Delays to the Department for Education’s delivery of estate improvements under the School Rebuilding Programme (SRP) could be addressed with news of a new collaborative framework for contractors.

The DfE is said to be working on a new ‘Alliance for Learning’ framework based on the Ministry of Justice’s collaborative £1bn New Prisons Programme Alliance framework.

It is hoped this will help to speed up delivery of the 500 schools promised as part of the SRP.

And it comes a year after the Government admitted that only four schools had been built two years into the programme against a predicted 50 per year.

It is not yet known how the framework would operate, but the MoJ model on which it is based has seen four contractors – ISG, Kier, Laing O’Rourke and Wates – collaborate to design a standardised prison, before taking on individual contracts to build separate prisons according to the agreed design.