Schools could have an extra £36,000 each on average to spend on buildings if the Department for Education reallocated unspent capital budgets, unions have claimed.
The School Cuts coalition said that the DfE underspent on its planned capital expenditure limit by more than £1 billion in 2022-23 and £900 million in 2021-22.
The underspend ”robs schools of £1.9 billion to spend on crumbling buildings”, the coalition said today.
The coalition - run by the NEU teaching union, the NAHT school leaders’ union and the Association of School and College Leaders - said if the 2022-23 underspend was redistributed to schools via the devolved formula capital (DFC) route, it would generate thousands for schools.
The analysis found that the average state-funded school would get £36,410 extra in capital funding from this.
Broken down by phase, the average primary would get £27,119 and the average secondary £81,328.
Schools ‘in desperate need’
Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the NAHT, said: “Parents, leaders and teachers will be baffled by the department’s inability to spend in full even the limited schools capital budget allocated to them by Treasury, at a time when schools are so clearly in desperate need of funds to carry out essential repairs and maintenance.
“This nonsensical decision will leave children learning in crumbling classrooms with damp, mould and broken boilers.”
DFC is allocated to individual schools to spend on building and maintenance projects - unlike school condition allocations (SCA), which are allocated to larger bodies.
The School Cuts coalition calculated DFC was worth £573 million in 2010-11 but has since dropped to around £200 million a year in cash terms.
The Treasury gave the DfE a capital departmental expenditure limit (DEL) of £6,365 million for 2022-23. The DfE spent only £5,348 million, leaving £1,017 million unspent.
The department spent £4,717 million in 2021-22, leaving an £898 million underspend from the DEL of £5,615 million that was planned one year ahead.
The School Cuts coalition argues that the unspent money should be kept for capital projects in education rather than returned to the Treasury.
Luke Sibieta, research fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said the DfE’s capital budget underspend in recent years has mostly been driven by “slow starts” to the school and further education rebuilding programmes.
He added: “Allocating these underspends to other things would have required the government to have scaled back its future plans for school and college rebuilding.
“That being said, current plans for capital spending across government for the next Parliament look very tight indeed. So there is also a good argument for spending money while you have it.”
The current average DFC allocation for 2023-24 is £9,790, the School Cuts analysis found.
Daniel Kebede, NEU general secretary, said: “Redistributing this money would make a tremendous difference at a local level, in a way that is tangible to pupils, school staff and communities.”
Schools are best placed to know where the money should be spent, Mr Kebede added.
Condition of the school estate
ASCL general secretary Pepe Di’Iasio said the next government must make sure capital funding for schools is “adequate and delivered to the frontline”.
Last year, a National Audit Office report estimated that 700,000 pupils were learning in buildings requiring major repairs.
Unions have previously told the government that schools need an extra £4.4 billion a year to spend on school buildings.
Standalone academies and small trusts that are not eligible for SCA can also bid for the Condition Improvement Fund for capital works - though the total amount of money available has been falling year on year.
The School Cuts website is supported by ParentKind and the National Governance Association.
The DfE has been contacted for comment.
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