The End of CIF: Who Wins When School Capital Funding Becomes Formulaic?
What a decade of Condition Improvement Fund investment tells us about the future of school estate funding.
By Tim Warneford
The Department for Education’s 10-year Education Estates Strategy, published in February 2026, finally put some substance behind what many of us in the sector had been expecting for some time: the Condition Improvement Fund (CIF) is coming to an end.
The DfE has identified 2028 as the point at which things will begin to change, with a more prescriptive approach to estate management through its new Estate Management Standards and defined levels of maturity. This sets out a staged journey for schools and trusts, building on the principles already established through its Good Estate Management for Schools (GEMS) guidance.
The direction of travel is clear: better data, stronger estate management and a more consistent approach to understanding and prioritising investment across the education estate.
At the same time, the FE college sector is also undergoing a recalibration. Whether it is School Condition Allocation (SCA) or Further Education College Condition Allocation (FECCA), schools and colleges are going to find themselves operating within a new landscape of estate management, funding and governance scrutiny.
And that scrutiny is unlikely to stop with central government funding. Whether capital comes from central government, local government or private sources, the expectation will increasingly be that investment decisions are supported by accurate, contemporary and, ideally, costed estate data.
That feels like a fundamental change in the way education estates will need to be managed. It is no longer enough to know that a roof is old, a boiler is failing or a building is in poor condition. Increasingly, schools and colleges will need to understand what they have, what condition it is in, what it is likely to cost to address and where that investment sits within the wider strategy for their estate.
Nobody would argue against better data, greater consistency or a funding system that allows schools to plan rather than compete every year for a share of a limited pot. But there is a bigger question here.
What happens to the schools that do not have the data, resources or capacity to operate successfully in this new environment?
And perhaps more importantly, who actually benefits from a universal, formulaic approach to capital allocation?
CIF has not been perfect, but it has done a lot.
I have spent many years working with schools and trusts through CIF. I know its frustrations as well as anyone. It’s competitive, unpredictable and oversubscribed. A good application does not necessarily mean a successful outcome, and schools can spend considerable time and money developing bids that ultimately go nowhere.
But it is also worth looking at what CIF has actually delivered.
Over its 11-year life, CIF has supported approximately 15,465 capital projects at a cost of around £5.6 billion. The average project contract value was around £367,000, while the average award in the latest 2026-27 round reached approximately £561,000.
Around 3,400 roof projects, 2,800 fire safety projects and 3,100 boiler projects have been funded. In other words, roughly half of the projects supported have addressed some of the most fundamental issues affecting whether a school can remain safe, warm and operational.
For many smaller academy trusts and single academy trusts, CIF has been the only realistic route to securing capital at a scale capable of addressing those problems and that matters.
I have seen trusts deliberately remain below the 3,000-pupil threshold for SCA eligibility because they understood the opportunity CIF provided. They used successful CIF awards to tackle the big-ticket liabilities – roofs, heating and hot water systems, fire compliance and major M&E works – before eventually moving into a formulaic funding environment.
For those trusts, CIF has been transformational, and there is another aspect of CIF that is often overlooked. The funding came with DfE Output Specifications, lifecycle requirements, warranties and a degree of scrutiny over what was being procured and installed. It was not simply a cheque. There was an expectation that the investment should deliver an appropriate quality and lifespan.
That level of scrutiny has not necessarily existed across SCA-funded estates.
The data problem
This is where the current reforms become particularly interesting.
The DfE is now introducing a much more detailed condition survey template, requiring information at the level of elements, sub-elements and individual fields. That is a positive step.
It also implicitly acknowledges something we have known for years: previous national data collection exercises did not give us the depth of information needed to understand the true condition – or cost – of the school estate.
The Property Data Survey Programme, CDC1 and CDC2 all had their limitations.
The RAAC crisis was perhaps the most obvious demonstration of that. A significant building material risk could exist within the estate without having been properly identified through the national data collection process.
If we do not know what we have, we cannot sensibly plan what to do with it, and if we do not understand the cost of addressing those problems, how can the government make a credible case to the Treasury for the investment required?
Good estate management starts with good data, but good data is not free.
That is the bit I worry about as we move towards 2028.
Who pays for the data?
The DfE’s new approach expects responsible bodies to have increasingly sophisticated estate information and to demonstrate progress through the new estate management standards.
The direction of travel is towards a staged journey, building on Good Estate Management for Schools and moving towards a much more mature approach to estate strategy, governance, compliance and investment.
For large MATs with established estates teams, professional advisers and digital systems, this is achievable. For a small MAT or single academy trust, it can look very different. The average primary school receives around £7,000 of Devolved Formula Capital. The DfE estimates that an approved condition survey could cost between £2,500 and £5,000.
“SCA brings certainty, but certainty is not the same thing as sufficient funding.”
That potentially leaves very little of the annual allocation before you have even considered a five-year electrical inspection, fire risk assessment, legionella testing, compliance work or any of the other costs associated with properly understanding and managing a building. And this is before we get anywhere near actually fixing it.
The current average SCA allocation for a primary school is around £35,000 and for a secondary school around £250,000. Compare that with an average CIF project award of around £561,000 in the latest round. That tells us something important.
The danger of one size fits all
I am not opposed to formulaic funding. In fact, I can see the attraction. A school should not have to enter a lottery every year simply to keep its buildings safe and compliant.
But education estates are not uniform.
A Victorian primary school in an urban area with a life-expired roof and heating system is not the same asset as a 1990s secondary school with relatively low condition liability. A small rural school does not have the same economies of scale as a 30-school MAT, and a single academy trust with no estates professional cannot be expected to operate in exactly the same way as a large MAT with a dedicated capital team.
The theory behind Planned Preventative Maintenance is entirely sound. Deal with problems before they become failures. Spread investment over time and reduce the cost of reactive maintenance.
The problem is that very few schools have the reserves to do that effectively when they are already carrying a significant backlog of maintenance. This is where I think we need to be careful.
If the move away from CIF also means moving away from the specification and scrutiny that accompanied CIF-funded projects, we risk returning to a world where short-term cost wins over whole-life value. A cheaper roof is not necessarily a better roof, a cheaper boiler is not necessarily the better investment and patching a problem because that is all the budget allows does not make the underlying liability disappear.
That matters not just from an estates perspective, but from a procurement perspective. The Procurement Act 2023 places an increasing emphasis on value and responsible procurement. Lowest initial price should not automatically equate to best value.
And what happens to the smaller trusts?
This is probably my biggest concern.
The DfE is already piloting approaches to the transition away from CIF. Almost 4,000 of the roughly 10,000 academy schools are dependent on CIF for significant condition and compliance investment. The question is whether all of them will have the data, systems and capacity required when the funding model changes in Autumn 2028.
“The winners will be those who understand their estates, hold good data, know what their liabilities are and have a credible strategy for dealing with them.”
The larger MATs are, by and large, already moving in this direction. They have estate strategies. They have data. They have governance structures. They have people who understand capital programmes and compliance. Many smaller trusts simply do not.
So what happens to them?
If the carrot for achieving the new estate management standards and progressing towards Level 3 is an appropriate capital allocation, what is the stick for those that cannot afford to commission the necessary surveys or do not have the internal capacity to interpret and manage the data?
Are we going to see more intervention following School Resource Management Advisor reviews? Will some trusts be encouraged – or effectively required – to re-broker?
And could the unintended consequence be further consolidation of the academy sector, with larger MATs absorbing smaller trusts because they have the capacity and infrastructure to manage the new requirements? There is another potential consequence.
Larger trusts undertaking due diligence on schools they might otherwise have considered absorbing may discover liabilities that simply do not fit within their existing capital programmes. That could create more ‘orphan’ schools; schools that nobody particularly wants to inherit because the estate liability is greater than the available funding.
That is not a criticism of trusts. It is a perfectly rational response to an increasingly data-driven capital environment.
So, what has CIF actually achieved?
It is easy to criticise CIF because of its competitive nature.
But if we step back and look at the evidence, it has achieved something quite remarkable. It has channelled billions of pounds into thousands of projects that have kept schools open, safe, warm and operational. It has allowed smaller trusts to tackle major capital liabilities that their annual SCA allocation could never have addressed. And, importantly, it has left an audit trail of what was funded, what was specified and what was delivered.
We cannot say the same with anything like the same confidence about every pound of SCA investment across the school estate. That does not mean CIF should continue unchanged, it means we should be honest about what we are replacing.
A formulaic system can be fairer than a competitive one. It can provide greater certainty, it can support better long-term planning, but only if the formula reflects the reality of the estate.
And only if schools have the resources and capacity to generate the evidence on which those allocations will be based.
The next two years matter
The transition to 2028 is therefore much more significant than simply replacing one funding mechanism with another. It represents a fundamental change in how schools will be expected to understand, manage and govern their estates.
The DfE has set out the roadmap, the estate management standards are there and the requirement for better data is clear.
The question is whether everyone is ready to make the journey.
For larger MATs, that journey is already well underway, for smaller MATs and single academy trusts, there is a lot of ground to cover in a relatively short period of time.
The risk is that we create a system that looks fairer from the centre but produces very different outcomes on the ground. The winners will be those who understand their estates, hold good data, know what their liabilities are and have a credible strategy for dealing with them. The losers may be those who do not.
That is why I think the conversation about the end of CIF needs to be much bigger than the funding mechanism itself. It needs to be about capacity, data, governance and the ability to turn information into investment decisions.
Because if 2028 really is the beginning of a new era for education estates, we should make sure that every school has a realistic chance of being ready for it.
And we should be careful what we assume a formula can solve.
Tim Warneford
Tim Warneford MCIOB is Director of Warneford Consulting, specialising in education estate strategy, capital funding, condition improvement and sustainable estate management. He holds degrees in both Humanities and Building Surveying.
Tim is also founder of GEMZ Great Estate Management Zero, a digital platform that provides a bird’s eye view of estate condition and energy performance, helping MATs and FECs to make better informed investment decisions.
