the direction they will choose to go in. This is difficult because Building Schools for the Future requires authorities to set their strategy for many years in the future, and academies are not governed by the authority in the same way that community schools are, which means that there could be elements of the way that education is delivered locally that are outside their control in the future. That is a change. The new Education Act takes that further: it allows for schools to be outside the authority's control in a number of respects. So, I think authorities are saying to us it is more difficult now to plan future strategies than it used to be.

Q648 Mr Marsden: Tim Byles, I am not going to ask you to comment on the ideological issues there, but I am going to ask you to comment on the practical issues. If in particularly difficult areas, low achieving areas, we are in for a lengthy period of creative tension between the departments and local authorities over how you include academies in BSF, is that not going to impact rather tightly on what are already tight deadlines for you to deliver?

Mr Byles: I find that tension point more historic than actual today. Having been, until five weeks ago, a local authority chief executive, I have been very much involved in the debate of how that discussion has matured through time.

Q649 Mr Marsden: Do you think Martin's assessment, or, to be more accurate, the assessment given in the paper, is pessimistic?

Mr Byles: I think it was true at the time it was written.

Q650 Chairman: When was it written?

Mr Lipson: I think it was submitted in June or July.

Q651 Chairman: So it is fairly recent.

Mr Byles: Yes, but what I am trying to describe to you is I have seen a very significant move in local authorities, some of whom took a very particular view about the utility of academies when they were first announced, and Martin has reflected some of that feeling. I am engaged every week in discussing with local authorities, with ministers in the department, the squaring of this circle between the strategic approach for an area and the utility of an academy.

Q652 Mr Marsden: I will move you on from being Mr Motivator to Mr Conciliator. You are there to try and smooth out some of the sharp edges between DfES and local authorities, are you?

Mr Byles: I think these are great titles. I look forward to reading them later! What I am trying to do is to get a process which does deliver an outcome that is coherent across a whole area but also allows for a targeted intervention where that is appropriate. The issue of governance is a much more complex one as it relates to local authorities' relationships with schools. This is not a command and control relationship, and it has not been for many years. The whole way of establishing a strategy which is owned locally depends on influence, persuasion, encouragement and leadership, and that is delivered through different skills than historical, controlled mechanisms, but it is a much more powerful set of arrangements when it works effectively, and we are seeing that increasingly across the country and I do see that as a contribution we can help in, yes.

Q653 Mr Marsden: Can I come back, finally, to you, Sally. You are trying to say to us that there were tensions but they have been smoothed out. That is to be seen. More specifically perhaps, given that some of the local authorities who you have got in the future waves of BSF, and certainly some of the schools, will share some of the forebodings that they have expressed to us in the Select Committee visits about how they are going to do this, how are you going to keep the people who are going to come on stream informed of the progress that you have made in waves one to three? If you have got local authorities, for example, who are particularly exercised about the academies and how that fits into Building Schools for the Future, how are you going to sell this to them and reduce some of the tensions? We have not seen at the moment much evidence that the department is informing those people who are going to come into the programme of the progress that you have made so far?

Ms Brooks: We have a lot of information on our progress so far, like putting things on our websites and producing reports, but we tend to work mostly with the local authorities who are coming into the next couple of waves, because those are the ones who are starting to focus on where they are going to be in Building Schools for the Future. The department as a whole has six-monthly meets with almost every local authority's capital investment teams in the country, and conferences, which keep them up to date in terms of our general progress, but really it is only the local authorities that are coming in, in the next two or three years, that really become focused on what that means. We are shortly announcing wave four. Six months ago we had a day long conference for all those local authorities that are in wave four, five and six to talk through with them, in a great deal of detail, exactly what we expected them to do, and, as Tim mentioned earlier, we are prioritising in wave four in terms of ability to deliver. Nonetheless, waves four, five and six are all thinking about BSF now. So, we talked through with them what it meant, we talked through with them what we mean by educational transformation and we talked through with them, in a lot of detail, what we saw from our early learning in waves one, two and three, what the key issues were that they had to demonstrate they were dealing with and they had a process for dealing with, and we then asked those local authorities themselves to assess whether they should be in waves four, five or six in terms of how complex it was.

Q654 Mr Marsden: So there is some choice in the process?

Ms Brooks: There is some choice in the process and actually good, high performing local authorities came back to us and said they wanted to be in wave five because they had new schools that they wanted to build on land they had not yet acquired, they were thinking of having academies or they knew they had to have a competition and they were taking responsibility for programming that into their BSF project.

Mr Marsden: I hope that the extended school and particularly the co-operation with the PFE sector will be key ingredients in what you talk about in the future.

Q655 Mr Chaytor: Where does Ofsted fit into the process of approval of local authority bids? Is there any formal role?

Ms Brooks: No, there is no formal role. Interestingly, we have been discussing recently whether or not, when Ofsted are going to local authorities to evaluate their performance, their ability to deliver should be part of that evaluation, but we are in early discussions with them about that. In general, Ofsted goes down a parallel track rather than being involved in the evaluation of their bids.

Q656 Mr Chaytor: More widely, in terms of teaching and learning strategies and development of the curriculum, how prominently does that feature in the bids that local authorities are required to submit? What value, what weighting is given to the teaching and learning strategies as against other things such as the potential for extended schools and liaison with the local authority?

Ms Brooks: In fact, local authorities do not bid because we more or less tell them where they are in the process in terms that they are prioritised in terms of deprivation and exam results. With waves four to six we ask them where they think they should be, but, in fact, it is not a bidding process. The evaluation takes place when the local authorities produce their strategy for change, and the strategy for change has to cover all those things. The way it works is that you have to know what you want to deliver in educational terms first, you then have to link that with your buildings strategy. To put the history on how we have changed things, in the first two waves of BSF we said, "We want your education vision, we will improve your education vision and then you can go on and sort out your building strategy." So we got some very good education visions which covered personalised learning, curriculum, science teaching, extended schools, sports, everything. They have to cover almost every single policy which we have in their vision, but what we found was that we had almost two separate documents. We had the educationalists in local government doing the education vision and then we had the property people, who may well have been in a different bid, doing the property bit. We have now brought them together, and we have said we need an integrated strategy for change which takes all those education issues, cut curriculum, everything. It gives their plan and then shows how they will use BSF to implement those strategies.

Q657 Mr Chaytor: But what happens in the strategy? What happens when the educational vision is at odds with the amount of capital available, and do they know what the capital available is before they draw up their strategy?

Ms Brooks: I think Tim might be better placed to answer the bit about how much money they know about and when.

Mr Byles: We are not just told there is this amount of money, but the process does tend to come from our indicative figures available, but it is a function of the number of schools and what they want to achieve through them. It becomes a discussion. It is not an entirely formulaic approach, but neither is it a blank sheet of paper. That is as much as I can help you with today, I am afraid.

Q658 Mr Chaytor: The ultimate allocation to each local authority's programme is absolutely dependent on the quality of the strategy they have produced?

Mr Byles: And what is contained within it. What makes sense, as Sally mentioned---. Take the Kent example, for example. There were three waves of activity, very large waves, each £500 million at a time with large numbers of schools contained within them, but there are others that are areas simply dealing with two or three schools and are coming back to other parts of the estate through time, and part of that is to do with capacity in the authority, with where the whole investment strategy sits with other things that they are trying to achieve in the education world and across the community as a whole. That is why I was trying to make the point earlier on. It has to be coherent in terms of what they are trying to achieve locally. There is not some centrally driven answer that they must fit this to.

Q659 Mr Chaytor: In the process that you are describing is there not a risk that the local authority may produce a strategy that is completely out of line with any realistic concept of what this is meant to be about?

Mr Byles: That is the reason for the facilitation, for the educational planning team, Partnerships for Schools sitting alongside them working out what is the aspiration, what is practical and deliverable and how can that be matched with the likely resources available, whether that is from PFI or from conventional funding.

Q660 Mr Chaytor: Where a local authority comes at the end of the line (i.e. they are not going to be fully involved in the programme until 2015), they are now given an element of specific capital for one school. Is there a danger that the focus on the single school approach as a kind of consolation prize is not going to be fully integrated into what the eventual strategy might be, or are there processes in place to ensure that what is done in terms of the redevelopment of one school is consistent with what is likely to be the redevelopment of another school?

Ms Brooks: Yes. We were very clear that the one school offer, as we call it, is a down payment on BSF, if you like, it is not separate. So local authorities have been required to tell us how it fits into their overall strategy. Obviously, a local authority that is going to be in wave 14 will not have fully worked out a strategic plan for its whole school estate in ten years' time, but they should have an overview of what they intend to do and they need to demonstrate to us, if they are rebuilding a new school in that area, that they have their pupil place planning which says it is going to be needed, that they have integrated it into where they want to put the new school when they do get BSF, that, for example, if they are focusing a certain specialism on that school, the facilities are going to be available to the other schools in the area. That is absolutely part of what they have got to tell us before they get the money.

Mr Byles: Can I add a point to that. You could imagine that everyone would be rushing to have the maximum investment as soon as possible. I can think of one very good example where a one-school investment is going to be the centre-piece of a major regeneration, and that requires land assembly, it requires the planning process to be put in place, and for that whole very long-term rejuvenation of an area to take effect it actually makes sense to deliver the school down the track rather than right up here and now. So one of the challenges we need to manage is the long-term benefit for whole communities alongside large-scale investment and the timing of that investment. That is one of the interesting parts of this programme.

Q661 Mr Chaytor: Finally, Chairman, in terms of the use of other streams of capital, if the local authority strategy had linked the redevelopment of secondary schools with primary schools or with FE, are they completely free to use the other capital funding streams relevant to FE in primary, or not?

Ms Brooks: We are working towards it.

Q662 Mr Chaytor: Can you aggregate the use of devolved capital for primary schools into the whole pot?

Ms Brooks: Yes, we are working towards it. It is where we want to get to.

Q663 Mr Chaytor: It does not apply now.

Ms Brooks: It applies with a lot of it, yes, because most of it goes into the single capital pot, and once it is in the single capital pot they can use it in accordance with their local priorities, so they can actually take money that is given them for other things and put it into education and vice versa. We have not completely got there yet, but it is a very high priority for us. Whenever I go out to local authorities with Martin (and I am sure we will say the same thing), it is one of the things they say to us over and over again: "Please, help us join up our funding more and be more flexible."

Mr Lipson: The issue is not whether authorities want to do that, but whether they are able to in terms of timing. The difficulty sometimes is that funding does not come on stream at the right moment to incorporate into the complex contract which they are entering into, and so sometimes they have to be added on later or procured in some other way.

Q664 Mr Chaytor: But in terms of the further education sector, for example, the way in which their capital projects are developed, there is considerably more freedom for individual colleges to use capital creatively than perhaps there is with primary and secondary schools. Given, the emergence of the 14-19 curriculum and the links between schools and colleges, are you confident that the various forms of capital available to the further education sector is fully integrated into the BSF strategy?

Ms Brooks: I think there is still more work to do. I think FE colleges have more freedom because they have the freedom to borrow, and that is a big advantage for them. That freedom is not something that is available to the rest of the school sector.

Q665 Mr Chaytor: The borrowing approvals can be part of the future BSF strategy?

Ms Brooks: Yes. Local authorities have freedom to borrow; individual schools do not in the sort of way that individual FE colleges do.

Q666 David Chaytor: If the local authority wanted to put forward a BSF strategy that involved redevelopment of its further education strategy as well, the further education college's capacity or freedom to borrow would not be inhibited in any way, that could be part of the overall package.

Mr Byles: Yes, that is right. Sally is describing a process that could become more structured and we are working towards that.

Q667 Fiona MacTaggart: We talked about future waves, but let us for the moment think of the first three waves of BSF. The DfEs has identified "lack of capacity or experience in delivering large projects in local authorities" and "insufficient corporate support and leadership" amongst the common factors in those delays. Could you not have written that before it happened? Was that not absolutely predictable?

Ms Brooks: I think it was partially predictable. The size of it and the transformational nature of it together were much more of a challenge than we may necessarily have predicted. We could have predicted that the size of it was something that local authorities would find some difficulties in getting to grips with; we could not necessarily have predicted the fact that it would be so transformational and the fact that it involves rethinking the whole school estate, with all those individual conversations with schools and local communities and so on, was going to make it even more of an issue. But, yes, I think we could. It still surprises me that the size and complexity of it was not fully grasped. We could have predicted it. When we had all our meetings and we introduced the new local authorities to BSF, we said over and over again: this is high priority; it should be dealt with at chief executive level and your members need to be closely involved with it. To be honest, it surprised me how long it took some local authorities to accept that. One of the biggest issues that slowed down the programme was that some local authorities did not see it as central to their corporate direction. They saw it either as an education programme or as a building programme and therefore that it should have been dealt with either by the education people or the building people. In fact, I do not think there is any local authority in the country for which BSF is not a hugely significant element of their corporate strategy. It has taken some time in some local authorities to accept that.

Q668 Fiona MacTaggart: What is each of your organisations doing about this problem? Having said that it was a highly predictable problem, what are you doing about it?

Mr Lipson: The DfES gives us funding to run a team supporting local authorities in the BSF programme. Our remit is to provide training to the project team in the local authority, to help them get best practice into the way they run the whole procurement exercise. Do not let us underestimate this: it is two years of extremely hard work by a large team which requires a good understanding of the governance of the project, the accountability processes for within the local authorities for how the project will report and be monitored, really good management skills for a large team, good leadership and so on. We give training and support in all these things. We are starting to do that in advance of authorities entering the programme, so we are now helping to try to get the authorities fit so they can say, "We're ready." I think that makes a big difference. In the first three waves, there was not really much of a chance to do that. We did not start giving the support until the first wave was already well under way. We have seen difficulties as a result, especially, as has already been pointed out, by definition the most needy authorities have often been the ones that have most difficulty with the capacity and skills. That is certainly something we have all acknowledged, if you like. I think we are now heading that problem off in the next few waves that are coming because we have done lots of work in advance and the authorities have been given the choice to say whether they are ready or not. That makes a big difference.

Mr Byles: We have Readiness to Deliver, so we have that assessment taking place. We are signing a memorandum of understanding with each local authority, which I was describing earlier on, which makes it clear what is expected on both sides, and we are using conferences and seminars/workshops to share experience, with those local authorities who have learned from this process telling their colleagues exactly how best to link to it. I am visiting a number of authorities and having conversations at leader and chief executive level. In a large local authority, there is a great deal to do, and this is not always going to be at the top of the pile, but it is capable of disrupting the budgeting and resource planning process very significantly if the centre of the authority is not well tuned to the demands of this process. That is an adjustment we want to make sure everyone fully understands and we are doing that at a personal as well as a more general level.

Q669 Fiona MacTaggart: Sally, I suppose you have partly answered me at the beginning.

Ms Brooks: I asked these two people to do those things they have just described. Apart from, absolutely, from wave 4 onwards, prioritising those local authorities that are ready to deliver and not making it easy for them to demonstrate they are ready, we are evaluating wave 4 at the moment and who should be in it. We are ringing up people who the local authorities are putting forward to us, saying, "This is the member who is leading on this, who knows exactly what is happening in BSF now." For waves 1 and 2 we would have said, "Jolly good, there is a lead member with responsibility for it." We are now ringing them up and saying, "Okay, what do you know about it?" to check that they really have that corporate leadership. We are looking at making more things mandatory. 4ps very much gives the early support to local authorities at the corporate level before they are in BSF. Once they become active, PfS to some extent takes over that relationship, although 4ps are still involved. Before they are in a wave, all that capacity building, all that knowledge and awareness at officer, chief officer and member level is from 4ps. At the moment, it is not mandatory that local authorities talk to 4ps. Most of them do but, sadly, some of those which need the most do not talk to them. The ones which I know are very, very good competent local authorities, were in there years ago talking to them, and the ones that need them were not. I think it is certainly reasonable to make it mandatory that local authorities do engage early on and we require them to get that. Rather than just recommending that they get support and help on capacity building and understanding, we require it.

Q670 Fiona MacTaggart: It sounds to me as though we have this massive national programme and we forgot to tell people at the beginning - let us be honest - that it was a massive national building programme.

Ms Brooks: Yes.

Q671 Fiona MacTaggart: We treated it as though it was a bit of capital renewal. That is one of the reasons why it has ended up in this problem. Is it practical to have 150 or however many different projects doing it here, doing it there, when we know there is a lack of capacity in procurement expertise, project management and of turning the vision into reality? Would it not be more sensible perhaps for Partnership for Schools or whatever to have a centralised team, with experience from previous projects, which is going into places and providing that kind of spine of support?

Ms Brooks: They do provide that support. We have had lots of discussions about how we can support local authorities: Could we get highly paid professional project managers and send them in? But it is all about knowing the area, knowing the schools, knowing the challenges. It is something that has to be driven locally. Most of the problems that arise, which I see slow things down - around pupil place planning, relationships between the schools, schools that do not want to be closed and maybe the local authority is proposing to close them because they are failing - are all about that local context. It is not at the moment particularly about managing major building projects, because most of them have not started, but a lot of the slowdown, a lot of the delays are around things that only those local partners can deal with, because they are the only people who know them and understand them in detail and have relationships set up. I think PfS can and do support with a great deal of support, but sending somebody in...? We all know how sensitive local authority relationships are. A load of schools in a local authority area, with that diverse set of stakeholders, is always complex and difficult to manage, even before you get into closing schools, buying land, opening new schools and so on. Really, in my experience, it is the local authority and the local schools and governors who are the only people who can manage that.

Mr Byles: We want to tune the level of our support to the capacity to deliver locally. Sometimes that is more hands on and sometimes it is more facilitative, as it can be with the role of 4ps. If we have a judgment about capacity and we can judge through the life of a project when that is rolling, that is fine, but the more difficult question is what happens when it all starts to fall over and then - which I think is behind part of your question - how best do we intervene in order to make sure that the thing stays on track? That is one of the challenges. We are overcoming that at the moment by having a recognised role for having access to local government's own sponsored support mechanism in order to make sure the thing delivers.

Mr Lipson: I mentioned earlier that in the early days of planning BSF local government had been very involved, and I do not think it would have been acceptable to local government to pursue the idea that there was an organisation that ran the projects from the centre. That would never have been agreed. So we have a very sensible acknowledgement of the role of the local authority - and I would like to answer the question that was answered earlier - as the principal client, because I think it is. It is the local authority that signs the contracts with the LEP, with various advisors and so forth. We have here a multiple client programme. We have the Department and PfS and local government and schools all working together. It has to be that way to get the thing to work properly with the ambitions that we all have.

Q672 Fiona MacTaggart: Is that local economic partnerships' model working properly? Does it succeed?

Mr Lipson: I think it takes some years to bed in something like this. Because it is a long-term programme, we have the chance to get this right. It does not work perfectly to start with. It cannot do. Three years in, it is starting to work very well. There is a lot of creative discussion going on between all the parties now about how to improve it and embed those changes.

Mr Byles: The local education partnership needs to be seen in the context of the range of partnership delivery mechanisms that a local authority is used to having within that community strategy for its whole area. This is recognisable language in local terms. We are adding to it, though, a determination which is quite hard technically to make sure that this programme delivers in a very commercial sense. I have a good degree of confidence that this is recognisable territory for local communities. It is taking it into a new area, and that needs to be proved through time, but I am quite sure it is a very effective mechanism to draw things together.

Q673 Fiona MacTaggart: Do you have a central mechanism which makes sure you can count the benefits' realisation? You say you have an educational vision. How are you going to account for benefits' realisation from this programme for every local authority?

Mr Byles: We are looking at the plan of what they want to achieve in overall education terms. We are framing that very specifically in terms of a programme of investment in relation to individual schools. Progress against that is monitored and measured at each stage of that procurement process, from the issue of an official journal notification, through to the selection of preferred bidder, to a financial close and delivery of the schools, and will then be monitored. You have to understand that we are in the process of all of those. A school has not yet opened under Building Schools for the Future, but, once it is open, how it is satisfied against key performance indicators, including educational attainment, will be a key part of the measure. At this moment we are concentrating on the agreed vision and strategy for delivering a range of finite, quite specific investment outcomes, and we are judging that process through time against expectations in terms of cost, budget and delivery.

Ms Brooks: We do also have an evaluation programme. We have let a contract to do a more long-term evaluation of educational outcomes which is, of course, as always, the most difficult thing to evaluate. It is a major government capital programme, so we have an evaluation programme in place, but that almost cannot start until the first schools are built. Then we will be looking closely at whether there is a real impact on educational attainment.

Q674 Chairman: Just before we move on to talk more about sustainability, from the way you have been answering the questions Fiona has been asking, does that mean that waves 1, 2 and 3 are going to get a really bad deal? I still have the scars of Jarvis, because we were one of the eager, first PFI schemes. Does that mean that waves 1, 2 and 3 are going to be the rather poor relations? In the future, will people look back and say, "What a great pity they went first. Look at what they have"?

Mr Lipson: I was referring earlier on to the difficulties and delays that might have occurred for some of the early projects. I do not think this is necessarily reflected in the outcome. There is one authority in the North West which is closing pretty well all its secondary schools and building new ones, a very dramatic vision change. The fact that they may have experienced some delays because they are an early project does not mean that that outcome is not going to be superb.

Q675 Chairman: If they are all much less sustainable than the buildings they replace, that would not be too good.

Mr Lipson: I was not answering that in terms of sustainability but in terms of the discussion we have just had.

Q676 Mr Carswell: Sustainability is basically a centrally driven agenda, is it not? You in Whitehall are determining the shape of the very buildings and the classrooms. It is not very localised, is it? You talked about the facilitation of the process; you talked about the education planning team. Whatever language you used, this is the centre basically deciding the shape of classrooms locally, is it not?

Mr Byles: No.

Ms Brooks: Not at all. We very much do not. We produce guidance, we produce minimum standards, we produce exemplar designs and we produce a lot of forward-thinking designs for local authorities and schools to learn from, but there is no way that we from the centre say what size or shape the classrooms have to be.

Q677 Mr Carswell: Were there centrally approved designs and minimum standards before this?

Ms Brooks: No, we do not approve designs. We create guidance notes. We create minimum standards which prevent local authorities, schools' architects and whatever from doing something which is dreadfully bad, but they do not constrain local authorities or architects, who can have a lot of freedom within them. They are minimum standards guidance.

Q678 Mr Carswell: Within that centrally defined framework.

Ms Brooks: Yes. We have a framework of how many square metres a pupil needs for their day: a certain number of square metres for classroom, for circulation, for dining and so on. We fund within overall space standards, which have gone up about 25 per cent in the last two years. Within that, there is tremendous flexibility for architects to do what they want locally and we certainly do not approve their designs.

Q679 Mr Carswell: I wondered to what extent the origins of the sustainability policy initiative were with ministers. I know in theory all policies are driven by ministers, but could you talk me through the origins of the policy. Did Mr Miliband walk in one day and say, "Hey, guys, we need sustainable schools" or was there a corporate departmental view about it beforehand? Were there recommendations and suggestions from the Department maybe put to ministers about sustainability?

Ms Brooks: Originally, I do not know, because I was not here. When I arrived, sustainability was an element of what we were expecting out of Building Schools for the Future. With BREEAM, which I am sure you have spoken about, the "very good" and "excellent" guidelines were being brought in and we were expecting all BSF schools to meet BREAAM "very good". I have to say I do not know whether that came originally from ministers. I am assuming it did. I certainly know that in the last couple of years, with sustainability becoming higher and higher profile, we are being asked by ministers to look at higher and higher standards for these schools in terms of sustainability. That is a combination of the fact that, in life, sustainability has a much higher profile now than it did three years ago. When BSF was originally set up, I do not think most people were talking that much about sustainability as of the highest priority, whereas now it is very high on everyone's agenda and we are adapting BSF accordingly.

Mr Byles: It is important to see sustainability in its broader context. In my previous life, I chaired for five years a local government construction taskforce, and Martin was and is an active member of that group, where the whole issue of sustainability from a local perspective as well as a national one had a very significant profile. I cannot agree with the proposition that sustainability is something that solely emanates from the minds of ministers. It has several dimensions: environmental, social and economic. The power of sustainability in local communities, when you talk to head teachers or local schools about what sustainability means: yes, it does mean a lot of costing and the whole approach to the maintenance and management of buildings but it also means the siting of those buildings so that there is ready, safe access to them in terms of transport, walking and cycling.

Q680 Mr Carswell: You are arguing that it was not exclusively the initiative of ministers; that it came from maybe the DfES.

Mr Byles: I am describing that there is a groundswell of support across the country for sustainability in its broad environmental, economic and social context, and this initiative has achieved a significant resonance across local government because of that desire in local communities and local participants to deliver in those terms. It makes sense to local communities to have safe places for children to get to school, to reduce the use of the private car, to see that as part of a broader public transport strategy, because that is good for the whole community as well as good for the investment programme that is BSF.

Mr Lipson: You are asking the question: Did sustainability come in with Building Schools for the Future? The answer is no. It was already embedded in the PFI schools programme before. If you use BREEAM as a measure, it was a requirement in the standard contract between 2001 and 2003, so the latter stages of the PFI programme had BREEAM "very good" as a basic requirement for all schools in that programme.

Q681 Mr Carswell: It is deeply embedded within the educational, professional civil servants, rather than elected ministers.

Mr Lipson: It was already there. BSF has taken it further.

Ms Brooks: I have received helpful advice from behind, from people who were there when it started, which I had forgotten. Charles Clarke, the Secretary of State at the time when BSF was being set up, was quite passionate about sustainability and so it was always high on the agenda of DfES ministers. It is now more broadly rising up the agenda across the whole of government.

Q682 Mr Carswell: I wondered, at a personal level in my constituency, if you are aware of Bishop's Park School in Clacton as a model of sustainability.

Ms Brooks: Yes.

Q683 Mr Carswell: You are aware of it.

Ms Brooks: I have been there.

Q684 Mr Carswell: Is it a sustainable school?

Mr Lipson: Yes, it is an award winning PFI school.

Q685 Mr Carswell: Is that to say it will not close?

Mr Lipson: I do not think so. It is part of a very good will procured package by the county there. I think it is a very good example of how these things can be done really well.

Q686 Mr Carswell: It definitely will not be shut down.

Mr Lipson: I cannot answer that.

Ms Brooks: I went to see it and spoke to the head teacher and it has, as I am sure you now, an interesting arrangement of three blocks that meet together. I said to him: "Is this sustainable? This obviously reflects the way you choose to teach but what about when you have left and there is a new head teacher, because it is a fairly specific way of teaching?" He talked me through the way those blocks could either be used for year groups or subject groups or houses. The design specifically looked at various different ways you could use that. Somebody asked: "Who is the client? Is it the local authority or the school?" You have to have a balance there, because if you have a very forceful head teacher in a school who has very passionate ideas about something, they may leave in five years time, and if the building has been designed to fit what they particularly wanted that could cause a problem. With this school, very clearly it is sustainable because the form in which it is designed can help any different number of ways of teaching.

Q687 Mr Carswell: But you would agree that it would be richly ironic if, having ticked all the boxes for what constitutes sustainability, it then closed or was turned over to an alternative purpose.

Mr Lipson: It might be ironic, but this is part of the discussion we were having earlier about the difficulty of planning long-term future in education. We do not know what may happen to the popularity of a whole range of schools in the area, to changes in policy that might make the popularity of schools vary.

Q688 Mr Carswell: Would that not indicate that sustainability is not purely a question of architecture and design but it is about educational ethics, about what you teach, about school discipline, about things like that.

Mr Lipson: I would agree with that.

Q689 Chairman: I think we would all agree with that, would we not?

Ms Brooks: Yes.

Q690 Mr Chaytor: The Committee's impression from previous evidence is that waves 1, 2 and 3 were pushed forward pretty quickly and the priority given to the whole range of sustainability issues was not as high as it could have been. Is there some evaluation of the sustainability impacts in the first three waves? Or will there be an evaluation when these schools are up and running in terms of the carbon footprint, the changing travel patterns or biodiversity? That is not a point that has been raised at all. Are there plans to formally evaluate the impact of the first three waves of schools?

Ms Brooks: Yes, we have plans to formally evaluate almost everything about the early waves of BSF. We are currently looking at how we evaluate the energy use and the carbon footprint. Whether we evaluate that whole sustainability thing is really dependent on a lot of things but we do need as a priority to look at how we can deliver a reduction in carbon emissions and the cost of that - and not just the cost but how it works. If you look at the book we have just published on sustainable schools, one of the things that appears to happen when you design a sustainable school with low energy use is that, in the first two or three years, the energy use seems to be extremely high compared with what we expect it to be.

Q691 Chairman: Why?

Ms Brooks: We are looking into that now. We are learning by our mistakes. We had the most sustainable school, trying to go for the lowest possible energy use; everybody said it was an example of best practice. It has opened, and the energy use is much higher than was expected. The architects are in there, the BRE are doing an evaluation, they are all doing evaluations of why this is happening. It is coming down, but, again, it is a case of learning by doing. Nobody could have predicted that was going to happen. They are now trying to find out why it is going to happen, to make sure it does not happen again.

Chairman: Perhaps you could consult with the Blue School down in Wells. We went there and they energised the students to bring down their energy use very successfully.

Q692 Mr Chaytor: That seems astonishing. This is now in a document.

Ms Brooks: This is in the sustainability green book which we just published. We have taken case studies. I do not know the details of what is happening there but I think it is tremendously good that the architect and the school and the local authority who did this have acknowledged there is a problem and have said, "We are going to go and look at exactly why this is not working. We are going to drill down into the detail and we are going to make it work and then we are going to spread that good practice so that nobody else gets it." They have not got it completely wrong but it has to be worked in. We cannot just say we designed these schools in BSF waves 1, 2 and 3 to be low carbon without evaluating whether that is happening. Absolutely, we would have to do that, and we would have to use that information to feed into our expectations for future schools built - and not just through BSF but all the new schools we build - because we will be expecting higher standards in terms of carbon usage and we need to know how it works.

Q693 Mr Chaytor: In future waves, beyond wave 3, you have now specified that there should be an architectural champion involved in the partnership. Is that right?

Ms Brooks: No, we have always had a design champion.

Q694 Mr Chaytor: So there is no change?

Ms Brooks: There is a change in how we are evaluating design, yes. One of the issues that has come up - and, again, it is how we learn from doing - is that often at the end of the outline design period when a preferred bidder is chosen, when we looked at the designs of that preferred bidder they were not always as good as we would like them to be. We were using CABE to do that looking at. We realised that that is too late. There is no point saying at that point, "The designs aren't very good," so we are now working with CABE. We have not quite got there yet, but we hope to announce next month a new way of evaluating design to the short-listed bidders, where CABE is involved right from the beginning; looks at, in week 1, if you like, the early outline designs; reports back both to the local authority and to PfS and to DfES on what they consider to be the strengths and weaknesses of those short-listed designers; and, most importantly, talks to the designers about what they consider to be their strengths and weaknesses early on, to give those designers a chance to improve, so that, by the end of that design period, when the preferred bidder is appointed, they have already had to demonstrate that they are good at design.

Q695 Mr Chaytor: In terms of guidelines over the range of sustainability issues, what has been the impact of the action plan on sustainable procurement? This was not in place for the further wave 1 schools, but it is now in place, I understand. Is that starting to have an impact or not? Or is that irrelevant to the whole issue?

Ms Brooks: I am afraid we do not know the answer to that, so we will have to come back to you on that one.

Mr Lipson: Are you thinking of the OGC guidance?

Q696 Mr Chaytor: Presumably, yes.

Mr Lipson: I am not sure of the answer.

Mr Chaytor: Obviously it has not had an impact. It exists but it has not had an impact.

Q697 Chairman: Would you write to the Committee on that.

Ms Brooks: Yes, we will. Perhaps I could correct something I said earlier, because I do not want to mislead you, on the issue about freedom of schools to borrow. Apparently schools are legally able to borrow but the Department limits the circumstances, but we do not allow them, for example, to mortgage their buildings because of the risk of that. In practice, therefore, very few schools do borrow but they are able to.

Q698 Mr Marsden: I would like to press you on the environmental considerations and how you validate them. BREEAM on previous occasions has been used as a bit of a mantra for that. I do not want to carp but I do want to ask you very specifically about some of the criticisms we have had. We had one consultant before the Committee from Arup who was very vividly sceptical about BREAAM. Other people have said that it is possible to score highly on one indicator, like a brown-field site, and the others get neglected. Are you reviewing the efficacy of BREEAM?

Ms Brooks: Yes. BREEAM balances out, as I am sure you have been told. It has eight areas that it covers and you have to have a certain score. You can have a high score in some areas and a low score in other areas and still meet BREEAM "very good". You can score very highly in every other area and not that highly in terms of your carbon use and still get BREEAM "very good". It is not easy to do but it is possible. BREEAM "very good" is very good.

Q699 Mr Marsden: I have to say that the gentleman from Arup who came before us said that "very good" in his view meant just about passable.

Ms Brooks: I am sorry, the BREEAM approach ----

Q700 Mr Marsden: You used the words "very good".

Ms Brooks: Yes, I should not have used the words "very good". BREEAM is a good approach to an overall evaluation of sustainability across the piece. It is about the level at which you set it. We set it at something like 65 per cent is very good and 75 per cent is excellent. You can ratchet that up to 80 per cent or 90 per cent.

Q701 Mr Marsden: You are saying, basically, that you think the goalposts need to be lifted a bit.

Ms Brooks: But you can lift the goalposts across BREEAM and it still will not necessarily get you carbon neutral or low carbon scores. We will set up something separate which is just about carbon use, which says, "This is a stand-alone expectation that carbon reduction of x per cent" or "Within BREEAM the carbon bit is mandatory and you cannot offset the carbon against the others." I think we are looking at mandatory expectations around reductions in carbon emissions.

Mr Byles: I think BREEAM is a very helpful starting point but you do have to look at an assessment in the context of a particular site you are talking about. It would be a very difficult world if you had no objective measure to set, but, as Sally has said, the characteristics of a site can influence very significantly the scoring that can be achieved.

Q702 Mr Marsden: Sally, you say you are doing a review. How quickly will you come up with conclusions from that review? How quickly will they be incorporated into the next wave?

Ms Brooks: We are looking at the moment at technically the ability to reach certain reductions in carbon emissions and the costs of that; that is, how much does it cost to get your 40/50/60/70/80 per cent reduction? It is quite a complicated thing.

Q703 Mr Marsden: That sounds to me like you are saying we are not going to get a revision of BREEAM any time soon but you are saying you are not happy with it at the moment.

Ms Brooks: We do not need to do a revision of BREEAM in order to change our expectations on carbon reductions.

Q704 Mr Marsden: When I asked you earlier, you said you were not happy with BREEAM. I asked, "Are you proposing to revise it?" and you said yes. You are now saying that you are not.

Ms Brooks: No, I am not saying I am not. I am saying that we can revise BREEAM; it may take quite a while to do that; we do not need to wait for that revision in order to say, if ministers so choose, that we want to reduce carbon emissions.

Mr Marsden: I think it would be really helpful if you could come back to the Committee with some written details on progress on that.

Q705 Chairman: Is BREEAM not becoming a bit of a fig leaf, though?

Ms Brooks: Yes.

Q706 Chairman: We are talking about sustainable schools. I was involved in discussing a new academy in Peterborough. The building of the new academy, which I think everyone locally celebrates - I think it is a science and engineering academy - is going to do the most awful things in terms of the transportation of people in Peterborough. If there is not a transport plan built into any new development like this, it is a disaster for sustainability. How far do those broader aspects of sustainability come in when anyone is looking at the sustainability of a school?

Ms Brooks: We have sustainability model which has what we call eight doorways, which include travel, waste and a lot of things outside the remit of BREEAM. In any BSF strategy for change, we expect the local authority will cover those. However, to some extent you have to build schools where the pupils are.

Q707 Chairman: It still does not mean you should not have a transport policy.

Ms Brooks: No, obviously not. We are providing some extra capital to schools to provide sustainable transport plans for them. All schools are going to be expected to have sustainable travel plans.

Q708 Chairman: At your conference earlier this week, on Monday, many local authorities apparently said that when you were thinking about sustainability driving the selection of a preferred bidder by the local authority, it weighed as little as two per cent of the total consideration. What do you say about that?

Ms Brooks: There are two separate issues here.

Q709 Chairman: It worries me that you have these really clever construction companies and they come along and they nudge the local authority and say, "Yeah, we've got to do something about sustainability, but we'll fix that for you."

Ms Brooks: No. The evaluation, design and sustainability is separate from the fact that schools have to meet a certain level. It is a condition of the funding that schools have. All new schools have to meet that BREEAM "very good" level. That is separate. That is already a given. You are not evaluating bidders and saying, "Which of you is going to deliver BREEAM "very good"." It is a given that all those bidders are required to deliver that as part of the funding. It is not evaluating how good they are in that term. They have to do that as a requirement of being a short-listed bidder. They have to already have committed to deliver BREEAM "very good". Within that you can then choose between them, in terms of a lot of things around their design, including sustainability. The balance is up to the local authorities to some extent. We give guidance but the balance is down to them. The bar they all have to cover is BREEAM "very good". If we were to up our requirements on carbon neutral schools/low carbon schools, that would be a bar for all of them to jump before they were short-listed.

Q710 Mr Marsden: Will there be any penalties on local education plans that do not achieve key performance indicators? We are told all the time about PFI contractors who promise various things and then do not deliver and they are fined. Will you be able to penalise an LEP if it does not work, in practice?

Mr Lipson: Perhaps I could help here. The contract between the local authority and the LEP when it is set up does include key performance indicators of that kind. The LEP is paid by performance. If it fails to deliver some of these KPIs, like educational transformation and sustainability indicators, it will get paid less. There is a serious incentive in there for the LEP to recognise these important issues and to deliver them.

Q711 Chairman: We must move on. I would like to talk a little bit about user participation. On one of our school visits they said they had heard they were in the next wave of Building Schools for the Future and they were not able to have the time to consult with the users. This Committee has a lot of experience of visiting schools and it is our belief - it may be prejudicial but it may be based on visiting an awful lot of schools - that where you build a new school and you consult the students, the staff, the dinner ladies, everyone involved in that school, it ends up as a better school than a non-consulted school. Why is it that the school we visited said, "We don't have time for that"?

Ms Brooks: I do not know the answer to that. A local authority will have 12 months, whilst it is drawing up all its plans and proposals, where it is required, as part of its strategy for change, to consult schools. Once it knows where it is and the wave it is in and it is moving forward, it has every opportunity - there is plenty of time - to consult the schools and their users. I cannot say - not knowing the individual situation - why that happened. I can say that we are working with organisations like the Sorrell Foundation to set up a centre where every school in BSF can bring its pupils in to talk through how they want to design their school. We are supporting a lot of organisations that work with the users and we are offering all that to local authorities and to individual schools and we are funding the NCSL to work with head teachers and school leadership teams. Part of what they will be saying very clearly is that, in order to get the best possible school, you must consult your users. We have all the right processes in place, the right time scales.

Q712 Chairman: There is a worry, is there not? The research shows that a head will be involved in probably only one new school development in their professional career.

Ms Brooks: Yes.

Q713 Chairman: Although there is no BSF school you can visit yet, there are academies you can visit to get some experience of a new-build school that is attempting to be more sustainable. What facilities are offered to allow people to go to schools where there seems to have been a sustainability element?

Mr Lipson: In working with the local authorities that are procuring these projects, we always encourage them, at officer and member level, and school governors and head teachers to organise visits to recently completed schools, both good and bad, so they can see for themselves how this works. There are lots of visits that are going on and there are many schools that are running tours for this reason, because they are very popular venues for showing off ideas.

Q714 Chairman: Is there a cross-fertilisation? BSF is being informed.

Ms Brooks: Yes.

Mr Lipson: There is a great deal of it. We have just established the regional network groups for the local authorities in the Building Schools for the Future programme, where they are now going to start sharing lots of best practice. That will help the programme a great deal.

Q715 Chairman: Let us try to nail one thing that does worry me. I have always had a great prejudice when someone says "This is an off-the-shelf design." I am not sure about that any longer. The more we have listened to evidence, I would rather have a package that made sense environmentally in terms of sustainability than have a jumble of buildings all individually. Actually, I would like a synthesis of the two. Where are you in terms of how the Department sees it? Do you see each individual school having Richard Rogers or someone designing it or do you see it off-the-shelf?

Ms Brooks: We are at petty much the same place as you. I will tell you one thing: if we knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that we had a design that was right, then we might be tempted to roll that out, but I think that is what they thought in the 1960s and they were wrong. I do not think any of us would be arrogant enough to say, "We've got a way of building and designing that is right."

Q716 Mr Marsden: It did not bother the Victorians.

Ms Brooks: No, and funnily enough they probably got the nearest to being right.

Q717 Chairman: We have the Victorians over here but we have Tesco over here. I hope you are not having any discussion with Tesco's architects.

Ms Brooks: We are certainly not, no. In practical terms, if you went to a head teacher, who had a one and only chance to design their school, and said "You cannot design it, we've got an off-the-shelf design".... One of the early issues when I arrived, when we had exemplar designs, was that at every conference I went to and in every conversation I had with local government in schools they were saying, "We do not want you imposing designs on us." We were never proposing to impose designs. They were, as we said, exemplars. I do not think you would ever, even if you wanted to, get through an individual head teacher's passion about how they wanted their school to be. We are not proposing to do that. There are two areas where we are looking for some movement and one is around basic principles. For example, if you are designing public spaces to be used by the community, they should be accessible by the community easily. We want some fairly basic principles which say, "Put your ICT areas, your drama, your sports facilities where the community can get in and use them easily". So on simple basic principles I think we are looking for standardisation, but I think it is about components really. Every head teacher will want to design their classrooms and their social spaces but they will not necessarily want to design their toilets and they certainly will not want to design their door handles and their components.

Q718 Chairman: Who will not want to design their toilets?

Ms Brooks: Head teachers do not necessarily want to design their own toilets. They just want good toilets, that work, that do not get broken, where people do not get bullied.

Q719 Chairman: Our experience is that the toilets are almost the most important thing in the school.

Ms Brooks: They are the most important thing in the school. I know you know about Joined-up Design for Schools, but we have been talking to Joined-up Design for Schools in terms of: if you could get a toilet block that was designed to work, that we knew - because we had done a lot of them - did work, did not get trashed, was very robust, yet at the same time did not feel like it was a high security area but was one where people did not get bullied, head teachers would love it and would not want to design their own. They would say, "Thank you very much. Let's bolt it onto the building." It is about what works and what does not. Components work - and PsF and our design people are doing some work on that. Elements work - but I do not think we would be looking for the whole thing to work in that way.

Mr Lipson: There is a connection between your previous question and this one in my mind. To get a really successful school, you have to have ownership at the most local level by the governors and the head and the school community. Their involvement in the design is very critical. If they were handed a standard school, they would not be involved. They would not feel they needed to own it; it would not be their project. So there is something about individualising schools at the most local level that is very important for their success.

Q720 Mr Carswell: Going back to a point I raised earlier, you say that, but then you have prescriptive standards and an assumption that there are certain things that head teachers are going to want to buy in. What are you leaving local people to decide? The colour of the classroom paints?

Mr Lipson: No, these things are not at odds at all. The standards they have to meet, as Sally said earlier, have built within them a great deal of flexibility as to how designers respond.

Q721 Mr Carswell: Top-down prescribed flexibility.

Mr Lipson: No, I think it ought to be bottom-up, bearing in mind a whole set of standards.

Q722 Mr Marsden: This Committee is just completing an inquiry on citizenship education and it occurs to me that a good role for school children might be to be well involved in their schools. But, given that you are looking at extended schools, the broader use of schools and that, what are you doing to involve the broader local community - you know, the area forums and maybe the FE college up the road - in that process of designing that school? Because that school is not just going to be used by the teachers and the children, is it?

Ms Brooks: No. When we look at a local authority's strategy for change, we expect, as part of that, for them to tell us what they have done to consult the wider community: the local people, the users out of hours, the FE community. It is an expectation that, unless they have done that, their strategy for change will not be passed.

Q723 Mr Marsden: You will be able to monitor that, will you?

Ms Brooks: Yes.

Q724 Mr Marsden: Fine. We have been told that there is no funding made available to subsidise the efforts which are required to plan, develop and manage the delivery of the capital programme. Is that correct?

Mr Lipson: Are you referring to the procurement costs that the authority incurs in getting the project?

Q725 Mr Marsden: That is my understanding, yes.

Mr Lipson: There is a small amount of support that Tim's organisation makes available to local authorities to help with the cost of employing a project manager.

Q726 Mr Marsden: Is it enough?

Mr Lipson: It is not the whole of the cost of that one individual, and the rest of the cost of the large team does fall to the authority.

Q727 Mr Marsden: What percentage of it would be covered in a typical local authority?

Mr Lipson: By the PfS grant? Less than 10 per cent, I should think.

Q728 Mr Marsden: It is a token rather than a solution. If that is the case, Sally, given that we have already talked about the problems with the lack of expertise, would it not make sense for the Department to be looking to up that proportion slightly?

Ms Brooks: We would expect an average procurement cost on a £200 million project to be 1 to 1.5 to 2 per cent and we would expect the local authority to fund that. The local authority do have access to other funds.

Q729 Mr Marsden: We all know that if you do not prescribe something, the local authorities, given the other pressures on them, tend to drop out by the back door. Are we not going to run the risk that we are going to have these major procurement policies taken forward with a very small amount of input into planning and development?

Ms Brooks: I do not know. I am sure Tim would like to answer this, but evidence suggests it is not a lack of willingness on the part of the local authority to appoint people; it is lack of capacity. There are just not enough good people around. Local authorities are very prepared now to pay quite a lot of money but they just cannot get the people. It is not that they are not prepared to pay.

Q730 Mr Marsden: Tim, are you worried about this? You are partially the motivator.

Mr Byles: Part of wanting to be clear about the resources that are required, to set that out clearly between the local authority and ourselves through the memorandum of understanding that I mentioned, is about committing who is going to commit what resources to make this occur. Although there are problems in the process, we do apply additional resources in order to try to make sure ----

Q731 Mr Marsden: You have the ability.

Mr Byles: We do have the ability to do so. We do not routinely say, "Tell us you have a problem and we will give you some extra money," but, if there is an issue, we have on several occasions over the last five weeks looked at providing some additional resource to make sure that it is adequately dealt with. But that should not take away from the joint responsibility to resource this process adequately, set at the beginning of the process.

Q732 Mr Marsden: Martin, can I ask you briefly about the 4ps expert client programme which is referred to in the DfES memo. I wonder if you could tell me, first of all, how many authorities and schools have taken advantage of this. If it is proving to be successful, is there a danger that you will not have enough capacity to deal with it?

Mr Lipson: I think we have supported 32 of the 39 authorities in waves 1 to 3. We have supported all the authorities that are hoping to come into the programme in the next three waves that are new to the programme. It is a large number of authorities we are trying to support with a modest sized team.

Q733 Mr Marsden: That underlines my second question, does it not?

Mr Lipson: We are reaching the point where we are going to have to look very carefully at how we apply our resources to supporting the authorities that need us most. It does mean that some authorities that could benefit from this sort of continuing help right through the procurement stage may get less, but on a programme of this scale we have to face the realities of the kind of support that can be offered and it is not limitless.

Q734 Mr Marsden: I appreciate you have to ration things, but how are you going to make sure that the people who get left out are not the people who most need it as opposed to those who are best at lobbying for it?

Mr Lipson: I think that is because we have got to know the authorities pretty well. We have been part of the process that you have heard described of Readiness to Deliver, so I think we can identify the authorities that really have been able to assemble high quality teams, that have their governance arrangements in place, that understand about best practice. We can afford to keep them at arm's length and just touch base occasionally to make sure that they are in touch with best practice. We will apply our resources to those we know are not in that category.

Mr Byles: We are also taking an assessment through the process of procurement. If there is a need for resource, we identify it through that. We are not just taking a snap shot at the beginning of the process. One of the important things about this way forward and following is that, where we have authorities that are ready to deliver, we are going to be using the local government community itself to share best practice and to help the sector generally through the boosted capacity in the sector for those who are already engaged in the process. So it is not just something that specialist organisations are going to be doing. We want to engage and local government itself is very keen to do this.

Q735 Mr Marsden: This is an issue for Sally. There need to be the structures there to facilitate that because my experience is that local government sometimes is good at that but sometimes they need a bit of a shove.

Mr Byles: That is why we are taking the assessment through the process.

Ms Brooks: I am sorry, I did not hear what you said.

Q736 Mr Marsden: It is my experience, that, although there is often a willingness in local government to exchange best practice, they do need to be given a little bit of infrastructure support and occasionally a little bit of a shove to do it.

Ms Brooks: Yes. In the conferences, meetings and events that we run, and the one we are doing for the wave 4 launch in January, we make sure that we get the local authorities that are experienced to talk to the new ones coming in because that is how local authorities are most likely to learn. They will listen to each other more than they will listen to me - quite rightly.

Q737 Chairman: We are getting some very valuable information here, but when we touch on capacity you are at your most defensive. Every time we talk about the highly skilled professionals that you need, both at local level and at national level, it seems to me there is a concern and worry that you are expressing.

Ms Brooks: Yes.

Q738 Chairman: If that is the case, should the Building Schools for the Future programme be slowed down? Why gallop towards it if there is going to be this problem? Surely it is always better to invest in public sector building when the private sector is languishing. Perhaps we should all wait for a downturn in the housing market. Do you get my drift?

Ms Brooks: Yes, I think you are right to say - and I hope we are not being defensive - that it is our biggest concern. Probably all three of us would agree that our biggest concern is that the capacity, the skills and the experience is a limited pool. That said, I do not think if you said to any local authority coming into BSF, "We would like to slow you down, we are going to slow the process down," they would be very happy about it. A 15-year (at the very least) programme is quite a long programme for those at the end of it, and for us to say we are going to slow it down further would slightly jeopardise confidence in BSF. We have worked hard with the private sector to gain confidence, and with local governments later on in the process to gain their confidence to make them believe that it is coming eventually, and if we started to slow it down and say it is not working properly, it would not help the process of BSF rolling through with the private sector with the existing local government.

Q739 Chairman: Is there a natural slowdown process in it anyway in that you have already got lags in it because the planning takes time and all that takes longer than you will ever think?

Ms Brooks: Yes.

Mr Byles: It does take time but I would not want the Committee to get the impression that this is a show-stopping area of major concern. It is an issue which we think is significant and needs to be properly managed through time. In terms of our overall confidence levels on the deliverability of this programme, that is increasing. It is not getting worse, it is getting better. This is a key issue, however, that needs to be got right through time and we are applying resources in order to deliver that. I think it is important to understand the balance of the point.

Chairman: I want to deal very briefly before we finish - and we have had a long and good session - with something about the primary capital programme.

Q740 Mr Carswell: Why are local authorities being given this when we know that they are already stretched to deliver on BSF and why are they using a different framework and approach? Surely that is just going to create more bureaucracy and make it more difficult for them?

Ms Brooks: The primary programme is going to all local authorities so most of them will not be stretched on BSF because they are not actually in BSF yet. The thinking, as I outlined earlier, was that we started with repairs and maintenance and we got targets and now we are doing a strategic secondary level. The next step is really to do a strategic primary programme. The primary programme is about looking strategically at your primary estate and applying the same approach as BSF but not in such an intense way. So it is saying look at what you are doing with the secondary schools estate; look at what we have said about re-thinking where your schools are, what size they are, who delivers them, whether they are in the right, place whether you have got extended schools. It is being rolled out quite slowly and it is not a lumpy programme so it does not go as £150 million to a few local authorities every year. It is a slow burn, if you like and local authorities have got three years to plan for it. It comes in in 2009-10 - and I am sure my colleagues will tell me if I am wrong - and it is several million a year. To most local authorities it is not a big project that they need to mobilise very skilled procurement people for. It more or less fits in with what they are doing already in their primary programme. It fits in with the existing framework. Most local authorities have existing frameworks for design and build and doing the work. It is basically taking what they are already doing in their primary programme and building on that, making it more strategic, and making it match to some extent the strategic approach of BSF, but without having that big lumpy "it is coming into town and everything has to be thrown into it." This is a slower approach.

Q741 Chairman: I was worried when you said it is a different programme with different authorities because surely you will be targeting similar authorities because the criterion will be that those schools in the primary sector in more challenging circumstances will be prioritised?

Ms Brooks: Within a local authority we would expect them to reflect that in their strategic programme but no, we are rolling it out across all 150 local authorities every year. It is not like BSF in that it is not a small number each year focused on deprivation and standards. It is rolled out across all of them.

Mr Lipson: The authorities that are already in the BSF programme have been thinking about their primary estate and their primary transformation as well. You cannot actually plan the secondary sector without thinking about what is happening to the primary sector. To an extent, this is simply recognising what is already happening in many authorities and providing them with some additional funds to address some of the issues there.

Q742 Chairman: Is it not a bit murky as to where the money is coming from? The evidence we have got suggests that the DfES is not going to provide all the capital funding; it is going to come from other departments. Which other departments and how much?

Ms Brooks: I do not recognise that. What we are saying is that we are giving another £0.5 billion a year. We expect local authorities to match their own funding to that.

Q743 Chairman: I have got here the DfES says, "It will be essential that authorities use capital from other sources - other government departments, local government and the private sector - in order to create the greatest impact." That is what I am referring to.

Ms Brooks: What we are saying is that we are going to give an extra £0.5 billion a year to this programme. We already give local authorities and schools between them about £2-£2.5 billion a year in devolved capital, which so far they have been using on repairs and maintenance. They have done ten years of repairs and maintenance so we are expecting them to put some of that capital into the more strategic programme. We are expecting them to use their Surestart capital to be more strategic and we are expecting them to join up with other funds that they get around sports, health centres and so on, to have a truly strategic approach. That is what we mean by that. You cannot look at the £0.5 billion in isolation. They have already got a lot of other money that we expect them to put into it.

Q744 Chairman: As I heard you talking I have been making note of all the different people that will impinge on Building Schools for the Future, there is not just the National Strategy but the School Improvement Partners, the Training Development Agency, the National College for School Leadership, let alone our friends in the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust. They all have purchase on this, do they not?

Ms Brooks: Yes.

Q745 Chairman: How do you balance all this cacophony of sound and pressure?

Ms Brooks: With some difficulty.

Q746 Chairman: Where do you try and do it?

Ms Brooks: We do a lot of it within the Department, and with the BSF education advisers particularly. We have got all these people in the DfES dealing with such a wide range of different issues all of which BSF has got to address. Within the Department we try to channel those to get them together through our work and, as I said, then we work with the BSF education people so there is a good crossover there. We send the BSF education people out to the local authorities to distil the information that we have all got together and the requirements and expectations. You are absolutely right, they are very complex, and because BSF is transformational it does have to hit all those things. Within the Department we have to keep all these balls in the air and make sure that my team and schools capital is talking to everybody, and is ensuring that our strategic approach to BSF covers all those areas.

Q747 Chairman: What would you say if I said towards the end of listening to your very good responses there were two concerns that seemed to me to keep coming out of this session. First is the bit that sustainability is being squeezed between getting this programme up and running, getting the construction, building the partnership and sustainability, and it really seems to be a bit squeezed here. Would you say that that would be fair?

Ms Brooks: No.

Mr Byles: No.

Q748 Chairman: No?

Ms Brooks: No, I do not think so.

Q749 Chairman: It comes through from some of your responses when we pushed you on, "Okay, what about the early ones seeming less sustainable than you thought?"

Ms Brooks: I think everything is on an upward curve. One thing about BSF is that we are constantly trying to balance transformational change on every aspect of what it is delivering with meeting a programme, so I do not think anything in particular is being squeezed. I think there is always a flex between how transformational you want to be - whether it is in extended schools, whether it is in ITC, whether it is in sustainability - and how long that takes. I do not think anything is being particularly squeezed more than anything else. There is always a tension, there is always a compromise between we could sit here forever and get it perfect but we have got to drive the programme forward. I think that is both the challenge and also the fascination of it.

Chairman: Okay, that was the squeeze. The other bit was were you fully engaged with the other bit of sustainability, what was going in that classroom in the 21st century? Were you pulling that? You did say yes, we are having that engagement, we are doing that. That is not a question; I will leave it in your minds. It has been a very good session and thank you for your attendance. There were two or three things that came up where we would like a written response. Thank you very much.