There is more good news for Lea Hough’s clients in the education sector today as a number of additional projects at schools across the region have been given the green light for funding from the Department for Education (DFE). In June, we announced that we had helped several schools across Lancashire, Cumbria and Greater Manchester to attain funding via the DfE’s annual CIF fund – the government’s annual bidding round for eligible academies, sixth-form colleges and non-diocesan schools to apply for capital funding to address the condition safety and general good working order of school buildings. We are delighted to announce that the DfE has today (5th August 2020) announced that they will provide a further £182m to fund a further 580 projects which narrowly missed the threshold in June 2020.
This unprecedented announcement comes just a few weeks after many academy schools and sixth form colleges discovered whether or not their bids had been approved. Usually, the DfE only grants funding to a small number of additional projects via their appeals process, and this is only where an error can be proven.
The news will be welcomed by a large number of schools across the country who will now be able to proceed with their building or improvement projects. This includes a further seven projects that Lea Hough’s education sector team helped academy schools prepare and submit bids for. One academy trust that has benefit from the further announcement is the Pennine Trust in Lancashire – which having already had six projects approved, has now had a further two receive funding, taking the total to eight in this single funding round.
Paul Dignan, Partner at Lea Hough, commented:
“This is excellent news and means another seven of the schools we work with can now begin their improvement projects.
“In total, this further announcement will mean that Lea Hough has helped to achieve almost £11 million in funding in the current CIF round. This is by far the best result we have achieved over our years of working within the education sector.
“The fact that we achieved such a high success rate overall is testament to the hard work put into the application and bidding process our team.
“Now the hard work starts in delivering the projects!”
For more information on our services to the education sector, including the preparation and submission of CIF bids, please get in touch.
