<
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/10/what-a-school-revamp-once-every-440-years-isnt-enough>
"The government has had a busy week trying to deal with the school buildings
crisis. This hasn’t involved doing anything about all the dangerous school
buildings – it’s far too late for that. That’s not the job of modern
politicians anyway: their aim isn’t to improve the country, merely to evade
responsibility for its shortcomings. Navigate towards the popular things and
away from the unpopular and/or disastrous ones.
Thus, Rishi Sunak’s main intervention into the issue of large lumps of flimsy
concrete mouldering above thousands of schoolchildren’s flimsier heads has been
to assert that it is “completely and utterly wrong” to blame him for it. The
topic of blaming the prime minister hasn’t arisen just because he’s the head of
the government and so, when there’s a catastrophic failure in the state’s duty
to its people, the buck stops with him. No, it was suggested that it was
specifically his fault.
Jonathan Slater, who was permanent secretary at the Department for Education
until he was sacked by Boris Johnson in 2020, said the department had wanted to
refurbish or rebuild 300 to 400 schools a year but that the Treasury, when
Sunak was chancellor, cut that to 50. Now prime minister, he rebutted this
allegation in the weirdest way: “Actually one of the first things I did as
chancellor, in my first spending review in 2020, was to announce a new 10-year
school rebuilding programme for 500 schools.” He then kindly added, for anyone
whose numeracy is compromised by historic failures of the Department for
Education: “That equates to about 50 schools a year that will be refurbished or
rebuilt.”
What Sunak is claiming here is that, far from being a non-school-refurbishing
chancellor, he immediately announced funding for refurbishing hundreds of
schools. The only trouble is that, in terms of sheer tedious numbers, his and
Slater’s assertions are identical: 50 schools a year. The difference of opinion
is only over whether that should be referred to as “only 50 schools a year” or
“a whopping 500 schools a decade”. What do you think? If I personally had to
refurbish 50 schools a year, that would feel like absolutely loads. A
ridiculous burden on my time and resources. But then I’m not a G7 economy with
a population of 67 million."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
