The biggest cut yet?

By Richard Watts / @richardwatts01

For hundreds of communities across England, yesterday’s announcement that their new school has been cancelled will come as a body blow.

Building Schools for the Future (BSF) was Labour’s plan to rebuild or refurbish all of our secondary schools. Yes it was expensive but given the parlous state of school buildings that Labour inherited in 1997 following previous Tory austerity programmes (alternatively known as massive under-investment in vital public services) such an ambitious programme was essential.

A new building cannot turn a bad school into a good one. But a bad building can damage a school and hold back its children.

I visited an Islington secondary last week where a strong team of teachers led by a wonderful head have created a truly excellent school. The school is rated by Ofsted as ‘outstanding’ and produces excellent results, despite the vast majority of its pupils coming from deprived backgrounds.

The school has achieved all this despite its buildings being typical of many pre-BSF secondary schools: a combination of well built but badly laid-out Victorian buildings and shoddily built classrooms from the 1970s that reached the end of their natural lives some time ago.

Michael Gove would no doubt claim that this school’s success justifies his arguments that re-building all schools is unnecessary, but he’d be wrong.

The head teacher of this school talked about the difference that BSF will make to the school: it will be wholly rebuilt with better IT and teaching facilities, better facilities for teachers and better play areas. The planned re-build will make the school easier to manage, with rooms designed to complement each other instead of the current site where buildings were put-up where there was space available at the time and so create lots of dead areas on the site that waste space and are difficult to supervise.

The head was adamant that the new buildings would improve this already outstanding school further and substantially improve the education of the young people who attend her school.

BSF has a range of other benefits: new schools provide much needed facilities that can be used to encourage sport or adult and community learning; new school buildings can be used to expand good and popular schools or can provide excellent joint facilities with the NHS or other service providers – saving money into the process. More fundamentally, it is easier to persuade a young person to value their education if they see that the state values their education enough to build them decent school buildings.

A new school building can transform a parent’s view of a school. Islington’s secondary schools have improved enormously over the past few years but the perception of them hasn’t yet caught up with the reality. The new school buildings that are already being opened as a result of the first phase of our BSF works are opening parent’s eyes to the excellent teaching and good results that these schools offer. The new building is only one part of creating these results but it is a strong sign that a school is changing. BSF will help to ensure that Islington’s schools will genuinely have a comprehensive intake of pupils form across the borough’s social spectrum.

The CBI, hardly biased in favour of big government spending, is worried that the massive cuts to the government building programme will hit the economy saying “Capital investment is crucial to driving the economy forward”.

Thankfully Islington’s BSF programme has escaped the Government cut but the majority of other Councils are not in such a happy position.

The Tories have always been sceptical about BSF and so this cut was well trailed. The announcement was supposed to have been made weeks ago but was clearly delayed by a process that the an insider described as “bloody chaos”. The result is that millions of pounds have been spent over the last month or so on projects that have been cancelled – so much for more efficient public spending.

Clearly in a rush to get out other bad news under the cover of the BSF cut the government announced another raft of education cuts at the same time, including new school swimming pools, joint school and health facilities and money for school and social work IT systems. Potentially most damaging of all is the threat of a cut to the money to pay for new Sure Start children’s centres.

Agreeing these cuts may well have been bloody chaos inside the ConDem government. However, this charming phrase now also describes the current state of council plans for secondary education in many areas of the country. And, for an education secretary so committed to stopping state planning and introducing market forces into schools, this is, perhaps, just how he wants it.