Headline – “School fined for calling a halt to drilling outside exam hall”. The rules of contract dreamed up by the Edukremlin’s ‘Building Schools for the Future’ did not allow for any flexibility in a rebuilding programme, so a school in Surrey had to pay £16k for a period of silence.
Shades of Avon. Lost in time (but not in the memory who have such a gift) that county council, now happily defunct, went mad from an imported disease which made it irrestible for them to send their works department to interfere in school life – like insisting on digging trenches in infant school playgrounds during term time. Local education officers, after an unequal fight in defence of schools, had to call on their professional network and thereby engage political pressure at the highest level for common sense and order to be restored. Now schools are on their own, defenceless in face of central bureaucracy.
In the bad old days BB, LEAs managed huge building programmes with inter-professional consultation, little fuss and no threat of punishment. AB, the impersonal, mindless State can never have it in to to act so sensibly; it has no capacity for the light hand and fine tuning. Now schools have to pay for common sense. One of the more ingenious new taxes.
What’s it worth to forego that and return to the domestic sanity of devolution?
Juvenile
edu-can-do 