More money went into CIF this year. Fewer schools came out funded. Here's why.

More money went into the Condition Improvement Fund this cycle than ever before. And fewer schools were funded than last year.

£470 million allocated — up 10% from 2024–25. Yet only 656 schools and colleges received approved projects, down from 733 the year before. If you applied and weren't successful, the headline figure will have felt particularly hollow.

The gap between what the funding announcement looks like and what it actually delivers has been quietly widening for years. This cycle, it's finally wide enough to notice.

The inflation problem nobody's naming

The reason more money funded fewer projects isn't complicated. Average approved project costs rose by around 20% this cycle. That single figure explains almost everything.

When the cost per project goes up by a fifth, the pot buys less — and that dynamic compounds. The 10% increase in total funding didn't come close to covering a 20% increase in project costs. In real terms, CIF shrank this year.

The geography of failure

The regional split is one of the most underreported aspects of this cycle. The North East had a 16% success rate — the worst in England. The North West had 44%. That's not a small variation. Both regions have significant concentrations of older, maintenance-intensive school stock.

What's driving it? Partly building condition. But largely — and this is the uncomfortable part — it reflects the growing gap between schools with access to professional bid support and those without. Analysis from RPT Consultants and S2e point in the same direction: the schools most likely to succeed are the ones with experienced surveyors behind their applications.

CIF has, in practice, become a procurement competition. It rewards the quality and presentation of evidence more than the severity of the underlying need.

If your bid failed

The appeals window opens in June 2026, with outcomes in July. Lea Hough's appeals guide is worth reading if you're considering that route. The next CIF round (2026–27) is already open, with a December 2026 deadline and a March 2028 completion requirement — tighter than it looks for anything needing planning permission or framework procurement.

One more thing: CIF itself is being wound down

The DfE published its Education Estates Strategy: A Decade of National Renewal on 11 February 2026. Buried in it is the most significant change to school capital funding in a generation: from autumn 2028, CIF is being replaced by a new programme that removes the need for full bid submissions entirely. The competitive bidding model — the one that produced this cycle's 27% success rate and its stark regional disparities — is on the way out.

The replacement is condition-led. Funding will follow estate data, risk assessment, and the annual returns that responsible bodies must submit via the new Manage Your Education Estate platform from autumn 2026. The DfE's implicit argument is that capital should follow verified condition data, not the quality of a consultant's bid document.

That's a reasonable position. But it changes what good preparation looks like. Under the old system, the schools best placed to access funding were the ones with the best bid writers. Under the new one, they'll be the ones with the most accurate, granular picture of their estate — condition surveys, asset registers, maintenance histories, compliance records. The transition between those two systems is happening now, not in 2028.

The 73% of schools whose bids went nowhere this cycle will understandably feel frustrated. But the more useful question is what comes next. The answer, increasingly, is: know your estate. In more detail than you currently do.

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