Todmorden and Calder High Schools — House of Commons, 2015-03-09
Topic: Education
David Anthony Laws (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Calder Valley (Craig Whittaker) on securing this important debate. I understand how important this matter is to him, and I recognise that he is and has been a strong advocate for the schools in his constituency It clearly is not right for pupils and teachers to work in buildings in a poor condition where learning is disrupted and staff time is diverted from the necessary focus on teaching. High quality school buildings send out an important signal to young people and to those who teach in schools about the importance that we place on education. It can also help to raise the aspirations of many young people, in particular those from disadvantaged backgrounds, if they are educated in appropriate settings. Investment in the school estate is one of this Government’s highest priorities, and it is our aim that every child will have a good quality school place in buildings that are safe and fit for purpose Over this Parliament the Government have spent some £18 billion on school buildings. This year we allocated a total of £1.4 billion to help improve and maintain the condition of school buildings, and have recently announced a further £4.2 billion in school condition funding up to 2017-18. This is in addition to the major investments in the Priority School Building programme, and the announcement of a second phase of that programme. Since 2011, we have also invested £5 billion in the creation of new school places in response to need, and we recently announced a further £1.3 billion in basic need funding for 2017-18 for new school places The Priority School Building programme aims to rebuild or refurbish those schools or individual school buildings in the very worst condition. I entirely agree with my hon. Friend that we should prioritise on the basis of need, not on the basis of deprivation, attainment or other factors that were considered by previous Governments. Through the first phase of PSBP, 260 schools are being rebuilt or will have their condition needs met. We are now actively engaged with all 260 schools in the programme—19 are already open in new buildings, 82 construction contracts have been signed, and the other schools are all in various stages of design and development. We are still aiming for all schools to be open in their new buildings by the end of 2017, two years earlier than originally planned In May 2014, as my hon. Friend indicated, we launched a second phase of the Priority School Building programme—PSBP2—a £2 billion programme between 2015 and 2021 to undertake rebuilding and refurbishment projects in schools with buildings in the very worst condition. While the first phase of the programme worked on the basis of the condition of the whole school site, through PSBP2 the Department has refined the approach to target individual school buildings as well as whole-school rebuilds where appropriate. That is for the good reason, as I am sure he will understand, that some schools have a large number of buildings, some of which are in a very good state and some of which are in an absolutely terrible state. It is not reasonable to overlook buildings in a very bad state simply because of the state of some of the school’s other buildings. This allows limited funding to be focused much more tightly on addressing specific issues in a school estate That approach has been made possible by the introduction of the property data survey programme—the most comprehensive survey of the school estate ever undertaken—which has provided information on the condition of individual school buildings. It has sought to do so—I emphasise this for my hon. Friend—in a way that is consistent across the country so that we do not rely on surveys that have been undertaken in very different ways by different local authorities and responsible bodies, on the basis of which it would not be possible to allocate money from central Government because we would not know whether there was consistency across the country.