IN Brief:
- Balfour Beatty will deliver a new 12,143 sq m Forres Academy campus for Moray Council.
- The £83m project will provide capacity for 1,120 pupils, alongside sports and parking facilities.
- The scheme adds to Scotland’s pipeline of energy-efficient public education buildings.
Balfour Beatty has been awarded an £83m contract to build the new Forres Academy in Moray, Scotland, extending its work across the country’s public education estate.
The contract has been awarded by Hub North Scotland on behalf of Moray Council. The new academy will replace the existing Forres Academy and is being developed in line with the Scottish Government’s Learning Estate Investment Programme Phase 3 criteria.
Designed as a 12,143 sq m secondary school campus, the project will include teaching and learning accommodation, a 3G artificial grass sports pitch, and car parking. The completed school will accommodate 1,120 students, giving Moray Council a modern facility intended to support long-term pupil demand and wider community use.
Work is due to begin imminently, with completion scheduled for 2029. The award adds to Balfour Beatty’s previous education projects for Moray Council, including Elgin High School, Lossiemouth High School, and Linkwood Primary School.
School estate investment has become a steady part of regional construction pipelines, particularly where local authorities are replacing ageing buildings while trying to meet higher standards for energy performance, flexibility, accessibility, and whole-life asset management. Education projects now carry broader requirements than additional classroom space alone, combining teaching environments with sports provision, community access, safeguarding, transport planning, external works, and long-term operational performance.
For contractors, that mix places more pressure on coordination before work reaches site. A replacement secondary school of this scale has to bring together structural design, M&E integration, fabric performance, digital connectivity, outdoor learning space, sports facilities, drainage, access, and commissioning without losing control of programme or cost.
Public-sector clients are also working under tighter budget conditions, which sharpens the focus on predictable delivery. Schools must be durable and efficient to operate, but they also need to remain adaptable as teaching methods, technology use, and community expectations change. Those requirements often make early design decisions more consequential, because the wrong specification can lock a local authority into higher maintenance or energy costs for decades.
The Forres Academy contract therefore sits within a wider shift in public building delivery. Replacement schools are being judged less as one-off capital projects and more as long-term civic assets, with energy use, future flexibility, and community benefit built into the brief. Contractors with repeat experience in education work are often better placed to manage those competing demands, particularly where projects involve live local authority oversight and close engagement with school communities.
Balfour Beatty’s existing relationship with Moray Council gives the project continuity from previous local school schemes. That does not remove the delivery challenge, but it gives the client and contractor a familiar basis for managing design development, procurement, logistics, and handover.
The new Forres Academy will be a sizeable regional building project over the next three years. Its wider relevance lies in the type of public estate renewal now being commissioned: more energy-conscious, more heavily specified, and more dependent on disciplined delivery from the earliest design stage through to occupation.
