It was inevitable right at the start of schools reorganisation that there was likely to be some slippage in the building schedule which was necessary for the change from a three-tier system to a two-tier one.

The programme of reorganisation and rebuilding was enormous in its scope, certainly one of the biggest ever attempted. It was clearly difficult at the start of the process to foresee all the difficulties and accurately forecast how every individual school project would fare in terms of the acquisition and selling of land, granting of planning permission and any on-site construction problems. The fact that so much has been achieved is remarkable.

However, none of that will do much to allay the fears of parents at the 18 schools which will definitely not be completed by September that their children's education will not suffer as a result.

There were many promises made at the start of the process about how long it would all take. Some of these clearly have now been broken and those parents whose children are affected have every right to feel aggrieved and concerned.

There is still no doubt that the reorganisation process will turn out to have been well worth it, but these extra delays really are not helpful in terms of improving the perception of parents that in the end all will have been for the best.

Bovis, the company with the contract for the building programme, is a massive organisation with massive resources. It needs to pull out all the stops to make sure the process is completed before it drags on into a further year.