Building our future

Scotland’s School Estate
 

Joint Scottish Executive and COSLA document.
February 2003

A clearly written well structured document setting out the reasons for the review, the objectives, strategy and how it is expected to be implemented and measured.

The objective is to raise and maintain the quality of the school estate after years of decay and under investment. The aim is to deliver high standards of facilities, design, and build, so that schools will provide environments flexible enough for the long-term, and future changing needs. There is a commitment to a new style of partnership between the Executive and local authorities, which needs to be matched by resources. They recognise these have limits, but that ‘smart investment’ will be used to balance these with priorities and that quality and best value will prevail. There is no universal blueprint and a variety of local solutions will be needed.

Implementation expected to take 10 to 15 years
Guiding principles in developing the strategy are

• A clear focus on the objectives which support the 5 National Priorities
• Partnership to deliver better services reflecting the needs and aspirations of the stakeholders
• Matching resources to priorities

’Programme for Government’ commitments leading up to developing this latest strategy:

1999 – to build or significantly renovate 100 schools by 2003. This is ‘on track’
2001- to complete an additional 200 new or substantially refurbished schools by 2006.
Oct 2001. Agreement reached between Exec and COSLA to work together on school estate improvement.

OBJECTIVES are to deliver better services via the school environment which is child centred and meets both the needs of individual children, and community needs.

Key points are a physical environment that is: Safe and secure internally and externally, has ease of access and is efficient and economical over the life of the building, taking account of sustainability. The buildings must be sufficient ( size, occupancy etc) and suitable and flexible, so good design must be integral to planning and development to ensure success. This must involve pupils teachers and other users to arrive at a clear understanding of how the school will be used in creating high quality learning environments and supporting ethos.
 

Who

All stakeholders share a vision and understanding of roles and responsibility, and commit to working together positively
 

How**

The strategy is that all local authorities must develop a School Estate Management Plan (SEMP) This is the key management tool for planning, implementation and monitoring progress. SEMPs must integrate into wider management, corporate and increasingly, community plans. The document lays down 6 steps in the SEMP process:
1. define objectives
2. assess position
3. consider options
4. develop plan
5. implement plan
6. monitor, review and evaluate
 

When

LA SEMPs to be in prepared and submitted by December 2003. It is expected that they should be updated on an annual basis and fundamentally reviewed every 3 to 5 years.
 

What

Resources-
So far 10 PPPs for £530m approved in 1998
June 2002- PPP package of £1.2bn across15 councils
Further bids Dec 02
£125m other investment in capital projects
£80-90m in repairs
£25m capital grants

Further Executive funding to be decided on a national basis informed by Local authority SEMPs. Skills and learning to be communicated across all LAs to inform the process by sharing best practice and providing consistent key data.
 

Monitoring

LAs measure progress against SEMPs, investment and best value
Continuing improvement assisted by benchmarking
Exec measure national progress against the strategy. They take a small number of core facts common to all LAs to give the national picture
Further qualitative evaluation to add context and detail to demonstrate impact of the strategy over the long term

**My main criticism of the paper, that although it mentions the importance of shared vision and community needs it does not define or emphasise the points at which community and user group consultation must be undergone, and it does not back up its declaration of partnership sufficiently forcibly, and it will fall to LAs to schedule this. My experience, is that consultation in Glasgow’s PPP was too little too late. I do acknowledge though that other schemes have consulted very effectively. I believe these to be small plans or one-off builds. I think SEMPs could reduce opportunities for user/community input especially given their delivery date.

Jo. 21/3/03