Ministers announce £150m for school rebuilding programme

Campsmount School which is ready to be populated by pupils after the Easter break

MORE than 20 crumbling schools in Yorkshire are to get funding for rebuilding or refurbishing projects as part of £2bn spending plans announced by the Government today.

The region is set to get around £150m spent on 22 schools in the latest round of Priority School Building Programme (PSBP) funding.

Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg and Education Secretary Nicky Morgan said today that around £2bn will be invested in rebuilding or refurbishing buildings in the worst condition at 277 schools across England.

There are 260 schools are already included under the first phase of the programme, with 36 across Yorkshire.

Now schools including Walkley Primary, in Sheffield, Guiseley School and Badger Hill Primary, in York, are among the 22 getting funding in the next wave of building work announced this morning.

The Government said that the PSBP was seeing schools being rebuilt faster and cheaper than those built under Labour’s Building Schools for the Future (BSF) scheme. The coalition controversially axed the BSF programme after taking office in 2010.

It led to school rebuilding programmes being shelved in six areas of Yorkshire: Bradford, Doncaster, Kirklees, North East Lincolnshire, Rotherham and Wakefield.

One of the schools affected by the BSF cut has also been central to the PSBP work which replaced it.

Campsmount Technology College in Doncaster was destroyed by a fire in 2009 and had been due to be rebuilt in 2010 under BSF until the programme was axed by the new government.

However its rebuild was then made a pilot project by the DfE to find ways of delivering school buildings at a lower cost than previous programmes.

The scheme was selected as the Sebastian James Review of Education Capital Pathfinder Project