Revealed: how annual capital bill for free school projects rivalled DfE’s spend on rebuilding all other schools in England

The amount of money laid out by the government on creating new free schools appears at least to have rivalled the amount it spent on rebuilds across the rest of the schools estate in England, new analysis by this website suggests.

Construction and site acquisition costs for 221 free schools opening over the years 2011 to 2018 ran to £1.7 billion, the latest available data from the DfE reveal.

However, the true total cost of opening all free schools will be much higher than this, as the government, which has gone three-and-a-half years since it last published data on this, has not revealed the cost to the taxpayer of a further 638 institutions.

The data, which I combine in an analysis below with National Audit Office information on the shortfall in DfE funding for wider school rebuilding works, is likely to raise further questions over government culpability for the current buildings crisis, which has seen more than 100 schools kept closed for the new term over safety fears.

This analysis comes after Jonathan Slater, the DfE’s permanent secretary from 2016 to 2020, told the BBC’s Today programme yesterday that Conservative-led governments had prioritised their free schools policies above the need to rebuild the rest of the schools estate and keep children safe.  

The detail: how much has DfE been spending and asking for on school buildings?

In its report published in June this year, the NAO said that the DfE had spent £2.3 billion a year on average, from 2016-17 until 2022-23, on school buildings. Of this, some 76 per cent had been spent on maintenance and repair, with the remaining 24 per cent going to “major rebuilding and refurbishment”. That would put spending on the latter at roughly £550 million a year over this period.

The report had also stated that, in its submission to the Treasury’s 2020 spending review, the DfE had asked for £3.1 billion a year for major rebuilding and refurbishment work. In response, the Treasury had provided only £1.3 billion per year.

In an interview with the BBC’s Today programme, Jonathan Slater, who was Permanent Secretary at the DfE between 2016 and 2020, said the government had prioritised building free schools over rebuilding existing schools.

The analysis in this piece suggests that the figures spent on free schools were of a comparable order, or may even have surpassed, the DfE’s outlay on other major rebuilding work in the years from 2016. So it does look as if, without the free schools programme, substantial more funds would have been available.

How much has the DfE spent on individual free school projects?

Staggeringly, the last DfE data I can find, setting out the capital costs of individual free schools projects, dates back to February 2020. So these DfE disclosures have not been updated for more than three-and-a-half years.

The result is that the government appears to have disclosed capital spending information – the money spent on acquiring a free school’s sites, plus its construction costs – only in relation to 221 of the 859* mainstream free schools which the Conservatives have opened under the policy. That amounts to only 25.7 per cent of such schools having had their capital costs disclosed.

Nevertheless, even based on the roughly one quarter of free schools which have had such overheads set out, the sums set out are still large – and especially so when set in the context of the DfE’s overall spend on rebuilding works for the rest of the schools estate.

In total, the DfE’s data show it spent £1.695 billion on the construction and acquisition of free schools, with the 221 projects for which there have been such cost declarations covering the period 2011 to 2018.

Grouping these 221 schools by year of opening, schools opened in one year – 2013 – saw some £460 million spent on site acquisition and construction.

By contrast, as mentioned above the NAO found that the DfE was spending only around £550 million a year from 2016 onwards on rebuilding any of England’s other 22,000 schools. It is not hard to see, then, what a transformative effect this would have had if the money spent on these free schools had been diverted from them to rebuilding existing schools.

And only just over half of the free schools which actually opened in 2013 – 64 out of 122 – have had their capital costs disclosed. So the true figure for that year will be much higher.

In terms of other high-spending years under these data disclosures, schools which opened in 2014 saw their disclosed capital costs coming to £343 million; among 2012 openers, the figure was £301 million; and among those opening in 2015, the figure was £252 million.

Individual free school projects

Data on individual schools also makes for very interesting reading, again especially when set against the DfE’s overall spending on school rebuilding projects.

The DfE’s total capital spending on two free school projects – Harris Westminster Sixth Form and Nishkam School West London – ran to £50 million and £45 million respectively. This is not far short of a tenth, in each case, of the entire estimated annual post-2016 DfE spending on rebuilding across the entire schools estate for England.

Two other projects – Bobby Moore Academy in Newham, East London, and Avanti House School, in Harrow, north London – saw capital costs of £38m and £37m respectively.

The DfE also spent £52.6 million on 15 free schools, as included in this database, which have since closed. Some of these sadly, include some depressingly spectacular logistical fails, including Collective Spirit Free School in Oldham and St Anthony’s School in Gloucesteshire ,which the government managed to spend £840,000 renovating in 2017, only to then close it within a year.

An additional five schools had a further £62 million spent on them only to then be given what the DfE database describes either as a “fresh start”, a “change in status” or “amalgamation”. One of these Steiner Academy Exeter, saw £12 million spent, only for the DfE to then change its ethos dramatically, transferring its control to two different academy trusts, a few years apart.

Some schools have had large sums spent on them despite being relatively small. Atlantic Academy, the former Route 39 secondary in Bideford in north Devon, had £20.6 million capital costs but as of last year, nine years after it opened, had only 240 pupils, against a capacity of 700. Edison Primary School, in Hounslow, west London, cost £14.9 million but only had 342 children attending it as of 2022, against a capacity of 630.

UTCs and studio schools

The DfE’s overall largesse towards free schools does not stop there, either. The above figures do not include spending on studio schools and University Technical Colleges, which, while not classed by the DfE as “mainstream free schools” are nevertheless still categorised as free schools of a sort by the government.

The total cost of studio schools and UTCs, again as set out in this now-very-old DfE database, runs to £536 million. This covers 90 of the 115 such projects which have opened. Of the 115, 50 of them have since closed. So this spending alone, on the published data, equates to roughly a year’s worth of DfE funding on school rebuilding projects nationally.

Conclusion

Is the above analysis harsh on free schools? Would some of this spending on new schools have been needed anyway, given that for much of the 2010s the school population was growing? So, on that argument, would not there have been legitimate pressure on the government to have spent money on new schools, regardless as to whether it had had a high-profile political scheme badged as the free schools policy?

There is some truth in this. However, serious questions must stand, having been thown into sharp relief by Mr Slater’s point about the project having been prioritised and the alleged knock-on cost of that. Free schools have been a major political priority since 2010 and the government’s spending in this field has often not represented a prudent use of public funds for which there was an urgent need elsewhere. Sometimes, the spending on free schools has appeared spectacularly profligate. It does seem, as the nation contemplates this crisis, that many pupils are paying a price for the political hubris that has always appeared as the free schools policy’s biggest weakness.

*“Mainstream” excludes figures for University Technical Colleges and Studio Schools, which I discuss later in the piece.