Exclusive:The 11 new schools and extensions planned in Scottish city's £1.38bn spending blueprint

Officers in the city have proposed that five urgently required new schools, and a further five extensions, be included in the blueprint.

These come in at a total cost of £264 million, of which £173.1m would be from developer contributions. Some of the projects for the period between 2025 and 2035 are already under way.

It comes as a teaching representative warned councillors investment was “desperately needed”.

The new schools would be Builyeon Road Primary, Gilmerton Station Road Primary, Granton Waterfront Primary, Newcraighall Primary, and St Catherine’s RC Primary.

The extensions would be at Hillwood Primary, Queensferry Primary, Frogston Primary, Castlebrae and Craigmount High School.

These schemes are understood to be among those highlighted as required in documents such as the 2016 local development plan, and City Plan 2030.

A further new school is required to replace the Fox Covert Joint Campus at an estimated cost of £32m, because the current building contains a “significant amount” of the collapse-prone construction material known as reinforced aerated autoclaved concrete (Raac).

However, there are other school building projects which are not included in the draft capital plan that will be considered by councillors later this month. If the plan is approved, it means no funding has been set aside for them

These include a new school at Greendykes, extensions at Craigroyston and Echline, and “secondary provision” to address a projected lack of capacity in the existing Queensferry High School catchment area.

Officials said business cases for these schemes would need to be developed for inclusion in budgets in future years.

New schools for West Edinburgh and East of Milburn Tower are expected to be funded entirely by developer contributions.

Meanwhile, a scoping exercise will be carried out to determine what improvements can be made across Edinburgh schools to ensure as many pupils can be educated in their local catchments as possible.

Investment of £26m is proposed for the school estate and children’s residential services to enable more children with additional support needs to remain in mainstream education at their catchment school, and fewer children to be placed in out-of-authority care. This would provide additional equipment, facilities or improve accessibility in existing buildings.

At a meeting of the council’s resources committee on Tuesday, Alison Murphy, Edinburgh branch secretary for the Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS) teaching union, welcomed the capital investment in the longer term plan, saying it was “desperately, desperately needed”.

She said: “The build money is incredibly welcome, but we know it is not even going to touch the sides of what is needed.

“Our special school estate, some of the buildings are utterly unfit for purpose and need to be replaced, which is recognised in that, but that is a long-term project.

“We need significant investment now in both our special school and mainstream estate to try and make the buildings less unfit for purpose.”