Schools have discovered today whether they have been able to secure a share of £456 million in government funding for buildings with the most “pressing need” of repair.
The Department for Education has announced the latest recipients of its Condition Improvement Fund (CIF) for school repairs and refurbishment in 2023-24.
The CIF funding is available to around 4,500 academies, sixth-form colleges and voluntary-aided schools, but they need to bid for the cash.
For 2023-24, there were 2,076 eligible schools, academies and colleges that applied for 3,061 projects in total, including fire safety improvements, urgent roof repairs and electrical works.
But only a third of these projects will receive funding, it has been announced today, amounting to 1,033 projects across 859 schools, academies and colleges.
And the total funding amounts to £42 million less than was given out than last year, the figures show.
Meanwhile, headteachers’ union leaders have warned that the current DfE spending on maintaining the school estate is “woefully short”.
Tables published today show there has been a 26 per cent reduction in the number of projects getting support from the CIF for 2023-24.
This year, the department has published a list of 1,033 successful bids. This is 375 fewer than in 2022-23, when 1,408 separate works were given the green light.
And in each of the two previous years, the number of projects getting the go-ahead also exceeded 1,400.
Regional divide
Data published by the department reveals differences in the proportion of successful bids in each government region.
The North West was the only region of England where more than half of the applications for the CIF were successful - at 51.4 per cent.
In contrast, the North East had the highest rejection rates, with only 26.7 per cent of applications being approved.
This was followed by the South West, where 28.5 per cent were successful, and London, where 36 per cent have been given the go-ahead.
Minister for the school system Baroness Diana Barran said: “It’s hugely important that every school has access to high-quality learning facilities and these funding allocations will make sure that responsible bodies can start to plan ahead and get projects started to replace roofs, boilers and windows - so pupils and teachers can learn and work in a comfortable space.”
The government says it has now invested more than £15 billion in upgrading buildings since 2015.
‘Vulnerable’ schools ‘disadvantaged’
But headteacher union leaders have said more funding is needed.
Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: “This is money allocated through an annual bidding programme to address significant needs in terms of the condition of school and college buildings and is most certainly not an example of government largesse.
“It is the bare minimum and nowhere near enough to meet the cost of remedial work to repair or replace all defective elements in the school estate in England - which at the last count stood at £11.4 billion.”
The prospect of school buildings collapsing has been flagged as a “worsening” risk by the Department for Education in its annual report, published in December.
And the risk was deemed “unlikely to reduce in 2022 as there was no agreement to increase condition funding or the scale of the rebuilding programme”.
Responding to today’s CIF funding announcement, Paul Whiteman, general secretary of school leaders’ union the NAHT, said: “Funding for the school estate has been cut dramatically over the last decade and the government has itself admitted that the risk of collapse in some school buildings is now very likely.
“Current levels of funding fall woefully short of what is needed to address these worrying risks and ministers need to acknowledge this and show far greater ambition than this kind of ‘business as usual’ announcement, which is not new money and was previously announced in the spring Budget.
“What is needed is a massively expanded programme of investment in maintenance, repair and replacement of school buildings.”
A Tes investigation earlier this year found that academy trusts were 85 per cent more likely to win government CIF funding if they were able to stump up large sums themselves.
Experts warned that the findings illustrate how “vulnerable” schools are “disadvantaged” by the bidding process for the CIF, which pays for work such as boiler replacements and roof repairs.
