Good advice

Andy Mahon, partner at BDO Stoy Hayward LLP with responsibility for Building Schools for the Future, on his firm’s work with local authorities and private sector clients.

As financial advisers on BSF projects we are in a privileged position of being at the heart of a wide range of projects, on some as part of a local authority's team and
on others as part of the private sector bidder's team. As a team - and by that I mean all of the authorities, other stakeholders and advisers involved in BSF projects and initiatives - we're tasked with spearheading a transformation in education.

What can happen all too easily, however, is that, as teams, we can fall into the trap of regarding reaching financial close on the procurement process to select the LEP partner as our objective. Granted, financial close is a very important milestone, but that is all it is - a milestone.

One of BDO's local authority clients recently held a risk workshop as part of the process of kicking offtheir BSF project and to form the basis for developing the initial risk register. After a briefing from the council's risk officer, everyone was given post-it notes to note down what they felt were the key risks. Not surprisingly, many of the usual suspects appeared - lack of project team resource or budget, lack of market interest, delay in obtaining approvals and so on. The workshop leader then reflected for a moment before reminding the team that we should be looking at the risks to the Council achieving its objectives. Surely the objectives were around educational transformation, not completing a procurement process within a defined timescale?

The workload and resource commitments from all sides, authorities and bidders, is huge, and there is a real temptation for the accountants to focus on the money, the lawyers on the contracts and so on. But we should all remember what BSF is about.

I am a secondary school governor in an authority that has yet to come into the BSF programme. My school desperately needs a sports hall and a maths block - not to achieve educational transformation, but simply to be able to deliver the national curriculum and meet current guidance. '

So, from a financial adviser's perspective, what needs to happen?

To achieve the transformation which BSF is mandated to deliver, and should ultimately be measured against, we have to go further in maximising the opportunity for the funding which is available, from government, authorities and schools, to be spent on schools and not on process. We then have to go further in ensuring the best possible value, in terms of outcomes, for the money which is spent not just on the sample schools which are subject to competitive pressure in the initial procurement exercise, but over the life of the LEP.

Costs of bidding have to come down, but without losing the genuine 'dialogue' and engagement between authorities and bidders which is key to delivering genuinely transformational solutions. In the dialogue period we have to focus on those issues which will deliver long lasting value to an authority. The recent procurement review conducted by Partnerships for Schools was bang on the mark in terms of its conclusions and high level recommendations for the procurement process going forward, and the early signs from the drafts of revised documentation coming out from PfS are very encouraging.

This is an exciting time for BSF, whether you are an authority, a bidder or an adviser. We have a large number of projects across Waves four, five and six, and even the new interim wave, six (a), which will be coming to market over the next year or so. The procurement review and the lessons learned from what has gone before give us a massive opportunity to really raise the bar even further in what we deliver. Let us remember what BSF is about and let us not miss that opportunity.