Act now for School Rebuilding Programme funding

February 21, 2022 Adam Richards

The deadline to apply for the latest round of School Rebuilding Programme (SRP) funding for schools with major rebuild or refurbishment needs is 31 March 2022.

Up to 300 schools and sixth form colleges across England will be awarded funding in 2022 - 2023, with buildings prioritised according to their condition.

Criteria for selection

After the Department for Education (DfE) carried out a consultation as to how places in the programme should be allocated, it has announced that it will use the following criteria:

Priority will go to schools and colleges with structural and safety issues that would force a building to close imminently. Schools will be judged on intensity (severity) of condition need in buildings, rather than the total amount of condition need across a site. This will ensure the programme does not simply favour larger schools.
Although the SRP will not specifically target buildings of certain ages or of particular construction types, many buildings prioritised for the programme are likely to date from the 1940s to 1970s.
The DfE will consider data and evidence on each project, including evidence of severe need not captured in the Condition Data Collection. This will include evidence of structural issues and other types of safety risk.
Places will not be allocated, at this stage, according to wider school characteristics, including education performance. Instead the focus will be on buildings that are the most likely to need to close imminently, or pose a significant health and safety risk.

While more than half of respondents to the consultation thought the DfE should consider education performance as a factor in decision-making at least to a small extent, condition will remain the primary factor for prioritisation.

High-quality education

The SRP is a ten-year initiative to identify and carry out projects at the schools most in need of major rebuilding or refurbishment, announced by the Prime Minister in June 2020.

There are currently 100 projects in the programme, announced in February and July 2021.

Schools selected will be informed that they have been provisionally allocated a place on the programme, subject to further due diligence, and projects will then enter delivery at a rate of 50 per year.

How to apply

Responsible bodies can nominate schools until 3 March 2022 using the online portal.

They will have an additional four weeks until 31 March to submit supplementary evidence where the need is severe enough to require the school to close imminently and where it can only be resolved through a rebuild.

Completing applications, gathering evidence and presenting the best possible case can be complex and time consuming.

Qualified chartered building surveyors for education, such as Surveyors for Education, can ease the burden with the professional support to help you create an optimum learning environment.