Carillion has beaten off competition from BAM to take the honours for the £50m North West 1 batch of the £400m first wave of the priority school building programme.

The job will cover eight schools in the local authority areas of Blackpool, Cheshire West and Chester, Halton, Manchester and Tameside.

The Education Funding Agency is also expected to confirm shortly that Kier has taken its first job covering the £40m programme in the south of England.

The new schools will be built in Bristol, Devon, Isle of Wight, Kent, Poole, Southampton and Wiltshire.

Kier beat Interserve, which had also been shortlisted, and is now out of the running for any jobs in the first wave.

It is a blow for Interserve which worked up a cost-saving design for schools called PodSolve in the hope of securing schools work.

But the firm will get another chance to bid for Government funded schools in the new programme after the EFA revealed it is set for a further £300m of capital funding in the current spending review period to enable an early start for 27 further schools in the programme.

This will include a further eight schools in the West Midlands worth £39m, a second programme of schools in the north east and east of England, together worth £123m and a third trance of half a dozen schools in the North West, expected to cost £48m.