Mr Balls:
An assault on our schools Michael Gove is halting the building programme so he can fund a doomed, deeply unfair experiment
The decision by Michael Gove to cancel over 700 school rebuilding plans at a stroke has rightly angered parents, pupils and communities across the country. The shambolic nature of the announcement betrays the sheer thoughtlessness of the process. If each plan had genuinely been considered on its merits these errors would not have happened.
Gove was also exposed when he accused me of improperly promising these schemes when the funding wasn't there. The permanent secretary at the Department for Education has now confirmed that this is not true. However, the true failure of the education secretary is not a failure of process or spin but a catastrophic failure of judgment.
The chaos of Gove's announcement may be forgotten in a few days, but the hundreds of inadequate school buildings whose replacement or refurbishment he has cancelled will stand for years to come as a memorial to Tory cuts.
And it's being done at a cost not just to our communities and children, but also to the construction industry. The impact on jobs and growth in this sector will be devastating, especially at this fragile time for the recovery.
Of course, the Tories – and their Liberal bedfellows – wring their hands and respond that it is all unavoidable: that reducing the deficit must come first. But what makes the Building Schools for the Future announcement so extraordinary is that it is not primarily about reducing the deficit. Instead, the billions cut from this programme is the sum Gove intends to "reprioritise" in order to fund his "free market" schools policy.
The terms of reference given to David Cameron's university friend Sebastian James for his review of schools capital investment contain only one passing mention of "standards" and "disadvantage" as an objective. Yet they contain three references to funding the "free schools" policy, and two to lowering the minimum standards for school buildings and playing fields. This "review" shows that the reason for these cuts is simply the Tories' determination to create an artificial market in state education.
And elsewhere, not only have the Tories diverted the academies scheme from improving the weakest schools to rewarding the strongest, their academies bill also includes plans to smooth the path for their "free market" schools.
It is almost unprecedented to rush a major public services reform through with just a few weeks between its publication and its passage on to the statute book. But this looks even more reckless given the experience of the Swedish model on which these reforms are based. The Swedish education minister, the Swedish Ofsted and the OECD have all confirmed that schools in Sweden became more unequal after these reforms were introduced, and that standards overall did not rise.
And the same will happen in Britain: parents groups and private companies will open new schools to take pupils from existing schools, who will see their funding cut. Indeed, many "free schools" will have new buildings created using the money saved by cancelling new buildings for existing schools.
Parents and children will see their schools left to fend for themselves. And all to fund a scheme which is doomed to fail. This is a systematic assault on the community education system to fund a wasteful and unfair experiment.
That's why I'm urging parents, teachers, young people and governors to back our "Save our Schools" campaign and join the lobby of parliament on 19 July.
Michael Gove should stop this botched cancellation and think again. Not just because his decision was chaotic, unfair and economically shortsighted, but because it is plain wrong to sacrifice the future of millions of children for a flawed and unfair ideological experiment.
Tory MP plans march against Michael Gove's education cuts Ian Liddell-Grainger prepares to lobby David Cameron after cancellation of school-building projects
A Conservative MP said today he is planning to lead a march to Downing Street in protest at the government's decision to axe school-building programmes in his area.
Ian Liddell-Grainger, the Tory MP for Bridgwater, said he was prepared to lobby David Cameron after his Somerset constituency was told that at least three of six schools it planned to build would not be given the go-ahead.
Michael Gove, the education secretary, announced on Monday that the government was suspending new building projects for 715 schools and cancelling the £55bn Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme, saying it had been beset by "massive overspends, tragic delays, botched construction projects and needless bureaucracy".
But, in an embarrassing development, Gove was forced to make an "unreserved apology" in the House of Commons yesterday after it emerged that, as a result of 25 errors in the Department for Education list issued on Monday, several schools had been misled into believing they would be able to go ahead with their building projects.
Gove vowed to apologise to every school affected by the blunder.
The schools in Liddell-Grainger's constituency learned of their fate on Monday.
The Tory MP defended his plans to march to Downing Street against the Conservative-led government, claiming the schools issue was "above politics" and that those who had spent time on the projects had a "right" to lobby the prime minister to get him to reconsider.
The MP told BBC Radio 4's Today programme earlier today that he had rung Gove's office to complain that the situation was unfair. "I am meeting with all my heads on Friday and all my councillors and take – if we have to – the message to David Cameron to say: 'Look, this is a very unique situation. We have built the best tertiary college. We are about to build a new nuclear power station. We have bent over to turn an industrial town in the south west into a great success story which we have done and we need to point across. Yes, we know the problems the government has got but there are ways around this.'"
Liddell-Grainger wants to persuade the government to do a deal to keep the building of the schools going. They were going to be built under the private finance initiative.
By putting back payments 20 years, the new building work could be kept off the government's balance sheets for a few years, he claimed.
"All our schools are very bad," said Liddell-Grainger. "They were built a long time ago. We were promised this because we are the only industrial town in the West Country. We need those schools so we can bring everything up to date so it all dovetails in to create the engineers we are going to need in the future. I know Michael [Gove] is under an enormous amount of pressure and I want to make sure I pressurise the other way, as the local member of parliament, along with my schools, along with my councillors, along with everyone else, to say: 'Please, Michael ... we do need those schools built in our areas.'"
He added: "When you have spent all this time through the education system and the council and others to build up these schools to what they are I think people have a right to come and say to the prime minister and to the cabinet to say, 'Look, we know what we can do, we know what we can achieve' ... If I have to stand outside Downing Street and say, 'Can we please have a chat?' then I am more than happy to do so."
Gove has faced widespread criticism both over the cancelled projects and the errors in the Department for Education list, which misled some schools into believing their new-build schemes were going ahead.
A source closely involved with a number of the cancelled BSF projects said: "This is the latest example of Michael Gove's inept handling of the BSF programme. Firstly, he allowed projects to progress to preferred bidder stage, resulting in the private sector incurring £100,000-plus of additional costs, only to subsequently cancel them. Now he has mishandled the seemingly simple of task of identifying which schools are impacted by the government's decision."
Schools in Sandwell, in the West Midlands, initially appeared to have had their projects saved, but that was later found to be incorrect. The same happened in Derby, Northamptonshire, Peterborough, Doncaster, Greenwich, Staffordshire, Wiltshire, Lancashire and Bexley.
Gove's department admitted the errors yesterday and published a corrected list. Last night, Gove told the Commons Speaker, John Bercow: "I'm grateful to you and to the whole house for granting me the opportunity to make this statement, and once again to unreservedly apologise." The department also said it "apologised unreservedly for these errors".
Vernon Coaker, the shadow junior education minister, who had yesterday demanded Gove come to the Commons to explain to MPs "what on earth has been going on" thanked the minister for "finally" apologising for the "serious errors".
Coaker said: "It is right that he has apologised to this house, but he should also apologise to all the pupils and parents and teachers expecting new buildings who have now had them cruelly snatched away. The chaos and confusion around this statement was frankly astonishing."
Discord grows after new school blunders
By Alex Barker and Ed Hammond
Michael Gove on Thursday offered a fresh round of apologies for the botched announcement of school building cuts, amid signs of an incipient Tory rebellion and threats of legal action from the building industry.
The education secretary has suffered a grim political week after his department released a list of axed building projects that was littered with errors, adding confusion to a painful round of spending cuts.
Gove apologises for school errors - Jul-08.
Axe hangs over school building jobs - Jul-06
.Councils initiate £1.5bn school building plans - Jul-01.
Builders braced for battle over new schools - Jul-01.
Mr Gove on Thursday repeated his “unreserved apology” and promised to visit some affected schools. In an attempt to soothe the anger of councils, he stressed that this was not the “end of school building”, as an ongoing review of future capital spending may allow some work to resume in their areas.
The decision to scale back more than 700 planned building projects has been blamed on a lack of funds and “needless bureaucracy” that had caused “tragic delays” under Labour. A review established by Mr Gove will propose better ways to allocate capital funding in future but the funds available are likely to be a fraction of what was cut from Building Schools for the Future.
A handful of coalition MPs also began to voice their frustrations over the cuts, with Ian Liddell Grainger, a Tory MP, promising to march on Downing Street with a procession of schoolchildren. “I would suspect that every MP that has had a cut is the same as me,” he said.
While expressing sympathy for Mr Gove, Mike Hancock, Lib Dem MP for Portsmouth South, said he was “cheesed off” and warned that there would be “trouble” if the review turned into a “money saving exercise”.
The council leader in Sandwell, an area that was wrongly informed on Monday that nine of its school building projects would go ahead, accused Mr Gove of presiding over “chaos”.
Interserve, the building company working on the Sandwell BSF project, said it was consulting lawyers on suing for money lost on projects that had reached an advanced stage.
A spokesperson for the company said: “There was a brief period of emotional relief after the initial announcement was made and we thought it was safe. That had turned to frustration and disappointment.”
Another industry source said that construction companies, which have already been hit by falling public spending, would be “hopping up and down at this latest cock-up”.
The Golden Years of investment in future generations:
For more than 30 years David Medd was one of the leading schools architects in England and Wales. He, along with his wife Mary, was part of a team of architects and educators charged with building schools to meet the critical need in postwar Hertfordshire, and the enlightened ideas they brought to bear on the design of schools had a deep, lasting influence. David Leslie Medd was born in Elswick, Lancashire in 1917. His father was a pattern-maker, and David inherited his father’s combination of a brilliant mind with a fascination for making things. At Oundle School he preferred practical projects to exams, graduating from Meccano to furniture- making, but the designer Gordon Russell advised that there was no future in furniture and suggested he try architecture. Medd’s uncle Henry, architect of New Delhi Cathedral, recommended London’s Architectural Association (AA). In 1936 this was Britain’s most radical architectural school, the first seriously to promote modern architecture. David and Mary Medd then turned to simple brick buildings, concentrating on maximising space for different types of teaching. This process began at Amersham, a junior school on a modest budget that incorporated better science and craft facilities than was customary. In Oxfordshire they worked closely with education officers and spirited teachers in the design of a village school at Finmere, whose classrooms had little areas for individual activities and opened into a shared space that could be closed off for sports or assemblies as required. Village schools had been disparaged for their lack of facilities; now they offered a model for flexible, mixed-age teaching that was exported back to the inner cities.
Eveline Lowe school in London, built by Medd and John Kay in 1964-6, was designed for a range of individual and group activities for children aged between three and nine. Medd advocated areas for messy activities, quiet study or group teaching separated by low partitions, rather than complete open planning, and believed firmly in good natural light and ventilation. The ground-hugging, modest brick structure of Eveline Lowe was designed as a counter to the nearby tower blocks in which most of the children lived, but the style equally suited a rural site at Llangybi, Wales, where five small schools were replaced by one for 70 children with a variety of spaces for collective teaching and individual working. Medd lectured extensively and wrote numerous articles, and in retirement advised on school building around the world. He was awarded an OBE in 1964. Always a campaigner for good school design, only a week before his death he was revisiting his old schools for a film contrasting his work with that of architects today.
My grandson is fortunate enough to attend a 'school for the future' and one which echos the work of Mr Medd. The Local Authority had the following vision in mind for its school for the future:
The designs for the new school buildings will must provide for
personalisation by including space for more specialised aspects of the curriculum to be experienced, including music and art, science and different technologies. Group rooms, break out spaces and circulation areas will be designed flexibly so that learning can take place in different groupings of pupils, or individually, supported by appropriate ICT networks. The intention is to extend to primary schools the ICT service arrangements being procured via the BSF programme, and through this to ensure a continuum in learning and teaching styles to ease the transition from primary to secondary school.
Where schools are to be rebuilt, refurbished or remodelled the opportunity will be taken to add new school kitchens (where the school currently relies on transported meals) so that these can be cooked on site with fresh ingredients, to provide an attractive and healthy school meal. In other cases improvements will be made to bring existing kitchens in poor repair up to standard.
We will listen to children’s views on their experience of school as part of the consultation process, and take these into account in the design/re-design of the schemes. The layout of accommodation will be planned so that areas that cannot be easily overseen and supervised will be eliminated wherever possible, and features that might pose problems for good circulation around the school, such as narrow corridors, avoided or removed. The importance of providing facilities such as well-designed toilets in locations that will not facilitate bullying, for example, is recognised: from previous experience we know this can impact significantly on pupils’ feeling of well-being at school.
Briefing for the design and layout of individual school projects will be influenced by a range of factors, but the emphasis will be on making schools welcoming to pupils and the wider community and flexible in terms of teaching and learning. Such flexibility can be achieved in a variety of different ways in both new and refurbished buildings – by providing larger teaching spaces equipped for a range of different activities or adding group rooms, as well as by equipping other spaces for learning outside the classroom – and will be underpinned by ICT provision that can be used throughout the building.
My grandson is one of the lucky ones. Not only is his school the reality of that vision and he is enjoying the learning environment it provides the school attracts the sort of staff who can appreciate and utilise the environment. As a consequence a visitor to the school is not only impressed by the building and facilities but is struck by the positive ambiance, the busy calmness that prevails.
Mr Gove, cancelling or postponing the 'schools for the future' programme is a short sighted measure and makes you a 'Thatcher the milk snatcher' on a grand scale. Why is it that, once again, whoever is appointed Education Secretary turns out to be a plonker?
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