New schools to be smaller after coalition cuts building budget

Corridors, assembly halls, canteens and atriums will be squeezed under the proposals, expected this week, which will set the template for 261 replacement school buildings to be erected over the next five years at a cost of £2.5bn.

The tough space standards will be introduced to help hugely reduce costs in the coalition's delayed programme to replace the country's most run-down primary and secondary schools .

The average price of each school is expected to be £7m less than under the previous government's £55bn Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme, which won architectural awards but was cancelled in 2010 by the education secretary, Michael Gove , amid criticism of soaring costs and delays.

Some teachers and architects have voiced concern that the squeeze could cause pupil congestion in corridors, potentially leading to poorer discipline and bullying. They have also warned that smaller assembly halls could undermine attempts to maximise the value for money of school buildings by making them available for community functions after hours.

Others have welcomed the pared-down approach, saying that millions of pounds were wasted under the previous programme on unnecessary consultant fees and extravagant design statements that could have been spent on teaching.

"If you have shares in atriums, sell," said Peter Lauener, chief executive of the government's Education Funding Agency, which has drawn up the "baseline designs" that are expected to be unveiled this week. Designers and builders vying for contracts will be expected to use the designs as a starting point.

"More for less is the theme of what we are trying to do with education capital," Lauener said. "We are looking to come out with an average school building cost of under £14m compared to £21m under the BSF programme. It is not quite buy one, get one free. It is a three for two proposition." Builders have compared the programme to the coalition government "shopping at Tesco" while Labour was "shopping at Selfridges".

The coalition's school building programme is an almost complete reversal of Labour's ambitious 2003 policy of rebuilding or renewing all 3,500 English secondary schools over 15 years. It came amid soaring public spending on education, which rose from £35bn a year in 2000 to £64bn by 2009, and attracted some of the world's best architects.

Lord Foster, best known for designing headquarters for multinational corporations, designed one of the most expensive schools ever built in Britain, the Thomas Deacon academy in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, which reportedly cost close to £50m. The cloud-shaped, office-style building has curved, glass-fronted classrooms and an undulating glass and steel structure roof over a vast atrium.

In the first four years of the BSF programme, only 42 of the 200 schools that were intended to be built were completed and the budget was underestimated by about £1bn a year, according to a report by the National Audit Office.

Lauener said architects were guilty of including too many "fripperies" in the last generation of schools. Gove has previously singled out architects' fees as a waste of public money. Last year, he told a conference on free schools: "We won't be getting any award-winning architects to design it, because no one in this room is here to make architects richer."

His officials have told builders to cut 15% from school space before issuing tenders next month for contracts to rebuild packages of about 10 schools at a time to standardised designs. The minimum size of a classroom is expected to be maintained at about 54 square metres (580sq ft), which means that the squeeze will bite disproportionately on other areas, builders said. "One of the problems with the new model is that it may be a little tight on area," admitted one contractor who has been working with the government on the designs.

Galliford Try has produced a design billed as "the optimum primary school", with 80% of every school designed identically from the same kit of parts. It states: "One clear target was to reduce or remove non-net areas such as circulation."

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