THE DEPARTMENT of Education and Science is to press ahead with the construction of schools under the Public Private Partnership (PPP) model, despite concerns about the way in which a previous €150 million five-school pilot project was managed, a Dáil committee heard yesterday.
Department secretary general Brigid McManus told the public accounts committee that the second-level school population was set to increase significantly over the next six years.
She acknowledged that the department did not have a full inventory of the types of accommodation, including prefabricated "temporary" classrooms, that schools have.
This was partly because keeping a centralised database of all school accommodation would have "significant resource implications" for her department, she said.
Ms McManus said four new PPP schools had gone to the planning stage this week and were expected to be available by the end of next year.
Minister for Education Mary Hanafin has previously announced that 27 PPP schools, mostly at post-primary level, are to be built in the coming years. Under PPP schemes, private companies build schools and maintain them for 25 years in return for fees from the Department of Education.
In 2004, a report by the Comptroller and Auditor General, John Purcell, found that the five schools involved in the pilot project, which are expected to cost €283 million including VAT over 25 years - or €150 million in today's money - could be provided more cheaply if the State built them.
Responding to strong criticism yesterday from some committee members, Ms McManus said the pilot school project had been extensively reviewed and lessons learned from this.
Among the developments since then were the introduction of public service benchmarking to assess the cost of providing the schools in the public system, she said.
Also, a new system of reporting had been introduced that allows for any unavailability issues or quality failures to be identified in monthly reports and appropriate deductions made from the PPP contractor.
A deduction of some €35,000 had been made between October 2007 and February of this year, mainly because the operator of the five pilot schools, Hochtief, had not provided the annual planned preventive maintenance schedules.
Ms McManus also revealed that the post-primary school population is set to grow from 333,000 in the 2006/2007 school year to an estimated 380,000 by 2013/2014, meaning there would be more demand for secondary school places generally in the coming years.
Her department's policy in relation to prefabricated schoolrooms is to purchase these outright if a school is expected to need them for more than three years, she said.
A survey of 900 schools that have rented accommodation is almost complete, and steps have been taken to create a computerised database of information in the department in relation to these schools.
However, committee chairman Bernard Allen (FG) said a "sweetshop owner" would know more about their stock than the department appeared to know.
"How can you plan adequately when you don't have the basic information that a sweetshop owner would have running their own business?" Mr Allen remarked.