This week’s spat about crumbling schools could not have been more exaggerated. We have been regaled with tales of children cowering under desks and pit props and that this is a metaphor for ‘broken Britain’ where nothing works.
This, of course, is the same Britain that recovered faster than any other economy from the pandemic; the Britain whose economy has grown faster than France and Germany; The Britain where we are educating one million more pupils in our schools than in 2010. The Britain where we are spending more on educating our children than ever before – by every metric: total cash, total real terms, and per pupil.
And as a consequence of thirteen years of education reforms – all of them opposed tooth and nail by the opposition parties, this is the Britain where we now have the best readers in the western world, where 90% of our schools are rated ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’ and where children from the most challenging backgrounds are now 75% more likely to get to University.
As for crumbling concrete, well, this is the Britain where Since 2010, we have invested billions of pounds in school capital. We have opened 650 new free schools. This is Britain, where we launched the priority school building programmes, rebuilding or refurbishing 532 schools between 2012 and 2020. The Britain, where funding for school maintenance and rebuilding will average £2.6 billion a year over this Parliament as a result of a 20% increase on previous years. Indeed, far from cutting budgets this is the Britain where the amount spent last year was the highest in a decade.
Yes, this is the Britain where the BBC (in reality a partisan campaigning organisation) has ‘discovered’ that a number of the schools now with a concrete problem were due for rebuilding by Labour’s ‘Building Schools for the Future’ programme, which the Conservative-led government cancelled in 2010.
Hold on!, That government’s incoming Chief Secretary to the Treasury received a note from his predecessor stating that ‘there is no money left’. Furthermore, that programme was expensive, bureaucratic, involved an elaborate quango, with most of the money being spent before a single brick had been laid, and mostly built with the disastrous Private Finance Initiative which saddled schools and hospitals with interest payments and outrageous management fees for 30 years. It was a rip-off.
From the hyperbole you’d think that that the entire roof really had fallen in.
Of 22,000 schools about a hundred were identified as a problem. Only four have had to close temporarily.
As a former teacher I understand just how unwelcome this whole business is at the very busiest time – the start of the school year.
(My own school burnt down over a weekend and temporary classrooms had to be in place for Monday morning).
The reality is that the problem was known about and being addressed. The government continued to alert local government education authorities to their responsibility to survey, identify and manage the problem. The sudden need to raise the profile urgently now, was entirely down to new technical evidence leading to a change in our understanding of the concrete product itself. It is very inconvenient and disruptive, but we need a sense of proportion: One might be tempted to profanities, but Britain isn’t finished!
In the longer term however, let’s raise our game. Why have we been building schools since the nineteen seventies with an expected life-span of merely 30 years?
-And not very inspiring buildings either.
There are plenty of schools all over the country built by the Victorians that are beautiful and still giving good service. We would do well emulate our forebears.
Sir Desmond Swayne TD
