The thing that makes me sick is £1,000,000s of tax payers money has gone into planning of BSF schools. Will anybody other than the planning companies see that again? Now there are worthless plans in place that no school on its own can afford to work via. They must have one massive drain hole where all this money just gets pored!
Our school is due to close at the end of the new academic year... explicitly linked to the BSF process in the closure consultation process.
BSF in our area has been canceled.
Three other schools in the area were going to be refurbished and expanded to accommodate our students... the council hasn't decided what it's going to do yet, and is still pressing ahead with the closure.
Don't be too surprised if some of the projects at a well advanced stage get dusted off & become part of a 'new' ConDem school building program to replace BSF. Many of these only need building contracts to be awarded, so they will appear 'cheap' compared to New Labour BSF schools because much of the design & consultancy money has already been spent. The Govt will want to have them complete by the next General Election, especially those schools that were to be rebuilt as Academies.Originally Posted by oalcock
The thing that makes me sick is £1,000,000s of tax payers money has gone into planning of BSF schools. Will anybody other than the planning companies see that again? Now there are worthless plans in place that no school on its own can afford to work via. They must have one massive drain hole where all this money just gets pored!
The Govts plans for Academies & Free schools has already failed to live up to the hype so they will need some good news for education from somewhere.
Notice how the outcry from the Govt MPs about BSF cancellation has died down...
[QUOTE=broc;549633]
The Govts plans for Academies & Free schools has already failed to live up to the hype so they will need some good news for education from somewhere.
[quote]
agreed. but then again, i think ideas like free schools were completely overhyped in some quarters. i'm not sure the govt. ever expected or wanted free schools to be in any way a replacement for rebuilding existing schools...for starters they would have known what could have been accomplished just by looking at the state of the public finances, nor was there ever [i don't believe] the type of diversion of funds into free schools that the scaremongering seemed to suggest. As for condem style academies...again i don't believe the initial response is unexpected, how many schools really want to be the guinea pigs and be the first to go from expressing interest to making applications ? i don't think the govt. should be surprised either. i think academies could eventually become quite popular.
Notice how the outcry from the Govt MPs about BSF cancellation has died down...
yep. i've noticed that, do you think some may have been given indications by govt. that the schools needing rebuild/refurb in their constituencies will get built under a rebranded scheme ?
[QUOTE=torledo;549641]I do. It was inevitable that BSF would be canned by the incoming administration, it was after all a New Labour flagship policy & the opposition had soundly criticised it. The fact remains that many schools are still in an appalling state of repair; many £ millions has already been spent on the design & planning of all those schools 'stopped' by Gove.... note stopped, not cancelled.....
I may not agree with this Govt (or the previous Govt for that matter) but they are not total fools: they must recognise that a lot of BSF money has already been spent on design, planning and consultancy, schools still need rebuilding & the state must still help lead the county out of recession; add to that the building industry will go into terminal decline once the Olympic building program finishes & the current BSF school building program comes to an end (both in 2012).
The Govt have promised a spending review; I think at the end of it they will announce a 'value for money' school building program; BSF was 'only' costing the country £5-6billion per year, so they could deliver a streamlined program for much less by capitalising on the the money already spent; spending money on schools is popular amongst the electorate, it might be a sweetener when cuts bite elsewhere, it could be a vote winner in the 2014-2015 timescale in time for the next election. I would be willing to bet that BSF 'academies' that were in the pipeline are the first to get approval under the ConDem revitalised school building program.
One of the other problems with this sort of planning about schools ... Govts tend to plan around each term in office (no point planning for longer unless they think it is a vote winner) but LAs and schools themselves are planning over much longer periods ... up to 25 years and beyond at times. When some Govt agenda comes in to change stuff they *have* to try and do some damage limitation. It might be that they retains rights to architects plans, keep the documentation about the process of getting it all running again ... the sticking point is that in 3 years the school that really needs the refurb or rebuild might have changed ... and changed again in the subsequent 5 years ... but the process is still the same, it is just about tweaking the building to fit on the allocated plot, changing around some specialist needs ... and Bob is your Mother's brother.
Gove announced yesterday that sample schools and some academies have been allocated funds. Look on the DfE website for further details
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