1472. Hon Alison Xamon to the Minister for Education and Training:
(1) Have Building Condition Assessment (BCA) surveys now been completed for each Western Australian government school?
(2) If no to (1), how many schools have BCA surveys outstanding?
(3) Why were the surveys not completed by the November 2017 timeline provided in the department’s request for quote tender documents?
(4) Will the BCA survey results be publicly available?
(5) If yes to (4):
(a) when will they be made available; and
(b) how will the public be able to access the results?
(6) If no to (4), why not?
(7) What is the estimated total cost of repairs for all public schools based on the current survey results?
Hon Sue Ellery replied:
(1) All public schools and facilities owned by the Department of Education across the State have been inspected. However, the individual Building Condition Assessment (BCA) reports are not yet finalised, as a quality assurance process of each inspection report is being undertaken.
(2) Not applicable.
(3) The Department of Finance – Building Management and Works (BMW) issued a Request for Quote for the metropolitan schools, which identified that the inspectors were to complete the school inspections by November 2017. This date was revised to February 2018 due to the decision to refine the methodology to reflect a staged approach to inspections, to ensure inspectors were provided with sufficient time to up-skill and gain understanding of the new data collection approach.
The BCA inspections of the regional schools were procured through a separate Request for Quote and these inspections were completed in June 2018. Since the conclusion of the inspections, BMW has been undertaking a comprehensive quality assurance process to ensure a high level of accuracy in the information provided by the inspectors and consistency across the assessments.
(4)–(5)
(b) Each school will be provided with its own BCA report, which will be available to the school community. It is estimated that all schools will have received the report by 30 November 2018. Members of the school community who wish to view the BCA can request it from their school.
The Department of Education does not normally provide all individual reports to the public.
The current BCA are more comprehensive, and will include the provision of three reports. A typical secondary school will receive:
a high-level PDF report of around 50–70 pages;
a spreadsheet that includes all the data that was collected through the BCA, which the school can sort and analyse for their requirements; and
a range of photos collected from the school showing defects and elements of assets, which could be around 150 pages.
The current BCA process is more thorough and has used a different assessment approach from previous surveys, so the results will not be able to be compared to previous surveys.
(6) Not applicable.
(7) The total cost of repairs will be known once all survey data has been quality assured. This is estimated to be completed by the end of 2018.