Much press coverage today of the Government's failure to deliver on its repeated pledges to renew and rebuild the UK's secondary school. Apparently the programme has been consumed by so much red tape that funds allocated to it are going unspent. (All the more for Blair to spend in Iraq and Afghanistan, then).
At the risk of putting on the grumpy old man hat once too often, I wonder how today's schools compare to the one I attended in Tottenham in the late 1960s. I have a very large secondary school literally at the bottom of my garden, and it is a great deal better than anything I endured. One of the buildings at my grammar school had supposedly been condemned as unfit for use in the late 1930s, but was still in daily use thirty years later. Somehow the staff managed to send a steady flow of students to university, year after year.
Just after I left, the school moved to new, purpose-built premises in a leafy suburb. Many years ago it converted to a comprehensive, and although it's still doing fine, academically it's not what it was.
There's nothing I'd rather spend public money on than education -- as the old saying goes, if you think education's expensive, try figuring out the cost of ignorance. But education is about more than just fancy premises and right now, I think the Government is getting just about everything in this area wrong.
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