AECOM, Faithful+Gould and Rider Levett Bucknall have been appointed by the Department for Education (DfE) to carry out its second major Condition Data Collection (CDC) programme surveying the entire school and FE college estate across England.

The programme involves surveying in excess of 22,300 education establishments which includes schools and FE colleges (around 70,000 buildings) from March 2021 to December 2025 and is one of the largest condition data collections exercises in the UK public sector. 

This programme follows on from CDC1 which was completed successfully from 2017 to 2019. The data collected from the site visits across England will ensure a robust evidence base and will continue to help the DfE to prioritise future funding of the maintained school estate. A pilot phase has recently been successfully completed by the three surveying organisations, who were also part of CDC1, and the programme was officially launched in March.  

Vince Jubb, communications and stakeholder management lead of the Condition Data Collection Programme at the DfE, said: “Maintaining an up to date and accurate evidence base of the condition of the school estate is vital in helping us to review and prioritise funding. We are pleased to have appointed AECOM, Faithful+Gould and Rider Levett Bucknall as the surveying organisations for CDC2. The collaboration the teams demonstrated and the way they worked with schools throughout the first programme and the recent pilot was exemplary and we are pleased to be moving into the delivery phase of this next programme.”

Christopher Kenyon, CDC programme manager, AECOM, said: “Our appointment to the new CDC2 programme allows us to grow the strategic relationship we have built over the past five years with DfE, Faithfull+Gould and Rider Levett Bucknall through the hugely successful CDC1 Programme. We will continue to collaborate with our partners on this latest programme to help make a difference to the school estate, which has never been so important to current and future outcomes for children.”

Christopher Ball, CDC programme manager, at Faithful+Gould, said: “Our expert surveyors at Faithful+Gould are committed to helping schools and colleges across the country maintain high quality learning environments. Building on our national capability and experience, we will take lessons learned from the previous framework to ensure best practice and technical excellence is implemented on all surveys, no matter where in England they take place.”

Brook Smith, CDC programme manager, Rider Levett Bucknall, said: “Combining our expertise of managing large-scale data collection surveys with hands-on knowledge of working with schools and understanding the pressures the education sector faces enabled us as a collective, to deliver the first CDC so effectively. Having successfully completed the pilot phase for CDC2, we are really pleased to be moving full steam ahead with this second survey for the Department for Education."