The BBC programme about Toby Young's attempt to open a free school was worth watching (unlike John Humphrys' jejune and chippy contribution to the same series).
Also worth reading was his Telegraph piece urging that "pupils need teachers, not touchy architects".
For instance, "Bexley Business Academy ... has had to cut staff and spend money on mending the constantly leaking roof and replacing the designer Italian lavatory seats. It’s now running at a deficit of almost £1 million a year. The school was built by Lord Foster’s practice at a cost of £31 million."
It was part of Building Schools for the Future (BSF), under which "the cost of rebuilding a school ... was three times greater than that of an equivalent commercial project". Young says this was partly because of the involvement of vainglorious architects - but we also know that a third of the costs could be incurred before any work was done on site, jumping through the government hoops.
Anyway, asks Young, are school buildings that important? Seeing a modern school building in Humphrys' programme, with a huge internal open space, you just knew it was going to be paid for by taxpayers.
As a teenage boy I don't recall that the state of the buildings mattered to me at all as long as we were dry and warm and we couldn't hear other classes. I just loved having good teachers. We would just have laughed at expensive loo seats.
But the BSF disease is catching locally. One school nearby has decided to spend money upgrading its reception area. That may impress visitors, but what benefit will it bring to the pupils? None.
BSF was expensive and fundamentally flawed. But that rotten Labour government also failed in small things. They paid £40,000 to water pot plants - which we had also paid for. David Cameron and George Osborne have scrapped spending £4,000 of taxpayers’ money on Downing Street Christmas trees and will buy them themselves. Don't say the last lot couldn't have afforded it on their salaries.
What a rotten government that was.
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