Mailwatch(ed) Forum

I thought the Bad Law Project was more usually referred to as the Conservative government, what with just about everything they try to do being rejected by the High Court as unlawful.

I took it to be right wing twats thinking they were being “clever”

Not old Jolyon's biggest fan- he's a bit too prone to overselling stuff for fundraising, amid his genuine achievements. But I like him more every time I see he's winding some goons up.

That 100+ schools in England are perilously close to collapsing must come as no surprise to government.

A fiver says that a senior civil servant has wafted back in to the DfE from Umbria and knocked a few heads together. Schools don't simply crumble "around their ears".

They kill children and no one wants that to happen, and certainly not this late in the electoral cycle.

Under Labour we had a large programme of rebuilding and improving schools.

Gove cancelled it in 2010, as soon as he and Cummings got their sweaty paws on education.

This was known about back then...

(Apparently the rush is due to a large concrete beam becoming detached and falling last weekend. Probably a sports hall, where this stuff is commonly used - think the roof of the Pantheon - for lightness.)

A few people are trying to pin this on PFI, because of course every problem comes back to your favourite talking point. PFI was rightly (belatedly) scrapped because it was an expensive way of paying for work, but the school buildings were worthwhile and sometimes excellent.

My undersanding is that these are old buildings that have been overlooked because of government cuts from 2010. I recall Private Eye praising Gove for scrapping Building Schools for the Future because they didn't like the funding. It seemed pretty clear to me that it wasn't just the funding mechanism that was being cancelled, and here we are.

I said on the other thread that GIllian Keegan would be U-turning on having to provide a list. Apparently she's doing that now.

In the meantime, the Indpendent has identified some of the schools in question. Keegan must have realised that about 10 days of irate heads/ parents/teachers phoning up journalists with new schools wouldn't have been good news management.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/h ... 03116.html

I'm sure the Tories and The Daily Mail will attempt to blame woke, lazy teachers for closing schools because six weeks holiday isn't enough for them.
This is an open goal for Bridget Phillipson, she needs to be all over the media stressing the message that "The Tories have put your child's life at risk for no reason".

She's doing that.

The Mail isn't going to be able to blame woke teachers for this. Not even their most mad readers think that teachers build schools and inspect them. The best the Mail can do with this is something like "Remember when we had good workmen? Now we don't because too many are doing gender studies". That's not particularly strong.

The worst thing about this is they've known this since at least 2018. Remember all those weeks the schools were closed because of COVID? What an ideal opportunity to carry out essential repairs? But nah, there's no aerated concrete at Eton or Winchester College so who gives a fuck?

Looking at some of the first schools named - Leicester, Bradford, Brixton - one does have to wonder if "fuck it, who cares?" figured into their decision making.

She's good at this.

Some great stuff BTL. It's Labour's fault because they knocked down good old school building and built these ones that are falling to bits, apparently. And they were at fault for not fixing this 13 years ago.

Andy McDandy wrote: ↑Fri Sep 01, 2023 7:05 pm Looking at some of the first schools named - Leicester, Bradford, Brixton - one does have to wonder if "fuck it, who cares?" figured into their decision making.

I am old enough to remember when such a thought would have garnered a slap for being melodramatic and downright silly.

How times have changed.

This should be another strand of thorough investigation for a Truth & Reconciliation Inquiry if and when these homicidal thieves have been driven out of office.

Nick Gibb MP- we only just found out about this.
London Tory Councillor- it was known about in 1996, and Labour should have fixed it.

Think it's a brave line to argue that Labour wasn't focussed on improving school buildings, to be honest. And anyway, say they did know all about it in 1996. given that the shit hit the fan 13 years after leaving office, hard to say that they mucked up by prioritising other things, isn't it?

I was involved in formulating and submitting our schools bid for money to refurbish the building. That was in 2008 and I'm pretty sure we knew about it (but didn't have any - what we had was asbestos...)

Plans stalled by a Tory council and nixed by a Tory Education Secretary...

Ouch.

Phillipson has raised it several times.

The Tories are playing a losing card if they try and blame it on Labour. It just plays into the idea that nothing works in this country.

We can just be thankful that beam didn’t decide to come down a week later. Some suggesting it might be due to the wet weather.

Whilst a lot of attention has been given to the dangers posed by this dodgy concrete the use of 'temporary classrooms' is equally worrying. We have 6 'temporary classrooms' at our school, they were erected in 1990 when the school merged with another school, yet 33 years later they are still in use. These classrooms are about two thirds of the size of normal classrooms, they have low ceilings and very little insulation. This means they get really hot in the Summer and very cold in the Winter. They are not very conducive to good teaching and the Maths department that is based in the classroom has seen a very high turnover of staff with at least 3 staff leaving each year.

The fact that so few new schools have been built in the last 13 years would suggests that there are probably now lots of temporary classrooms being used up and down the country.

Well honed government machine in action.

I assumed that people were joking about schools having to analyse concrete themselves, but it seems to be exactly that. If I was responsible for this in a school, I think my attitude would be "Have we got some fairly old concrete? Yep. I'll have to report that to be on the safe side".

Tubby Isaacs wrote: ↑Fri Sep 01, 2023 4:20 pm
The Mail isn't going to be able to blame woke teachers for this. Not even their most mad readers think that teachers build schools and inspect them.

You'd be surprised (well, you wouldn't be really). I read a suggestion earlier that for 65 grand a year a train driver should be getting off his arse and fixing a signalling problem.