11:03am Friday 30th July 2010
Cllr Wealthy seems to be mixing Building Schools for the Future (BSF) with maintaining and improving the school buildings (‘Damage from investment halt’, Your Views, July 15).
Although the BSF programme, Labour’s wasteful and failed scheme, has been cancelled, the education secretary Michael Gove has assured US the Government will continue to invest in school buildings and target money at schools most in need.
Mr Wealthy can write without appropriate context and to scare the school communities, but the realities of the BSF scheme are very different.
Following are some of the factors that made BSF unsustainable: n The Labour Government cleverly devised this rather attractive scheme to obscure the fact that it repeatedly failed to meet its set targets for literacy, numeracy, SATs, GCSEs etc.
n The Commons education select committee warned in 2007 that the Government should take stock of plans to rebuild England’s secondary schools before rushing into a series of costly mistakes – they heavily criticised the method chosen to fund half the £45 billion through the private finance initiative.
n Educationists acknowledged that the BSF is beset by red-tape, delays, and is poorly planned and over-ambitious.
n The BSF scheme has been responsible for about one third of all the education department’s capital spending.
n Labour’s planned spending of £6.5bn on school buildings in 2009 to 2010 with uncertain value for money needs to be seen in the light that within five years, our national debt is set to double to £1.4 trillion unless we cut down expenditure on schemes like BSF which has little educational merit.
Can we really afford ‘upgrading’ the school buildings which might not look attractive, but are quite suitable to teach the school curriculum?
Cllr Husain Akhtar (Conservative, Canons Ward)
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