Fears voiced over future BSF design quality

Mairi Johnson of CABE

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Concern is growing that the public-private partnership that delivers BSF schools will encourage speed of construction over quality design.

Bristol Brunel Academy by Wilkinson Eyre was the first school to open under BSF

The Michael Tippett School in south London by Marks Barfield is the most recent BSF school to be built and was completed just 21 months from design inception

The government's £45 billion Building Schools for the Future (BSF) procurement process is 'intense, expensive and time-consuming' and to make matters worse, its 'contractors are going to want pay-back'.

So says Capita Architecture director Richard Woods, who is working on BSF schemes in Lancashire and Nottinghamshire. But Woods is not talking about the schools currently being designed – although they have already drawn stinging criticism from CABE. He instead is worried about the schools which will be designed five years from now, once a public-private partnership called the Local Education Partnership (LEP),
is in full flow.

CABE is also concerned about the quality of schools that will be built once a LEP is formed – the partnership created once the contract is signed between the contractor-led consortium and the local authority. The design watchdog believes that these schools could be of worse quality than those already being produced.

CABE's head of enabling Mairi Johnson says: 'In theory the client and supply chain can take as long as they want to deliver schools once the LEP is formed, but the contractors will want to get them up and running as soon as possible to get a return.'

Johnson added that as no schools have been procured and built in the later stages of an LEP, it is an 'unknown world' for local authorities, and so CABE wants to 'revamp' its design-review process to include schools designed later in the process.

'This is when the public sector finds out exactly who they are dealing with. During the bidding time the consortia will do anything to get the bid,' she says. 'Once they no longer have to bend over backwards, they may try to get the schools up as quickly as they can.'

One source working for a major contractor involved in the BSF programme said that the design standards should be set from the initial school designs at the bidding stage.

'CABE should be encouraging the initial schemes to push the design benchmarks,' he says. 'The cost is benchmarked from the original scheme.'

One architect working on a BSF school who refused to be named said there is also the danger of contractors and architects using their best people during the bidding process only.

'Most of the time the "A Team" will win the bid, then the "B Team" will be brought in to actually work on the project,' he says. 'It's one of the brutal commercial realities.'

However, Partnership for Schools (PfS), the agency charged with the task of delivering the BSF programme, says it has the checks in place to ensure quality schools will be delivered.

A PfS spokeswoman said: 'All LEPs are required to deliver 'continuous improvement' year on year, and this includes design quality in all BSF schools. Improvement is measured by a series of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and in the case of design, based on the Design Quality Indicators (DQI) for schools.'

According to the Construction Industry Council, DQIs are effectively a tool kit and can easily be customised by the client to achieve their desired preferences.

But Woods believes that although the DQIs are the best LEPs can hope for, they are 'unlikely' to ensure good BSF design.

'This is a really important issue for BSF,' he says. 'Having the DQI tools is not a guarantor for good design. A bad school can do well with DQIs as it draws on human perspective.'

Bristol City Council helped draw up the LEP process as it acted as a pathfinder on the first wave of the BSF programme, and it believes the measures are robust enough.

Bristol Council's BSF client manager Bob Rutherford says: 'While I can understand CABE's concerns, we believe the KPIs and DQIs should work, but they haven't been put to the test yet.

'A local authority can help itself by making sure they have a design champion to give advice, as well as using the DQI tools.'

He adds: 'There is an assumption that LEPs are totally commercial, but we don't believe that to be the case. Those involved in LEPs want to build well-designed schools.'