This Gove mistake
Discussion
Is it me or are they blowing this out of all proportion. BBC report after BBC report
The list was wrong yeah annoying but cuts have to be made, At least he stood up and appologised in the house.
I doubt he made the list the civil servants will have done that for him. Its not like Labour ever made any misstakes is it.
Pesty said:
Is it me or are they blowing this out of all proportion. BBC report after BBC report
The list was wrong yeah annoying but cuts have to be made, At least he stood up and appologised in the house.
I doubt he made the list the civil servants will have done that for him. Its not like Labour ever made any misstakes is it.
The lefties have to keep the pressure on. That is their MO, forget the facts, the plebs will believe what we tell them to believe.The list was wrong yeah annoying but cuts have to be made, At least he stood up and appologised in the house.
I doubt he made the list the civil servants will have done that for him. Its not like Labour ever made any misstakes is it.
Irrespective of reality, the present gov't MUST be making a mess of everything because we were much better.
Like a dripping tap.
Smiler. said:
Pesty said:
Is it me or are they blowing this out of all proportion. BBC report after BBC report
The list was wrong yeah annoying but cuts have to be made, At least he stood up and appologised in the house.
I doubt he made the list the civil servants will have done that for him. Its not like Labour ever made any misstakes is it.
The lefties have to keep the pressure on. That is their MO, forget the facts, the plebs will believe what we tell them to believe.The list was wrong yeah annoying but cuts have to be made, At least he stood up and appologised in the house.
I doubt he made the list the civil servants will have done that for him. Its not like Labour ever made any misstakes is it.
Irrespective of reality, the present gov't MUST be making a mess of everything because we were much better.
Like a dripping tap.
. Everything to do with politics that's what oppositions do. The Lib Cons are going to do some unpopular stuff too, so get used to it. Which means that gaffes like this are a pain in the arse. So sort it out boys.Pesty said:
Is it me or are they blowing this out of all proportion. BBC report after BBC report
The list was wrong yeah annoying but cuts have to be made, At least he stood up and appologised in the house.
I doubt he made the list the civil servants will have done that for him. Its not like Labour ever made any misstakes is it.
It illustrates in my mind the haste needed to cancel all these unfunded Labour projects which they left behind in a 'scorched earth' policy.The list was wrong yeah annoying but cuts have to be made, At least he stood up and appologised in the house.
I doubt he made the list the civil servants will have done that for him. Its not like Labour ever made any misstakes is it.
Rebuild every school, great idea, where's the money?. THERE IS NO MORE MONEY
That is something the left wing media need to be told again and again until they get the message.
chimster said:
Nothing to do with 'lefties' or 'righties' . Everything to do with politics that's what oppositions do. The Lib Cons are going to do some unpopular stuff too, so get used to it. Which means that gaffes like this are a pain in the arse. So sort it out boys.
Quite. If this ha been a Labour mistake I think this thread would have been 60 pages long by now screaming for him to be hanged. Everything to do with politics that's what oppositions do. The Lib Cons are going to do some unpopular stuff too, so get used to it. Which means that gaffes like this are a pain in the arse. So sort it out boys.
Halb said:
chimster said:
Nothing to do with 'lefties' or 'righties' . Everything to do with politics that's what oppositions do. The Lib Cons are going to do some unpopular stuff too, so get used to it. Which means that gaffes like this are a pain in the arse. So sort it out boys.
Quite. If this ha been a Labour mistake I think this thread would have been 60 pages long by now screaming for him to be hanged. Everything to do with politics that's what oppositions do. The Lib Cons are going to do some unpopular stuff too, so get used to it. Which means that gaffes like this are a pain in the arse. So sort it out boys.Fittster said:
The fact that a job has got to be done doesn't mean we should accept it can be done incompetently.
Gove has now failed to get the list right twice,third time lucky?
Oh I don't know, we managed to accept incompetence from the last government for 13 years Gove has now failed to get the list right twice,third time lucky?
Edited by Fittster on Friday 9th July 08:48
Just politics as normal, it's the person in charge who should shoulder responsibility for stuff like this. I didn't know aboot it till QT, been busy. He (his department) got it wrong and he apologised, that's fine with me, and the opposition make much of it. I would have thought he situation the new coalition government/administration faces would have made them check everything several times. I hope he (his department and others) don't make anymore mistakes like this.
The thing is these schools are in a disgusting state. They need rebuilding. It seems to me disgusting that the first major cuts actually to be made are to these school rebuild program. Did it need to be the first? SOme of these schools are falling apart, yet we can still afford to spend 12 billion on a two week sporting event? Millions need spending on Buck Palace and Windsor castle apparantly, has this been shelved?
The state on ome of these schools in the report is appalling.
PRIORITIES?
I know cuts are needed, but surely we need to rebuild schools ahead of most other things? Personally I dont think we require those Aircraft carriers anytime soon. We seem to do well enough without them.
The state on ome of these schools in the report is appalling.
PRIORITIES?
I know cuts are needed, but surely we need to rebuild schools ahead of most other things? Personally I dont think we require those Aircraft carriers anytime soon. We seem to do well enough without them.
bobbylondonuk said:
Wonder why the coalition is not making doubly sure that gaffs like these are scrutinised and erased before publication?? Surely, that is the first lesson in politics...public perception?
tough to always ensure, especially if some members of your department are determined to undermine you on the basis of their private political allegiences...............................
Corsair7 said:
The thing is these schools are in a disgusting state. They need rebuilding. It seems to me disgusting that the first major cuts actually to be made are to these school rebuild program. Did it need to be the first? SOme of these schools are falling apart, yet we can still afford to spend 12 billion on a two week sporting event? Millions need spending on Buck Palace and Windsor castle apparantly, has this been shelved?
The state on ome of these schools in the report is appalling.
PRIORITIES?
I know cuts are needed, but surely we need to rebuild schools ahead of most other things? Personally I dont think we require those Aircraft carriers anytime soon. We seem to do well enough without them.
.....I believe we no longer need Trident (but the carriers will help with any future stabilising force action) and NOW is the time for the coalition to prove they ARE different from the previous generations of self-grandising governments AND JUST LET IT GO......The state on ome of these schools in the report is appalling.
PRIORITIES?
I know cuts are needed, but surely we need to rebuild schools ahead of most other things? Personally I dont think we require those Aircraft carriers anytime soon. We seem to do well enough without them.
Back on thread now....
Corsair7 said:
The thing is these schools are in a disgusting state. They need rebuilding. It seems to me disgusting that the first major cuts actually to be made are to these school rebuild program. Did it need to be the first? SOme of these schools are falling apart, yet we can still afford to spend 12 billion on a two week sporting event? Millions need spending on Buck Palace and Windsor castle apparantly, has this been shelved?
The state on ome of these schools in the report is appalling.
PRIORITIES?
Depending on what and who you believe, Gove's dept hasn't said that after stopping those parts of the school re-building programme detailed in the list, nothing will happen. Nor that schools don't need repairing or rebuilding, or that capital programmes are gone completely from the education landscape. What has been said is that the BSF programme will continue but in a less bureaucratic and less costly framework, and there are people working on that now.The state on ome of these schools in the report is appalling.
PRIORITIES?
This is the full text of Gove's statement to the House on with some emphases added to direct those not interested in other bits.
The Secretary of State for Education (Michael Gove): With permission, Mr Speaker, I would like to make a statement on education funding.
On 05 July 2010 starting at 1651 hrs Michael Gove said:
This coalition Government are determined to make opportunity more equal and to reverse the decline in the performance of our education system relative to that of our international competitors. Over the last 10 years we have declined from fourth in the world for the quality of science education to 14th, from seventh in the world for literacy to 17th, and from eight in the world for mathematics to 24th. At the same time the gulf between rich and poor has got wider, with the attainment gap between students in fee-paying schools and those in state schools doubling. But the action necessary to improve our schools is made more difficult by the truly appalling state of the public finances left by the last Government.
This coalition Government have inherited a national debt approaching £1 trillion, a budget deficit of £155 billion and debt interest costs every year that are more than the entire schools budget. It is no surprise then that the last Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer felt he had to pledge a 50% cut in all capital spending, the last Labour Education Secretary could not make any firm promises to protect schools capital spending in the future, and the last Labour Chief Secretary to the Treasury left a letter saying simply, "There is no money left."
Faced with the desperate mess left by the last Administration, this Government have had to prioritise, and our first priority is raising the attainment of the poorest by investing in great teaching. We know that the world's best education systems have the most highly qualified teachers, and we are fortunate that the current generation of teachers is the best ever, but we must do better if we are to keep pace with the best in the world.
No organisation has done more to attract brilliant new recruits into the classroom than the charity, Teach First. Since its launch, Teach First has placed hundreds of highly accomplished graduates in our most challenging schools and has helped to drive up attainment in those schools for the very poorest children. We believe that every child should have access to excellence, especially the poorest, which is why we will more than double the size of this programme from 560 new teachers a year to 1,140. We will help recruit hundreds more teachers into areas of poverty, so there will be Teach First teachers in one third of all challenging schools, and, breaking new ground, we will fund the permanent expansion of Teach First into primary schools so that more than 300 superb new teachers will be working in some of the country's most challenging primaries.
However, while we have chosen to invest in people, there have been alternative submissions on how to make savings in the education budget. The shadow Education Secretary has argued in The Sunday Times that we should be sacking 3,000 heads and deputy heads this year in order to balance the books. I have rejected that advice. While the Labour party's answer to our economic mess is further undermining the teaching profession, our answer is supporting great teaching. Therefore, in order to clear up the economic mess we have been left, we have to bear down on the waste and bureaucracy that has characterised Labour's years in office and rein back the projects that have not been properly funded.
Even before we formed this coalition Government and had the opportunity to look properly at the scandalous mess we inherited, we knew that Labour Ministers had no proper respect for public money. The whole process by which the then Government procured new school buildings was a case in point. The Building Schools for the Future scheme has been responsible for about one third of all this Department's capital spending, but throughout its life it has been characterised by massive overspends, tragic delays, botched construction projects and needless bureaucracy.
The BSF process had nine meta-stages: preparation for BSF; project initiation; strategic planning; business case development; procurement planning; procurement; contractual close; construction; and then operation. Each of these meta-stages had a series of sub-stages. Meta-stage 3-strategic planning-for example, had another nine sub-stages. Step 1 required local authorities to produce a strategic overview of the education strategy. Step 2 required local authorities to produce a school and further education estate summary. Step 5 required local authorities to produce another strategic overview-this time with "detail and delivery". Step 6 required local authorities to use the school and FE estate summary to develop an "estates strategy". Only once we had reached step 9-once the Department for Education had given approval-did part 2 of the "strategy for change" become complete. This level of bureaucracy was absurd and had to go.
For those who doubt that money was wasted on the process, I have here just the first three of more than 60 official documents that anyone negotiating the BSF process needed to navigate. This whole process has been presided over by the Department for Education and the quango Partnerships for Schools, and at various times has involved another body, 4ps, and Partnerships UK. Local authorities involved in this process have employed a Partnerships for Schools director, a Department for Education project adviser, a 4ps adviser and an enabler from the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment-another non-departmental public body.
Local authorities have also had to set up a project governance and delivery structure, normally including a project board of 10 people, a separate project team of another 10 people and a further, separate, stakeholder board of 20 people. They formed the core group supervising the project. Beyond them, local authorities were expected to engage a design champion, a client design adviser and a 4ps gateway review team-a group of people who produce six separate gateway reviews over the course of the whole project. It is perhaps no surprise that it can take almost three years to negotiate the bureaucratic process of BSF before a single builder is engaged or brick laid.
Some councils that entered the process six years ago have only just started building new schools. Another project starting this year is three years behind schedule. By contrast, Hong Kong international airport, which was built on a barren rock in the South China sea and can process 50 million passenger movements every year, took just six years to build from start to finish.
[b]Given the massively flawed way in which BSF was designed and led, it failed to meet any of its targets. BSF schools cost three times what it costs to procure
buildings in the commercial world, and twice what it costs to build a school in Ireland. The last Government were supposed to have built 200 wholly new schools by the end of 2008; they had only rebuilt 35 and refurbished 13. Those schools that were refurbished had to abide by a regulatory regime that prescribed the size and shape of cycle racks and of changing rooms next to showers, and even the precise species of plant allowed on school sites. The cost to each school for just participating in the early stages of the programme was equivalent to the cost of a whole newly qualified teacher. The cost of setting up the procurement bureaucracy before building could commence has been up to £10 million for each local area.[/b]
And this expenditure did not guarantee quality. One BSF school was built with corridors so narrow the whole building had to be reconstructed; another had to be closed because the doors could not cope with high winds. One was so badly ventilated that additional mobile air conditioners had to be brought in during the summer, and pupils were sent home. In three other BSF schools pupils collapsed from heat exhaustion, as design faults repeatedly sent the temperature up to 38° Celsius; that is hotter than August in the Sahara. After Labour's 13 years in power only 96 new schools out of a total secondary school estate of 3,500 schools have ever been built under BSF. The dilapidated school estate that we have today is, alongside our broken public finances, Labour's real legacy. Far from using the boom years to build a new Jerusalem, the previous Government only managed to fix just under 3% of roofs while the sun was shining.
The whole way in which we build schools needs radical reform to ensure that more money is not wasted on pointless bureaucracy, to ensure that buildings are built on budget and on time, and to ensure that a higher proportion of capital investment gets rapidly to the front line. That is why I can announce today that a capital review team, led by John Hood, the former vice-chancellor of Oxford university, Sir John Egan, the former chief executive of BAA plc and Jaguar, Sebastian James, the group operations director of Dixons Store Group, Kevin Grace, Tesco's director of property services and Barry Quirk, the chief executive of Lewisham council, will look at every area of departmental capital spending to ensure that we can drive down costs, get buildings more quickly and have a higher proportion of money going directly to the front line.
In order to ensure that we do not waste any more money on a dysfunctional process, I am today taking action to get the best possible value for the taxpayer. I will take account of the contractual commitments already entered into, but I cannot allow more money to be spent until we have ensured a more efficient use of resources. Where financial close has been reached in a local education partnership, the projects agreed under that LEP will go ahead. I will continue to look at the scope for savings in all these projects. Where financial close has not been reached, future projects procured under BSF will not go ahead. This decision will not affect the other capital funding in those areas; schools will still receive their devolved capital allowance for necessary repairs. The efficiencies that we make now will ensure better targeting of future commitments on areas of greatest need.
There are some areas where, although financial close has not been reached, very significant work has been undertaken, to the point of appointing a preferred bidder at "close of dialogue". There are 14 such cases, in which two or, occasionally, three projects have been prioritised locally as sample projects, to be the first taken forward in the area. I will be looking in more detail over the coming weeks at these sample projects to see whether any should be allowed to proceed.
As we believe in supporting those in greatest need, my Department will be talking to the sponsors of the 100 or so academy projects in the pipeline-those with funding agreements or that are due to open in the coming academic year-which are designed to serve students in challenging schools in our most deprived areas. Where academies are meeting a demand for significant new places and building work is essential to meet that demand, where there is a merger and the use of existing buildings would cause educational problems, and where there is other pressing need, I will look sympathetically on the need for building work to go ahead. But where projects are some way from opening or sponsors can use existing buildings to continue their work, any future capital commitments will have to wait until the conclusion of our review.
That review is made all the more necessary because as pupil numbers rise in years to come we have to ensure that our first duty is guaranteeing an expansion in capacity to meet that demographic growth. Action is urgently needed today because the whole of my predecessor's Department's spending plans were based on unsustainable assumptions and led to unfunded promises. In the forward projections that we inherited, the previous Government were relying on taking massive underspends, worth billions of pounds, across Government to fund promises on college places for teenagers and school buildings. That was a fundamentally irresponsible approach to so important an area. Fortunately, in this coalition Government we have a proper relationship between the Department for Education and the Treasury. That is why we have deliberately reduced our forecast reliance on underspends elsewhere and brought our spending into line. In the process, we have kept capital spending within the envelope outlined by the previous Government, so there are no reductions beyond those for which the Treasury had budgeted.
By bearing down on costs now we can ensure that money will be available in the future to help secure additional places, to help the most disadvantaged pupils and to refurbish those schools in greatest need. We have safeguarded front-line revenue schools spending, we have safeguarded front-line spending on Sure Start and we have safeguarded front-line spending on school and college places for 16 to 19-year-olds this year. We have cut spending on wasteful quangos, we have cut the unnecessary bureaucracy which has swallowed up so much money and we have reduced the amount spent on regional government, on field forces and on unnecessary Government inspection regimes; but we have prioritised funding for better teachers, we have invested more in the education of the poorest and we are giving schools greater control of the money that has previously been spent on their behalf. For everyone who believes in reforming education that has to be the right choice, and I commend this statement to the House.
This coalition Government have inherited a national debt approaching £1 trillion, a budget deficit of £155 billion and debt interest costs every year that are more than the entire schools budget. It is no surprise then that the last Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer felt he had to pledge a 50% cut in all capital spending, the last Labour Education Secretary could not make any firm promises to protect schools capital spending in the future, and the last Labour Chief Secretary to the Treasury left a letter saying simply, "There is no money left."
Faced with the desperate mess left by the last Administration, this Government have had to prioritise, and our first priority is raising the attainment of the poorest by investing in great teaching. We know that the world's best education systems have the most highly qualified teachers, and we are fortunate that the current generation of teachers is the best ever, but we must do better if we are to keep pace with the best in the world.
No organisation has done more to attract brilliant new recruits into the classroom than the charity, Teach First. Since its launch, Teach First has placed hundreds of highly accomplished graduates in our most challenging schools and has helped to drive up attainment in those schools for the very poorest children. We believe that every child should have access to excellence, especially the poorest, which is why we will more than double the size of this programme from 560 new teachers a year to 1,140. We will help recruit hundreds more teachers into areas of poverty, so there will be Teach First teachers in one third of all challenging schools, and, breaking new ground, we will fund the permanent expansion of Teach First into primary schools so that more than 300 superb new teachers will be working in some of the country's most challenging primaries.
However, while we have chosen to invest in people, there have been alternative submissions on how to make savings in the education budget. The shadow Education Secretary has argued in The Sunday Times that we should be sacking 3,000 heads and deputy heads this year in order to balance the books. I have rejected that advice. While the Labour party's answer to our economic mess is further undermining the teaching profession, our answer is supporting great teaching. Therefore, in order to clear up the economic mess we have been left, we have to bear down on the waste and bureaucracy that has characterised Labour's years in office and rein back the projects that have not been properly funded.
Even before we formed this coalition Government and had the opportunity to look properly at the scandalous mess we inherited, we knew that Labour Ministers had no proper respect for public money. The whole process by which the then Government procured new school buildings was a case in point. The Building Schools for the Future scheme has been responsible for about one third of all this Department's capital spending, but throughout its life it has been characterised by massive overspends, tragic delays, botched construction projects and needless bureaucracy.
The BSF process had nine meta-stages: preparation for BSF; project initiation; strategic planning; business case development; procurement planning; procurement; contractual close; construction; and then operation. Each of these meta-stages had a series of sub-stages. Meta-stage 3-strategic planning-for example, had another nine sub-stages. Step 1 required local authorities to produce a strategic overview of the education strategy. Step 2 required local authorities to produce a school and further education estate summary. Step 5 required local authorities to produce another strategic overview-this time with "detail and delivery". Step 6 required local authorities to use the school and FE estate summary to develop an "estates strategy". Only once we had reached step 9-once the Department for Education had given approval-did part 2 of the "strategy for change" become complete. This level of bureaucracy was absurd and had to go.
For those who doubt that money was wasted on the process, I have here just the first three of more than 60 official documents that anyone negotiating the BSF process needed to navigate. This whole process has been presided over by the Department for Education and the quango Partnerships for Schools, and at various times has involved another body, 4ps, and Partnerships UK. Local authorities involved in this process have employed a Partnerships for Schools director, a Department for Education project adviser, a 4ps adviser and an enabler from the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment-another non-departmental public body.
Local authorities have also had to set up a project governance and delivery structure, normally including a project board of 10 people, a separate project team of another 10 people and a further, separate, stakeholder board of 20 people. They formed the core group supervising the project. Beyond them, local authorities were expected to engage a design champion, a client design adviser and a 4ps gateway review team-a group of people who produce six separate gateway reviews over the course of the whole project. It is perhaps no surprise that it can take almost three years to negotiate the bureaucratic process of BSF before a single builder is engaged or brick laid.
Some councils that entered the process six years ago have only just started building new schools. Another project starting this year is three years behind schedule. By contrast, Hong Kong international airport, which was built on a barren rock in the South China sea and can process 50 million passenger movements every year, took just six years to build from start to finish.
[b]Given the massively flawed way in which BSF was designed and led, it failed to meet any of its targets. BSF schools cost three times what it costs to procure
buildings in the commercial world, and twice what it costs to build a school in Ireland. The last Government were supposed to have built 200 wholly new schools by the end of 2008; they had only rebuilt 35 and refurbished 13. Those schools that were refurbished had to abide by a regulatory regime that prescribed the size and shape of cycle racks and of changing rooms next to showers, and even the precise species of plant allowed on school sites. The cost to each school for just participating in the early stages of the programme was equivalent to the cost of a whole newly qualified teacher. The cost of setting up the procurement bureaucracy before building could commence has been up to £10 million for each local area.[/b]
And this expenditure did not guarantee quality. One BSF school was built with corridors so narrow the whole building had to be reconstructed; another had to be closed because the doors could not cope with high winds. One was so badly ventilated that additional mobile air conditioners had to be brought in during the summer, and pupils were sent home. In three other BSF schools pupils collapsed from heat exhaustion, as design faults repeatedly sent the temperature up to 38° Celsius; that is hotter than August in the Sahara. After Labour's 13 years in power only 96 new schools out of a total secondary school estate of 3,500 schools have ever been built under BSF. The dilapidated school estate that we have today is, alongside our broken public finances, Labour's real legacy. Far from using the boom years to build a new Jerusalem, the previous Government only managed to fix just under 3% of roofs while the sun was shining.
The whole way in which we build schools needs radical reform to ensure that more money is not wasted on pointless bureaucracy, to ensure that buildings are built on budget and on time, and to ensure that a higher proportion of capital investment gets rapidly to the front line. That is why I can announce today that a capital review team, led by John Hood, the former vice-chancellor of Oxford university, Sir John Egan, the former chief executive of BAA plc and Jaguar, Sebastian James, the group operations director of Dixons Store Group, Kevin Grace, Tesco's director of property services and Barry Quirk, the chief executive of Lewisham council, will look at every area of departmental capital spending to ensure that we can drive down costs, get buildings more quickly and have a higher proportion of money going directly to the front line.
In order to ensure that we do not waste any more money on a dysfunctional process, I am today taking action to get the best possible value for the taxpayer. I will take account of the contractual commitments already entered into, but I cannot allow more money to be spent until we have ensured a more efficient use of resources. Where financial close has been reached in a local education partnership, the projects agreed under that LEP will go ahead. I will continue to look at the scope for savings in all these projects. Where financial close has not been reached, future projects procured under BSF will not go ahead. This decision will not affect the other capital funding in those areas; schools will still receive their devolved capital allowance for necessary repairs. The efficiencies that we make now will ensure better targeting of future commitments on areas of greatest need.
There are some areas where, although financial close has not been reached, very significant work has been undertaken, to the point of appointing a preferred bidder at "close of dialogue". There are 14 such cases, in which two or, occasionally, three projects have been prioritised locally as sample projects, to be the first taken forward in the area. I will be looking in more detail over the coming weeks at these sample projects to see whether any should be allowed to proceed.
As we believe in supporting those in greatest need, my Department will be talking to the sponsors of the 100 or so academy projects in the pipeline-those with funding agreements or that are due to open in the coming academic year-which are designed to serve students in challenging schools in our most deprived areas. Where academies are meeting a demand for significant new places and building work is essential to meet that demand, where there is a merger and the use of existing buildings would cause educational problems, and where there is other pressing need, I will look sympathetically on the need for building work to go ahead. But where projects are some way from opening or sponsors can use existing buildings to continue their work, any future capital commitments will have to wait until the conclusion of our review.
That review is made all the more necessary because as pupil numbers rise in years to come we have to ensure that our first duty is guaranteeing an expansion in capacity to meet that demographic growth. Action is urgently needed today because the whole of my predecessor's Department's spending plans were based on unsustainable assumptions and led to unfunded promises. In the forward projections that we inherited, the previous Government were relying on taking massive underspends, worth billions of pounds, across Government to fund promises on college places for teenagers and school buildings. That was a fundamentally irresponsible approach to so important an area. Fortunately, in this coalition Government we have a proper relationship between the Department for Education and the Treasury. That is why we have deliberately reduced our forecast reliance on underspends elsewhere and brought our spending into line. In the process, we have kept capital spending within the envelope outlined by the previous Government, so there are no reductions beyond those for which the Treasury had budgeted.
By bearing down on costs now we can ensure that money will be available in the future to help secure additional places, to help the most disadvantaged pupils and to refurbish those schools in greatest need. We have safeguarded front-line revenue schools spending, we have safeguarded front-line spending on Sure Start and we have safeguarded front-line spending on school and college places for 16 to 19-year-olds this year. We have cut spending on wasteful quangos, we have cut the unnecessary bureaucracy which has swallowed up so much money and we have reduced the amount spent on regional government, on field forces and on unnecessary Government inspection regimes; but we have prioritised funding for better teachers, we have invested more in the education of the poorest and we are giving schools greater control of the money that has previously been spent on their behalf. For everyone who believes in reforming education that has to be the right choice, and I commend this statement to the House.
turbobloke said:
Halb said:
chimster said:
Nothing to do with 'lefties' or 'righties' . Everything to do with politics that's what oppositions do. The Lib Cons are going to do some unpopular stuff too, so get used to it. Which means that gaffes like this are a pain in the arse. So sort it out boys.
Quite. If this ha been a Labour mistake I think this thread would have been 60 pages long by now screaming for him to be hanged. Everything to do with politics that's what oppositions do. The Lib Cons are going to do some unpopular stuff too, so get used to it. Which means that gaffes like this are a pain in the arse. So sort it out boys.Corsair7 said:
The thing is these schools are in a disgusting state. They need rebuilding. It seems to me disgusting that the first major cuts actually to be made are to these school rebuild program. Did it need to be the first? SOme of these schools are falling apart,.
Are they in a disgusting state? Really? After 13 years of Labour, they are in a DISGUSTING state? I doubt it. And anything in a dangerous condition would certainly be repaired. In reality they're bit shabby maybe, but hardly disgusting. And since when does a shabby building determine whether a pupil will leave school illiterate and/or inumerate? (sp?) You do realise that the educational standards of our school leavers is at an all time low don't you? I'd rather the money was spent on some decent teachers tbh, rather than shiney edifices. Corsair7 said:
Millions need spending on Buck Palace and Windsor castle apparantly, has this been shelved? ,.
Yes, as a matter of fact it has. In fact HRH has not had a pay rise for donkeys yearsCorsair7 said:
PRIORITIES?
I know cuts are needed, but surely we need to rebuild schools ahead of most other things? Personally I dont think we require those Aircraft carriers anytime soon. We seem to do well enough without them.
Well thats a valid opinion, but not one I subscribe to personally. Our armed forces need the kit to enable them to do the jobs we demand of them. The Carriers are part of the future planning for these roles. As it happens I believe the current carriers are just about knackered, so replacements are necessary. I know cuts are needed, but surely we need to rebuild schools ahead of most other things? Personally I dont think we require those Aircraft carriers anytime soon. We seem to do well enough without them.
Back on topic, to the OP, yes I too have been more than a little bemused by the frothing of various BBC commentators on this topic. To hear them talk you'd be assuming that no schools will be built or repaired in the next 5 years, and that simply is not true. James Naughtie in particular let his political allegiences show this morning...... Now there's one public sector employee that needs cutting and pronto. I imagine his salary could pay for a fair old few school repairs....
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