Fears for schools in need of £200m repairs

Mounting repair bills are building up at dozens of secondary schools which had been expected to be replaced or refurbished until the Government axed more than 1bn of rebuilding schemes in Yorkshire.

A leading councillor has warned the condition of many of these schools has got worse because maintenance work has not been carried out at buildings which were set to be demolished.

Local education authorities expect to find out next month if their projects will be the first under the new Government to receive cash backing after Ministers announced capital spending on schools would be cut by 60 per cent over the next five years.

The decision to scrap the 55bn Buildings Schools for the Future (BSF) programme hit 11 councils in the region. Six authorities, including Bradford, Doncaster, Kirklees, and North East Lincolnshire, had money withdrawn for rebuilding projects already approved while five more councils missed out on the chance to bid for future funding.

Leeds which has already received 260m BSF funding was hoping to get 300m more to complete refurbishment of its secondary schools while Calderdale, the East Riding, North Yorkshire and York were on a waiting list to join the national rebuilding programme.

Now education bosses around the region are warning cuts to the capital budget will mean councils are forced to waste millions of pounds repairing buildings already past their intended life span.

Bradford has a maintenance backlog across its schools of 55m while the figure in North Yorkshire is 81m. Calderdale schools will cost 28.4m to repair while in Doncaster the repair bill stands at 25m. North East Lincolnshire has identified 7.5m of maintenance work needed at schools it had planned to refurbish with BSF money. Bradford Council is also facing a shortage of school places, and its BSF plans had included the expansion of 10 secondary schools, to create around 3,000 more places.

A report to Bradford's executive meeting on Friday warns it will need to create new schools to meet the demand for more than 40,000 extra places by 2020. Most of the secondary schools had an initial lifespan of 25 years and in all instances, have outlived it at least one and half times.

Coun Ralph Berry, Bradford Council's Labour executive member for Children and Young People's Services said: "It is unacceptable for these repairs to be coming out of schools budgets. We have schools containing asbestos materials cheek by jowl with schools which have been completely redeveloped with modern buildings."

A DfE spokesman said: "We are targeting capital investment at schools in the most need of refurbishment and to make sure it best meets rising demand for primary places despite the very tight public finances. The taxpayer rightly expects value for money – that's why we're stripping out waste and unnecessary costs from the school building programme to make funding for ongoing BSF, academy and sample projects go far further."

FREE SCHOOLS TO OPEN IN CITY

An organisation in Bradford has been given approval to set up a new "free school".

Called the Rainbow School, its backers hope it will open from September 2011.

The plans are supported by Asian Trade Link, a Yorkshire-based group that seeks to encourage business and training opportunities for minority communities.

Ayub Ismail, director of operations, said the group had not yet been told officially of the decision but the news was "fantastic".