Education Business

A year further on and the Building School for the Future (BSF) programme is now getting into its stride. At least twelve Pathfinder and First Wave authorities have announced their preferred bidders for Local Education Partnerships (LEPs) since January 2006.

The Amey led consortium, known as Integrated Bradford, was the first preferred bidder announced in January 2006. Behind this bid was a group of established architectural practices known collectively as Education Design Network (EDN). This was a strongly fought bid process with the first group of schools in Bradford committing to a very extensive stakeholder engagement process following ‘School Works’ guidelines.
    
The client is convinced of the benefits such a process brings; saying the improvement in the designs of all the bidding teams was directly related to the quality of that engagement. But this draws attention to one of the main concerns about the BSF process - the level of resource duplication for the client side and the design side. Here consultative workshops were repeated three times, imposing great demands on teaching and learning time, and not achieving that important ‘single conversation with schools’. The challenge for Partnerships for Schools (PfS), the body charged with delivering this vast programme, is to find a way of replicating the outcomes without the resource intensive process.

Local Education Partnerships
The first Local Education Partnership (LEP) to be fully established was not Bradford but Bristol in July 2006. Skanska is the Private Sector Partner, working with Wilkinson Eyre Architects to develop school designs for the first phase of work. The particular characteristic of the LEP involves partnership with the local authority, the Private Sector Partner and PfS, and it will use a mixture of contract forms including PFI, particularly for new build projects, and other traditional forms such as design and build for remodelled solutions.

BSF absorbs Academies
The Government has expanded its ambitions for Academies recently, hoping to double the 200 it plans to complete by 2010. Established through a partnership with business, faith or voluntary groups and the Department for Education and Skills (DfES), this programme of Independent Schools is seen by Ministers as an important part of its strategy to offer diversity of provision and the opportunity to experiment with ways of learning in disadvantaged areas.

It is not surprising that their design and procurement method, now almost ten years old, should be more closely aligned with the bigger BSF programme. PfS have established a framework of six major contractors who will be responsible for all future Academies working with national and regional design teams. Concerns have been raised about the risk of reducing design standards by such a significant shift from bespoke design teams, selected by the principal sponsor, to effectively more of a design and build relationship.

An important part of this move is to link Academies to the Local Education Partnerships being established through BSF. The framework is necessary to account for the different timing of the 10-15 year programme for BSF compared with the way in which Academies are to be delivered; it will, therefore, also be used for the programme of ‘One-School Projects’ set up for those authorities not seeing BSF money before 2011.

Are LEAs prepared for BSF?
There is some evidence that LEAs have got the message about the need to employ a Client Design Advisor to work with the educationalists and individual schools on their vision for a school building in the run up to the BSF bidding process which will help stimulate the transformation process. Unfortunately, there are still too many who are entering the BSF process without completing the visioning process or with inadequate development plans. These authorities are putting enormous pressure on bidders and individual schools as there is simply not enough time to do the visioning and complete the design work needed for a firm bid.

What risks have designers taken to get involved? If the BSF programme is to deliver new and remodelled schools of quality and on time, the capacity of the architectural profession involved must be increased and this will have to include small to medium sized practices as well as the bigger ones already on board. This is starting to happen with smaller firms gathering together in consortiums, such as at Bradford, which are able to offer the capacity of the larger practices.

The attitude to risk will have to change, however, if this process is to continue because the smaller firms are unable to risk the large fees involved in the bidding process. Many of them are prepared to play their part by giving their time freely at the inception of projects and working at cost up to preferred bidder stage but can go no further. There is also evidence that even the larger practices are becoming more risk averse as the increased investment in schools produces alternative projects for them with procurement models which do not involve the same level of risk.

Continuing Professional Development
Can Continuing Professional Development (CPD) help prepare more for education design? Clearly there is a risk that, as many more architects are drawn into the school design programme, experience of school design will be diluted or lost. This is equally a risk with the bigger practices as well as with the medium and smaller size practices.

Many would argue that any talented architect, worth his salt, should be capable of picking up a brief and designing a quality building and that in many ways it is an advantage to be unencumbered by the mistakes of the past. Another view is that the BSF process is so pressurised that newcomers should prepare themselves, with some level of understanding of the education process,  so that they can ‘hit the ground running’ and avoid frustrating clients by their obvious lack of knowledge. This point is currently under discussion between the RIBA and DfES and it is hoped that some form of CPD can be offered to designers, about to be involved with school design for the first time, in the very near future.

How does the design architect view BSF?
With some trepidation it has to be said. Two main factors determine this and they probably don’t include remuneration which is often cut to the margins of viability but probably not by serious bidders in the BSF programme.

The real satisfaction for designers comes from getting close to the user client, understanding the needs, coming up with a solution and seeing it built. Too often consultation is remote, duplicated or non-existent and the competitive process means that only one in three designs are successful and eventually built. How long we can sustain this level of resource in design and the cost to the industry and to the schools sector is debatable. At present it does not look like its abating and frustrations may increase as more authorities bring in design teams to prepare reference schemes or feasibility studies that become part of the output specification for the short listed bidders.

Do conferences help?
There has been a spate of conferences recently aimed at stimulating the BSF programme and some of them have undoubtedly helped to improve communications between the main players and encourage others to take part. All architects have a limited amount of time to attend such events; however, they have many calls on their time and this is yet another overhead. They have to choose very carefully those conferences which will be of direct benefit and can be frustrated when invited to conferences which appear to cover the same ground. It would be good if someone at DfES or PfS could co-ordinate all the BSF conferences to ensure they were all relevant.