EPICo² part of consortium to build 27 schools
- 10-07-2024
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Today the consortium Schoolkracht (AGRE, EPICo², Rebel and Ethias) signed the agreement for the design, construction, financing and maintenance over 30 years of 27 schools in Flanders. These schools form the first cluster of an ambitious €1 billion school building programme with 450,000 m² of school space for 85,000 pupils.
Together, the brand-new schools will accommodate 20,000 pupils. To build them, a DBFM (Design, Build, Finance, Maintain) formula was chosen. In this type of public-private partnership, it is the school that comes up with its own plans, but a private partner who then provides the financing, works out the school’s requirements into tender-ready projects and then puts everything on the market. In this way, school boards are relieved of a maximum burden. The 27 schools are a part of a lager plan, totalling no less than €1 billion, consisting of 450,000 m² of extra school space for a combined 85,000 pupils.
Schools of Flanders
The consortium to design, build and also maintain the first 27 ‘Schools of Flanders’ for 30 years includes the private partners AG Real Estate, EPICo², Ethias and Rebel. They have now been awarded the first ‘Schools of Flanders’ plot after a market procedure: a deal worth as much as €400 million. Later, two more lots will be publicly tendered, so that ‘Schools of Flanders’ will be good for €1 billion in total. The 27 new schools in the first lot will provide a total of 165,000 m² of additional school space for a total of 20,000 pupils. These are primary and secondary schools, but there will also be new special schools, new art academies and a new boarding school.
"The modernisation of the education infrastructure is crucial, and choosing a public-private partnership according to the DBFM formula is an ideal way to tackle that challenge.With such a formula, the construction and maintenance of the buildings are taken into account from the design stage onwards, leading to a much more efficient process than developing them separately. We are pleased that we can realise the necessary infrastructure together with our partners in this way."
