radical?

abolishing Building Schools for the Future? There are lots of areas that need money to develop them and the state of our schools is a prime concern. Alot of them are poor at best, but the procurement process is long and expensive. I was chatting to a lady who works as a consultant for consortiums bidding to build schools and she was saying that it costs each company £4 million to BID for a project, not even garunteed to get the contract, so there must be way over £4 million profit for each school that is built. Quite frankly I find that a little bit ridiculous, but apparently that is the way it is, and that cost must be absorbed somewhere. A streamlining of the schools building programme is a neccesity in the economic climate, but where do you priorotise? who gets to make the decisions on which schools don’e get rebuilt this time round?

Hard questions and hard answers, interesting to read the report (albeit briefly) and nice to know that other people agree that public spending must be cut. Personally I reckon the could save all the money by cutting the wages of GPs by 10%, especially the ones that have the cushty jobs on the islands and highlands, where they moonlight as Vets for all the sheep they would otherwise be shagging…….

I have a job, and it is going well, albeit through a self employed basis. I have my own tuition business which is generating adequate income, and I only work a few hours a day. Most agreeable,

I think those who drew up the proposals have forgotten that pumping public money into the economy had benefits beyond expensive schools. eg pay a builder to build a school and you not only get a school but he has a job and can spend that money in the economy.

I have just finished our BSF procurement (i headed up the ICT side of things) and it was 18 months of hell. we had 3 bidders and they estimate the costs were about £1m for each of the biders. we are a small authority and in the 1st instance there are only 6 school and only 1 of which is a complete rebuild. the others are substantial rebuilds. will they make the 1m back over the 25 years of the contract?.. easily and it strikes me that for a 1 in 3 chance that is fair odds for the private sector. what was frightening were the legal costs we ran up as an authority.. they were shocking.

the schools are not happy either.. they are locked into long term contracts that will be a squeeze for them to afford. having said that i cant think of any other way to guarantee that they will maintain the nice new shiny buildings. i cant believe the state schools have been allowed to fall into.

in fact skimming down the list i cants see all that many things i would want to see the end of..

stop the bloody government advertising, stop identity cards seem quite sensible.

as for slimming down the LEA (ignoring for the moment that there is not such things as a local education authority.. a council is a council).. there are some areas that may be over staffed but in general there is no one left to get rid of. same goes for cutting non-front line staff in schools… that just means the front line staff will have to do the back end jobs.. and then there will be less front end staff. i think there is an argument for less teachers and more skilled non-teaching adults but that is a different matter.

i have a better plan.. more tax for all the bastards who earn more money than me (to be kept in line with any future pay raises I may obtain of course)

I agree with Doc on the citizens allowance, a surely much fairer way of running the benefits system. We all know it wo’t happen because the political will is not there. Shame because it could be a truly ground breaking development. As for Education, get it seperate from government, few people disagree with this that I have met, make an independent quango run education and decide on policy, then we might get some long term policies that are actually implemented for a decent amont of time and give teaches some stability and stop the eternal run of changes and the cyclical three year nature of education.