Building Schools for the Future

BSF is an ambitious and far-reaching long-term change programme. It offers local authorities in England a once in a generation opportunity to transform educational provision and significantly improve educational outcomes and life chances of children, young people and families. The capital investment is intended to act as a catalyst and enabler for change, but is not itself the change. By providing 21st century facilities for learning and teaching, the talents and skills of every young person can be unlocked, so that they can achieve their best regardless of background.

As well as raising the aspirations and attainment of young people, BSF is also about providing inspiring environments in which teachers and children feel valued, which are appropriately resourced for a 21st century curriculum, and which are sufficiently flexible to enable variety in learning and teaching styles, and a broad innovative curriculum. It is also an opportunity to position the local school as a hub of its community and as a very valuable resource and focus of expertise, to energise and revitalise local areas.

BSF sets local authorities a significant challenge. To achieve these ambitions local authorities have to provide strong strategic leadership in developing, through extensive engagement, dialogue and consultation, a coherent and compelling long-term vision for education and children’s services in its schools. To do so, they need to connect the full range of national policy agendas and local priorities, and to make sense of them as a single piece of thinking, using BSF investment as a key enabler and as an opportunity for added value. This means thinking in depth about teaching, learning and children’s services in the future, how they should be delivered, and what services the community requires.

Local authorities need to have this dialogue with a wide range of stakeholders – its schools and their governing bodies, its officers and members, parents, children and the community, the agencies and organisations with which it works the voluntary sector and statutory consultees. This is a significant opportunity to construct and articulate a widely-shared long-term educational vision and strategy and to marshal support for it. This interaction is a key element of the project and good stakeholder engagement at the right time will assist the success of the project.

On the basis of this vision and strategy, the local authority will be invited to construct a strategic approach to its school estate, proposing school organisation and design solutions which will facilitate the proposed changes, and for which capital investment will lead to new and remodelled schools which are clearly fit for purpose. The local authority and its stakeholders (including districts in two tier authorities) should also consider alternative learning environments as well as schools when developing their estate strategy. It may be that statutory education could be delivered through a range of partners such as work based learning environments, libraries, museums, arts centres, leisure / community centres, either co-located with schools or accessed centrally by learners across the authority. And part of the strategy is likely to involve consideration of how ICT can break down barriers to learning and access in unprecedented ways.

As transformation of outcomes will inevitably involve radical change in provision and organisation, a key to the programme’s success will be the local authority’s strategy for change management.

Readiness to Deliver (RtD)

Local authorities will be required to make a submission to PfS to demonstrate their preparedness to deliver. Local authorities should decide when they wish to be considered for entry, after assessing their own readiness to deliver.

The Readiness to Deliver focuses on three factors which together will form the judgement of readiness.

• The local authority’s capacity, project governance and management arrangements, experience and readiness to lead and manage a programme of this scale and value
• The clarity, ambition and connectedness of the local authority’s transformational educational and children’s services vision and strategy
• The integration of BSF with broader corporate, regeneration and multi-service priorities and strategies.

Local authorities’ readiness to deliver will be assessed against a range of core criteria:

1. A transformational overview
2. Deliverability
3. Investment Strategy
4. Affordability
5. Resources and Capability
6. Benefits Realisation

and the result used to position projects in a rolling programme.

The first group of RtD submissions in this BSF Wave will be assessed and the most ready authorities will be invited to attend an RtD assessment panel to further determine progress and confirm either that they are ready to proceed to the Remit meeting (the formal commencement of the BSF programme ), or the progress they need make before they will be ready.

Norfolk's RtD was submitted on 8 May 2009 and a copy can be found on the Other BSF Documents page.

The Remit for Change

As part of its normal duties, the Department holds information on the performance of local authorities and schools. This information is in the public domain. It will be used to set local authorities scheduled for BSF investment a ‘Remit for Change’ – high level, strategic objectives for each authority to meet with the aid of BSF investment. Children’s Services Advisers, with their detailed and in-depth understanding of local circumstances, are also involved in this process. Their knowledge of the local authority’s progress and aspirations within the Every Child Matters (ECM) agenda is critical in supporting the transformational nature of BSF. The aim of the remit is to provide local authorities with locally specific objectives and challenges that reflect their circumstances, rather than a set of generic requirements. The DCSF, OSC and PfS will discuss this remit with local authorities at the Remit meeting.

The remit will show where Ministerial and Departmental expectations will be focussed. Its content may include:

• strategic objectives, e.g. school organisation, diversity of provision, providing choice and fair access, removal of surplus places
  targets for school improvement
• improvements to provision and outcomes as they relate to particular policy areas, e.g. integration of children’s services, 14–19, school underperformance, inclusion, SEN, extended schools
• delivery capacity and leadership expectations

Page last updated 17 June 2009.