Innovative procurement theories to optimise educational outcomes per total cost of school facilities.

This research aims to develop a novel and cohesive whole-of-procurement decision-making framework for financing, design, construction, operations and maintenance of schools to advance educational outcomes per total cost of new school facilities.

Funded by an Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage grant, the ARC Value in Operations research project advances the body of procurement knowledge by developing a novel suite of whole-of-life procurement decision-making theories, models, and tools for the delivery of schools. The application of this body of procurement knowledge by public and private school operators is designed to advance educational outcomes in relation to the total cost of the built environment for the school.

The project’s success in developing the body of procurement knowledge to deliver new schools with significantly improved value includes a further successful application of the Procurement Decision Tool (PDT) to the education sector (beyond the original applications in health and road sectors). The PDT identifies the best value for money approach to two key infrastructure procurement decisions, i.e., contract packaging (the size and number of contracts) and their contract terms (using competitive and/or collaborative contracting). The PDT is a world-first; it is the only procurement decision-making tool based on state-of-the-art microeconomic theories and successfully empirically tested.

A key outcome of the ARC Value in Operations research project is the PDT recommending Design and Construct procurement to one of the non-Public-Private Partnership (non-PPP) schools in the Value Rating Study (the same non-PPP school used to show the procedure to develop the Value Rating Tool). The Value Rating Tool is another world-first. This tool measures the contribution of schools’ facilities to educational outcomes, while accounting for their total production costs and transaction costs. The Value Rating Tool is the most comprehensive post-completion review and benchmarking tool, as far as the research team are aware. While the Value Rating Tool was developed in a school setting, the Value Rating Tool can be adapted to apply to a wide range of social and economic infrastructure e.g., hospitals and roads.

Images of schools kindly provided by Bickerton Masters Architecture.