Welcome to your new classroom – in a pub

By Richard Watts / @richardwatts01

A bit of light relief in these dark days is always welcome.

Councils are now waiting to find out just how bad our final settlement from government is. The predictions are dire with councils in poorer areas loosing up to a third of their total money. This will have a devastating effect on local services from libraries to youth clubs.

We know that overall councils’ budgets will fall by around 26%. We also know councils in poorer areas will be hit much harder than those in well off areas because the deprivation based grants will be cut most harshly. Individual councils will not know their final settlements until December when the full damage to local services will become clearer.

Bright spots are few and far between, but a document arrived the other day that got people chuckling.

The government has just issued its consultation on whether to change planning rules to make it easier to start a free school.

Apparently the lack of available buildings is one of the reasons cited by government for why they’re not exactly being knocked over by a rush of organisations looking to set up a new school.

The document lists four possible options: Most prosaically Option 1 leaves things as they are e.g. that schools can occupy without the need for planning permission similar buildings. Given ministers think the status quo is the problem – the inclusion of this option is a fig leaf.

Option 2 allows new schools to be started without the need for planning permission in offices, shops, hotels, residential institutions, cinemas, music and concert halls, bingo and dance halls (but not nightclubs), swimming baths, skating rinks, gymnasiums or areas for indoor or outdoor sports and recreations (except for motor sports, or where firearms are used). The mind starts to boggle.

Option 3 is more radical and would allow schools to be opened, without the need for specific planning permission, in all of the above plus former:
Restaurants and cafés
Drinking establishments
Hot food takeaways
General industrial units (although it does helpfully specify that incinerators, chemical treatment plants or hazardous waste works are excluded from this)
Casinos and nightclubs
Dwellinghouses e.g. private houses of various kinds
Houses in multiple occupation e.g. flats in a housing block

Option 4 would be to allow any building of any kind to become a school without planning permission. There is a caveat in this option that schools will have to assess the impact of the new school on issues like parking, traffic congestion and so on, although this is felt to be unnecessary for the other options.

Ministers are believed to be leaning towards the more radical options. So, with no-one able to stop them, a school could be opening up in an abandoned pub near you soon.

In fact free school pupils could spend the morning being taught in the ‘Crystals kebab shop wing’ before transferring to the ‘Dog and Duck annex’ in the afternoon to continue their studies.

Rarely has one document ever exposed to lunacy at the heart of a particular policy so completely. Instead of taking their time to ensure that new schools work and that they are needed (in which time suitable buildings could be built for new schools) Ministers seem determined to push ahead at all costs as fast as possible and aren’t going to let minor details such as a lack of appropriate buildings stop them. This is the same government which rushed through, without proper scrutiny and debate, the legislation creating free schools at a pace usually reserved for urgent anti-terrorist legislation.

Inexperienced ministers would do well to remember good policy is rarely made in a hurry.