Different schools of thought
The Conservatives have apparently decided (according to The BBC Politics Show - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8502553.stm ) that under a Conservative government anybody will be allowed to open a school in any old building, or build a new school with nobody except the Secretary of State having any say on whether it can happen.
I suppose one should concede that sometimes council bureaucrats can get in the way of some new schools that might be a good idea. But if that is the problem, the answer must be to streamline the local bureaucracy, not abolish it and replace it with a complete free-for-all!
What is wrong with this Tory idea? Here’s a short list of the problems that are going to arise:
1 unsuitable premises for children to learn in 2 in unsuitable locations with additional traffic and parking problems
3 complete inability to predict the number of school places the local authority will have to provide
4 and therefore, complete inability to provide said number of school places
5 probably leading to overprovision of places, at huge expense, in order to avoid
6 no school places at all for some children
7 a bewildering maze of processes for getting a school place for your child
8 loss of local democratic control to central government in the name of “localism”
9 state education budgets that are going to be virtually impossible to predict and apportion from the centre
10 lots of wasted money at a time when “savage cuts” are the Tory order of the day
11 who knows what in the way of financial implications for parents
12 and who knows what in the way of educational price will be paid by the children?
have your say
