Dilapidated schools wait for decision on rebuildling grants

Bids worth more than £220m were submitted to the Department for Education (DfE) from councils across the region last year for funding under the new Priority School Building Programme (PSBP).

The money will be used to rebuild crumbling schools and provide classroom space for extra places where needed.

The rebuilding projects will be delivered under private finance initiative (PFI) contracts which will be paid off over 27-years.

Schools will only qualify for PSBP cash if their backlog of repairs cost around a third or more of what it would cost to replace the buildings entirely.

Eleven Yorkshire councils have applied for a total of £225m of DfE funding including six education authorities – Bradford, Doncaster, Kirklees, Rotherham, North East Lincolnshire and Wakefield – which lost £1bn on school building projects which already had initial approval when the Building Schools for the Future Programme was scrapped in 2010.

Across the region the applications for PSBP cash cover plans to rebuild or expand more than 40 schools.

Nationally between 100 and 300 are expected to be given the go-ahead. Bradford Council’s bid included plans to create two new secondary schools in a city where 5,000 extra places are expected to be needed in both the primary and secondary sectors over the next four years because of the rising population.

However eight primary schools in the district which have buildings which need replacing decided not to bid for the cash because of the cost of the service charges for cleaning, management and maintenance which will exist in the PFI contracts.

Calderdale Council bid for more than £24m for three schools while Hull has submitted a bid worth £25m. A DfE decision on which bids get funding had been expected in December but is now set to be announced this year.