Synergy News & Blog: London Office
Condition Improvement Fund 2019 to 2020 round is now open
The application process for the Condition Improvement Fund 2019 to 2020 is now open. As in previous years the ESFA (Education and Skills Funding Agency) have highlighted that the highest priority will be given to condition projects, which address compliance and health and safety issues. This includes fire protection systems, gas safety, electrical safety or emergency asbestos removal. They will give priority to projects that ensure weather tight buildings and continuous heating and water supply.
Important dates to note:
The key changes of the CIF process this year are:
- Projects will now need to demonstrate that they are designed to satisfy the relevant performance requirements of the output specification 2017 (OS). This is to ensure that projects are only funded of the appropriate quality.
- The assessment criteria has been changed to give more weighting to the project cost criterion in order to give additional focus to the overall value for money of the proposed project. This has increased the Project Cost Criterion to 25% and reduced the Project Need criterion to 60%.
- There is no additional funding available through the Healthy Pupils Capital Fund.
- Applications that score very low marks in the Overall Costs criterion will be rejected regardless of how they perform against other criteria.
As in previous years, a small proportion of the CIF will be allocated to address expansion issues across high performing academies and colleges. In previous years the ESFA have allocated between 10% and 19% of the fund to expansion projects and the funding for this category of application is expected to again be heavily oversubscribed.
We look forward to working with our academy school clients on their bids over the coming weeks.
