Private-finance deals that were signed a generation ago are leaving Scottish schools struggling to adapt to Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) and landing them with exorbitant bills for essential equipment, a Tes Scotland investigation reveals.

The charges include £180 to drill a hole in a wall and nearly £500 to move noticeboards, affecting schools built under public-private partnership (PPP) and private finance initiative (PFI) schemes.

Teachers are warning that money is being diverted from essential classroom resources such as books. 

Meanwhile, headteachers say the schemes are restricting their ability to modernise timetables and adapt classrooms in order to provide a wider range of subjects - a crucial element of CfE. Research has shown that the standard of school buildings may be a key factor in the standard of education offered to pupils.

Campaigning group The People vs PFI shared detailed information with Tes Scotland, obtained from 11 Scottish local authorities on spending associated with PFI/PPP schools.

It reveals the extra costs that fall outside the contractual arrangements, which often give schools no say over where to source additional items or services from.

These additional costs can be small - for example, £41.56 to hold a two-hour fundraising event for Malawi at one school - or much larger, such as more than £24,000 to adapt a disabled toilet.

The People vs PFI - which has also uncovered startling information about the private financing of schools in England - argued that this is only one part of the “Scottish PFI schools fiasco”.

Spokesman Joel Benjamin said: “There is evidence from numerous schemes that PFI contractors are not even doing what they are being paid for within the contract, let alone the additional remedial work that is considered to be outside the scope of the contract - from which contractors expect additional taxpayer funding.”

However, Michael Wood, general secretary of education directors’ body ADES, said PFI/PPP projects were good value overall, given the poor state of many schools 20 years ago.

A Scottish government spokeswoman said: “We share the concerns around the flexibility and the value for money offered by historic PFI contracts which offered a bad deal for the public purse. She added that the current system for financing new schools, overseen by the Scottish Futures Trust, was designed to “improve performance and efficiency”.

This is an edited version of an article in the 19 May edition of Tes Scotland. Subscribers can read the full story here. To subscribe, click here. To download the digital edition, Android users can click here and iOS users can click here. Tes Scotland magazine is available at all good newsagents.

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