Contractor Jarvis has issued a detailed statement following a report critical of its performance at one of Sussex's top secondary schools.

The engineering giant, whose maintenance wing took over day-to-day handling of buildings at Varndean School last year, said it had gone way beyond its obligations, giving as an example a new roof fitted to the school's swimming pool.

This was news to headteacher Andy Schofield.

He said: "It doesn't make any sense. We don't have a pool and have never had a pool. It's a daft response."

Whatever the reason for the slip, and the company runs three other schools in the city some of which do have pools, it serves to highlight the complexity and confusion arising from the forced marriage of a private firm and a public service.

In their report of the firm's first year of performance at Varndean, governors listed a series of complaints about work which was not finished on time or up to standard.

But there was a more fundamental issue.

As problems piled up, the school felt it was not receiving the full backing of Brighton and Hove City Council, which as education authority was the signatory to the deal.

An uneasy relationship grew stormier by the month, emphasised in a month-by-month report put together by Mr Schofield.

In September, he recorded unease over how Jarvis would perform. By May the diary entry was a diatribe of open hostility.

It concluded 2003 had been: "a year in which much of what we have been trying to do has been frustrated by Jarvis".

The shift to PFI has been a fundamental change and in the sensitive and pressured environment of education, teething problems are inevitable.

But more and more public facilities are being hived off to private firms, which in return for building and maintaining them are given annual payments.

PFI was dreamt up by the Conservative government in the early Nineties as a way to build desperately needed roads, hospitals, schools, prisons and other public buildings without huge tax rises.

Since then the PFI baton has been picked up by New Labour.

Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott has been vocal in his support of a policy which would once have been an anathema to "old" Labour.

But unions are concerned the supposed value for money has come at the expense of staff terms and conditions. Local government officials are overwhelmed by the legal and technical complexities.

And there are those who fear PFI is just a crafty way of disguising the true cost of repairing Britain's battered infrastructure.

In Sussex, PFI has been seized with a fervour.

As well as managing the facilities at Varndean, the £105 million contract signed between the council and Jarvis also covers Dorothy Stringer, Patcham High and East Brighton College of Media Arts (Comart).

The deal with Comart looks particularly shaky now the troubled school is threatened with closure.

Under the original terms, Jarvis was to build and run the school for 25 years.

If it shuts down, there will be an enormous penalty to pay which insiders say could be up to £17 million.

Worthing, Crawley and Hastings police stations and the new Brighton Custody Centre were all built under PFI.

Brighton and Hove will get a new library under an £18 million scheme. The city council has signed up to a third PFI deal worth £1 billion over 25 years with Onyx Aurora for waste disposal.

David Panter, chief executive of the city council, said: "The reality is we need to work with this system if we want to see significant capital injection into the city."

Friday August 1, 2003