In 1996 the Comptroller and Auditor General carried out a value for money study on post-primary building projects. Arising from this report, the Comptroller and Auditor General recommended the creation of a prioritisation system for school building projects, a matter to which he again refers in his recently published report.
Following the 1996 study, my Department initially explored prioritisation systems used in other jurisdictions and discussed the matter with a broad range of interested parties. Subsequently, my Department engaged an external professional consultant, Professor Pignatelli, to assist in the drafting of a robust transparent prioritisation system. Professor Pignatelli's report formed the basis of the prioritisation system that has been put in place within my Department.
In framing his report, Professor Pignatelli conducted an extensive consultative process with all of the education partners during which it was pointed out to him that an inflexible and mechanistic application of a predetermined points system could inhibit freedom to articulate the legitimacy and compelling circumstances of a case and restrict the Department's discretion to respond in appropriate situations.
Professor Pignatelli further reported that many of the parties with whom he consulted recognised that, no matter how objective and scientific criteria for prioritising projects might be, the need for decision makers to exercise their professional and-or technical judgment at some point in the process would remain. This was seen as the inevitable consequence of the fact that all bids for support in a national system have to be considered in the context of national priorities and policies, the availability of funding and the complex technical considerations inherent in many project proposals. Professor Pignatelli, having studied these views, did not recommend a points based system.
The prioritisation system used in my Department classifies projects by reference to a range of well-established and well-defined categories. Within these categories, projects are assigned to an appropriate band of priority, of which there are four, with band one being the highest priority and band four being the lowest. I published the criteria used to decide the banding systems when I took the unprecedented step of publishing the 2003 school building programme earlier this year. When shaping a programme, those projects that command the highest priority banding within their respective categories are considered for inclusion. Also published in the 2003 school building programme are the criteria used to select within bands as may occur when resources do not permit the implementation of all equivalent banded projects.
