Mini-Blog 3: Destroying Aspirations like the Past
July 2010
Dear Headteacher of Monkseaton High School,
I am sorry, the money Labour promised you for you new building has been withdrawn. Those commies spent it all on a rainbow logo for the DCSF [spits] and they also caused the global banking crisis. Bastards.
Sorry,
Mr. Gove
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July 2010
Dear Headteacher of Monkseaton High School,
Yeah sorry, I forgot to actually check the list. Didn’t really think it was important. Hope you are enjoying the new school building. That Mr. Cameron opened. Looks great. Of course, I learnt perfectly well sitting on a concrete slab, reading of a dusty blackboard and shitting into a hole in the back yard. But that’s Aberdeen for you.
Sorry again,
Mr. Gove
Of course, I don’t have some secret access to Michael Gove’s personal correspondence, but I can imagine there was some serious hand-to-forehead action going on in the DCSF Department of Education when that proverbial hit the blades.
Was the money allocated to BSF too much? Yes probably. Was some of it being mismanaged? I am pretty sure it was. Should we just scrap the whole thing and refurbish some old houses and a Lidl and make them schools instead? Erm – maybe not. Whilst maybe there was overspend, what the government perhaps don’t realize is the power a building can have over those that use it – it can motivate, instill pride and engender aspiration as well as stop soggy books from holes in the celing and drafty corridors from missing bricks.
But the most important matter here is that the money that would go to rebuild our state secondary schools has been, for want of better words, brown-enveloped to Rachel Wolf and her cronies in the New Schools Network to dish out to school-fee-dodging middle-class types such as Toby ‘Die Fiona Millar, Die’ Young so that he can build a new school that teaches Latin and, presumably, about Miss Havisham.
I’ve said all I can say on free schools without imploding. But this experiment in privatizing our children’s education is wrong and will only make the rich richer and the poor poorer. We have to fight against this.
