Scandalous school building money statistics

The Guardian tells us that:

The amount being spent building new free schools, then, was vastly more, per school, than the average amount allocated per school to rebuild England’s existing classrooms. A pet political idea was put ahead of a much broader, if less eye-catching, objective: maintaining school buildings so that children are kept safe.

Well, yes, we’d rather expect that to be true. We don’t rebuild classrooms every year. So the spending on a school being built (or even one being rebuilt if it’s their year) will be higher than the average of all schools some to many of which are not being rebuilt.

Between 2011 and 2018, £1.7bn was spent on site acquisition and construction for 221 free schools. On average over this period, that is £959,000 per free school, per year. By comparison, a National Audit Office (NAO) report published in June revealed that, from 2016 to 2023, annual spending across the remainder of England’s 21,600 state-funded schools on “major rebuilding and refurbishment” equated to just £26,070 per school, per year.

Much the same point applies. When actually building a school the expense is rather higher than the maintenance of another school.

This isn’t to say that the school maintenance programme was well managed - or even managed at all. We’re insistent that government’s inability to manage maintenance is one of the major reasons to not have government building and operating things.

But just to clarify the maths being used here. The cost this year of building a school is higher than the annual buildings maintenance costs of a school we’ve already built.

Umm, Yes?

The real surprise here is that this calculation was thought worthy of publication in The Guardian. But, you know, journalists and numbers….