“While we welcome any money spent on school buildings, what the government is announcing is simply the annual round of allocations for urgent repairs and maintenance following bids from schools and sixth form colleges in England.
“The wider problem is that there is a massive £13.8 billion maintenance backlog across the school estate and we are still nowhere near the level of investment needed to address this. The fact that schools and sixth form colleges have to bid for funding for urgent repairs and maintenance is in itself a sign of the inadequacy of overall investment and is effectively an annual exercise in papering over the cracks.”