At the recent ISBL National Conference, Surveyors to Education Directors, Martin Hier and Roy Pett joined up with Chris Everard, Operations and Finance Director of The Wensum Trust to lead an interactive workshop titled, ‘Rethinking & challenging the development of capital funding.’

The evolution of capital funding

Martin began the workshop by giving a background overview of how school capital funding has evolved since 2008, from a time when local authorities were in full control to today where funds are increasingly allocated directly by the DfE to academies and multi-academy trusts.

Today, condition funding is split predominantly into three pots, the Condition Improvement Fund (CIF) and the School Condition Allocation (SCA) for MATs and the SCA for LA’s.

As the slide below shows, whilst CIF funding has remained relatively constant over time, SCA funding for LA’s has steadily declined, whilst SCA funding for MATs has grown rapidly, reflecting successive governments’ desire for schools to become academies and for academies to become part of MATs.

However, the actual amount of condition funding available hasn’t increased beyond inflation and has just been ‘recycled’ from the Devolved Formula Capital (DFC) Fund that serves LA controlled maintained schools to the CIF and SCA funds that service academies.

The shift in funding responsibility from LA’s to academies has led to the raised profile and importance of the Trust Estate Manager role and the need to manage school estates according to the principles set out in the Good Estate Management for Schools (GEMS) guidance.

However, as Martin explained planning for capital funding remains a significant challenge (a) for LA schools because funding still is allocated centrally (b) for CIF academies because they don’t know whether their bid will be successful and (c) for SCA MATs because whilst they have been given the funding they might not necessarily know how to prioritise an allocate the spend.

Managing capital allocations

Roy Pett then led the second session of the workshop which aimed to examine in more depth how those SCA Trusts that do have the opportunity to plan their estate spending go about it.

Despite there being clear guidance as to how it should be spent in he 2021 Condition Grants Spend Guidance, the allocation of SCA funding can be contentious and can depend on who you are talking to! Methodologies vary across Trusts either concentrating on condition or on educational or capacity requirements. S2e have also seen bids submitted by individual headteachers.

The question posed by Roy was – is there a right way?

The Wensum Trust has been part of the ESFA Capital Advisors Pilot Study to review how estates capital is spent and so Roy handed over to Chris Everard to take everyone through the Wensum approach.

Estate management at the Wensum Trust

Chris introduced The Wensum Trust, comprising 8 primary and 3 secondary schools which last year received £840 in SCA funding. The estate strategy covers the next 10 years and is closely aligned with the overall strategic objectives of the trust which in turn are closely connected to the educational needs within each of the schools.

Projects are prioritised based on condition data using both the historical CDC reports but also recent condition survey data collected within a two month timeframe. At Wensum because SCA is centred around condition improvement, decision making is centralised and headteachers don’t get involved. The Estate Manager puts the prioritised plan together based on the condition data and that is then shared with the leadership of the Trust, approved and signed off by the Board of Trustees on an annual basis.

Educational requirements are incorporated into the plans so that as part of condition improvements, areas of focus such as SEN or improved sports hubs have been developed.

Similarly with sustainability, these are not treated as a separate item but are incorporated into planned improvements, for example installing solar panels when making roof replacements and installing LED bulbs and intelligent lighting systems. The Wensum Trust has also just completed a feasibility study of all their heaters and boilers as they move away from traditional gas and oil heating systems to ground and air source heat pumps.

As Chris pointed out, SCA on its own would not provide enough funding to finance all of the projects on the estate plan and therefore they have actively incorporated other source of additional funding. DFC funding supports IT infrastructure replacement and the Trust has also bid for the Public Sector Decarbonisation Scheme (PSDS), Sport England funding and funding via the Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL). School revenue budgets, sitting outside of SCA, cover the annual ongoing maintenance, repair and decoration programme to keep the appearance of the schools to a high standard.

Finally, Chris explained how the Trust’s reserves policy provided funding for headteachers to bid for projects that would enhance the educational experience of their pupils and stressed how important it was to work with external professional advisors to guide, manage tenders and project manage work to make sure the Trust received good value for money and timely project completion.

The Capital Advisors Pilot Study has strongly endorsed The Wensum Trust’s approach, namely:

1. Basing prioritising work based on condition

2. Carrying out up to date condition surveys

3. Centralising decision making

4. Using external professionals to guide and project manage

The changing landscape of capital funding – challenging the School Building Programme

Martin then ended the workshop by looking at how capital funding might change in the future, focussing in particular on the new £50bn School Building Programme (SBP).

The SBP should be affecting everyone but in reality the new funding will only impact 500 schools, or 2.3% of the total over a 13-year period. As Martin pointed out – this doesn’t seem fair!

The first wave of SBP prioritisation has been based via the very high-level and arguably inadequate CDC reports. However, we know that 70% of schools were built in the 1960s/70s and are therefore are in a similar state of repair and therefore one can assume that far more than 2.3% of schools are in need of some form of replacement or rebuilding.

The question remains then as to what happens to the 97.7% of schools who won’t benefit from the SBP.? They will have to rely on SCA or CIF money as well as other available funding such as Section 106, CIL, Basic Needs, lettings and some of the other funds already mentioned.

Martin suggested an alternative approach whereby instead of a £3’5m whole school replacement’ program, the emphasis was placed on £1-10m block replacement which was arguably a much bigger need and a much wiser investment. With the same funding, such a scheme could affect 600 schools a year, 6,000 schools over 11 years, comprising a much better 27% of all schools.

If you require any further information please contact us on  01530 877969or email enquire@s2e.org.uk.