Tag Archives: school

Will Tory conference announcements all prove as daft as this?

Social media junkie: history has shown that the worst case of someone being distracted from their work by a mobile phone is this one. Have those Covid-19-era WhatsApp messages turned up yet?

Here’s something that is typical of the Tories – certainly since they got back into office in 2010: a lack of joined-up thinking.

So we get announcements like this:

The problem? Smartphones aren’t a big issue in schools – and the policy doesn’t take account of the fact that smartphones are often used by youngsters to pay the bus fare into school – so they can’t be banned from bringing them in.

And in fact, most schools already prohibit the use of mobiles during the school day.

The policy would also apply only to schools in England because education is a devolved issue.

Put it all together and it is easy to understand why Richard Murphy (above) called it a “dead cat” policy to avoid mention of underfunding.

This Site mentioned that problem in an article yesterday. It is also discussed in the Guardian piece linked above:

Geoff Barton, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, accused the government of failing to address the real problems facing schools of funding and staff shortages.

Daniel Kebede, the general secretary of the National Education Union… urged the education secretary to focus instead on the challenge of teacher recruitment, real-terms funding cuts, the lack of mental health support and rising levels of child poverty.

It seems this is just another instance in which the Tories would rather do what is easy than what is right.


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Labour’s plan for public schools is controversial; here’s why

Eton: it’s just a school. Why should it have charitable status or VAT exemptions to make the £50,000-per-year tuition fees go even further than they already do?

On one hand, it’s just another broken Keir Starmer promise.

But it seems to have created a lot more heat than might be expected.

Here’s what’s going on:

Labour has dropped plans to end charitable status for private schools but says it will still remove other tax breaks if it wins the next general election.

The status exempts some private schools in England and Wales from taxes.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer had previously said charitable status for private schools could not be justified.

The party now says it can remove “unfair tax breaks” without changing the rules on charitable status.

There are about 2,500 private schools in England and Wales and the government says half are registered as charities.

Having charitable status means schools can not operate for a profit and are eligible to claim some tax exemptions, for example, on donations and business rates.

Since 2006, private schools have had to demonstrate they were creating “public benefit” to maintain their charitable status.

Labour says it would charge private schools 20% VAT, as well as ending business rates relief, to raise an estimated £1.7bn.

It’s the last bit that is causing trouble among some commentators, it seems.

Labour is saying its plan was always to remove tax breaks that the party seems to believe give private schools an advantage over state-run schools.

In fact, education in the UK is a mess – due in part to the encroachment of privatisation into the state sector, with privately-run academies whose owners seem to collapse with alarming regularity, only to be replaced with more doomed privateers.

A few decades ago, some corner-cutting government (does it matter whether it was Labour or Tory?) decided to build new schools using RAAC concrete, and now those buildings are falling down. This does not improve the state of, well, state education either.

Meanwhile, on the private side, we have seen schools like Eton unleash one dunce after another into the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties. Boris Johnson is living proof that an Eton education is not the gold standard it once was.

But the “Old School Tie” network means these numbskulls can climb the slippery pole to success with much less effort than the rest of us, despite being far less deserving of it.

Result: well, you can see it all around you. The UK is on the brink of collapse.

The fact is that neither Labour nor the Tories have anything like a decent grip on what needs to be done.

So they argue about side issues like VAT as if they matter, and then fall to personal insults:

Time to let somebody else make an educated guess at how to solve this?


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‘Judge us by our record’, says Tory MP. We did – and the verdict is not good!

Laura Trott: does she spend a lot of time with her foot in her mouth?

Conservative Pensions Minister Laura Trott made a bit of a blunder on the morning media round: she asked the public to judge the Conservative Party on its “track record” since 2010.

Here she is, saying it:

Peter Stefanovic took her at her word, and did just that. Here’s the result:

Social mobility is at its worst in more than 50 years.

Untreated sewage dumped in our rivers.

Crumbling schools and hospitals.

Thousands dying every year on NHS waiting lists.

Let’s add a little more to the list, from an article published earlier today (September 18, 2023):

14 million people in the UK are in poverty – that is a little more than one-fifth of the population.

A million adults can’t afford to eat every day.

Nine million, while eating every day, are skipping meals and cutting back on food. There is a consequent effect on the nation’s health that will impact the NHS, of course – with thousands of people being hospitalised with malnutrition. Then the Tories say they don’t understand why the health service can’t cope after they have put so much (ha ha!) extra funding into it.

A record 2.1 million people are now using food banks. Remember David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ policy? This is its only success – forcing more wealthy people to subsidise those who cannot afford to feed themselves, including lower-paid working people and nurses, let’s not forget, with charity.

The number of children in food poverty has doubled in the last year alone.

Seven million households aren’t being heated properly.

Rishi Sunak has also mentioned inequality, claiming – again, falsely – that this is also lower. In fact:

In 2022, incomes for the poorest 14 million people fell by 7.5 per cent while those for the richest fifth saw a 7.8 per cent increase.

Could that be partly because Sunak has uncapped bankers’ bonuses while imposing real-terms pay cuts on public sector workers?

Sunak reckons 200,000 fewer pensioners are in poverty today – but the number of pensioners in relative poverty has actually increased by more than 200,000. In 2021/22, more than two million pensioners were living in poverty in the UK.

Sunak’s comment about 100,000 new homes needs no response because the House of Lords rightly rejected the arguments in favour of building on land likely to be flooded with water that had been polluted, not only by developers but also by greedy privatised water firms.

Sunak reckons he’s delivered 4,000 prison officers – so why are there fewer now than in 2010? Does it have something to do with the privatisation – and profitisation – of our prisons?

Put it all together and you’d have to be demented to deny the comments in the following ‘X’ post:


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Which Tory donor will profit from the Portakabins being hired for crumbling schools?

A school: well, that’s what it is in Tory Britain.

This is on-the-button – and also on-the-nose:

Responses were humorous…

… but the subtext is anything but funny.

There should be a proper tendering procedure for any temporary buildings hired by the Tories while they try to shrug out of doing anything about the schools they have left to fall down.

We need to demand that any procedure be fully-transparent and open to all qualified providers – not the usual cowboy Tory donors.


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Is covert deal to cut help for special needs pupils in England part of Tory tax cut plan?

End SEND cuts: the Tory war on kids with special needs has been going on for years – this image is from 2019.

Here’s a shocking admission from the Tory government:

The government has quietly signed a contract targeting 20% cuts to the number of new education plans for children with special educational needs and disabilities (Send) to bring down costs, the Observer can reveal.

Then junior education minister Claire Coutinho – recently promoted to the cabinet as energy secretary – subsequently told MPs that no targets were in place.

The cuts target has emerged as councils across England grapple with huge financial deficits on Send budgets caused by a combination of rising demand and longstanding underfunding.

So the Tory government cut support for school pupils with special educational needs by a fifth and then lied about doing it.

On the same day we find this out, I see this on my ‘X’ (formerly Twitter) feed:

Never mind the talk about benefit cuts; what we get from this is that the Tories are cutting spending in order to cut taxes – for the rich again, most likely, although this could be an election tactic.

They take money from SEND kids because those people and their parents are powerless to stop them; all they can do is hold protests on the streets, and the police have been empowered to put a stop to that.

Meanwhile, rich people have leverage – especially if they give donations to the Conservative Party; they can threaten to withdraw that money. There is a financial incentive for Tories to hand money to them.

So the question for parents of kids with special needs is simple:

Are you happy that your government places your child’s needs as secondary to giving more money to people who are already filthy rich?

Source: Revealed: covert deal to cut help for pupils in England with special needs | UK news | The Guardian


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Tories said they were rebuilding 50 schools per year. Actual number: TWO

This is fine: the image was originally created to symbolise Rishi Sunak’s attitude to climate change but it works just as well for his position on schools that are falling apart because of RAAC concrete collapses.

The trouble with Tory lies – other than the fact that there are so many of them – is their tendency to fall apart when the facts are checked.

Here’s Peter Stefanovic on the schools’ rebuilding programme, and on Tory education funding in general:

So the Tories claimed they would be rebuilding 50 schools per year – down from 100 and far below the 400 rebuilds required.

And the total number of actual rebuilds per year is two.

Yet the Tories cheer in support of this monumental failure.


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Rishi Sunak’s weasel words can’t hide the lie: Tories WERE called out on crumbling schools, long ago

Crash: this is what happens when RAAC concrete in a school roof fails.

Rishi Sunak has been caught lying in Prime Minister’s Questions again.

He said Opposition leader Keir Starmer had never raised the issue of crumbling schools with him before PMQs on Wednesday (September 6) – but this is not true.

Here’s what Sunak said:

With hindsight, the Tories have rushed to claim that Sunak meant Starmer had never mentioned RAAC concrete in schools before Wednesday – you can see it in Greg Hands’s ‘X’ post above, and in Michele Donelan’s response to Kate Garraway, below:

But these are weasel words. You can hear Sunak’s words for yourself, so you know he didn’t mention RAAC concrete. If he didn’t, then it is misleading of these other Tories to do so afterwards.

It seems that, when Sunak was bandying the words “Captain Hindsight” around, he was pointing in the wrong direction.


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Gillian Keegan HAS done a good job – of f*cking her own career

Gillian Keegan: she reckons she has done a ‘f*cking good job’. Your opinion on what has been ‘f*cked’ may differ.

Education Secretary Gillian Keegan has been caught on camera, in the middle of the RAAC concrete/crumbling schools crisis, bemoaning the lack of support she has received for doing, in her words, “a f*cking good job”.

She said her actions have come after others – presumably other Education Secretaries – “sat on their arses” and did nothing.

This certainly seems to be true. We know that the Labour government of 1997-2010 had identified a problem with the concrete used to build many schools (and other public buildings) and had started a programme to replace those buildings – but Michael Gove cancelled it when the Coalition government negotiated its way into office in 2010:

Tories have been on the social media, claiming that Building Schools For The Future was slow and corrupt…

… and the veracity of those claims may need to be researched. But it was, at least, there. The Tories replaced it with nothing at all – for eight years.

Evidence that schools were falling apart surfaced in 2013 but nobody did anything about it.

Further evidence turned up in 2018 and, while something was done, it was nothing like enough.

Rishi Sunak was warned about the problem when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, and was asked to double the budget for replacing school buildings. Instead, he halved the number of schools being helped:

To hear Sunak defending his decision, one might think he has actually increased the number of schools being helped instead of halving it:

Peter Stefanovic has had a look at the facts, and here they are:

Returning funding to 2010 levels – in 2021, let alone 2023 – still means a real-terms cut in funding due to inflation, and This Writer would certainly suggest that this is the reason the number of schools being rebuilt has been halved.

It’s all symptomatic of the Tory ‘Less is More’ strategy – cut a policy, then bring it back at a lower level than previously and tell the public to be grateful.

Reasons have been put forward for the decision to cut the number of schools being rebuilt in half. Keegan has rubbished them in Parliament but – given what we know – you may wish to ignore what she is saying:

Keegan became Education Secretary in October last year, after Sunak had become prime minister.

And what has she actually done?

Well, she has apologised for her filthy-tongued rant, saying she was frustrated with her interviewer at the time, and adding that guidance for schools on RAAC concrete has only changed since Thursday, when new reports came to light:

She has also said that any work to be done on affected schools was not the responsibility of the Department for Education:

It seems neither of those claims are true, as the following, from a frustrated father, indicates:

And this response to her abrogation of responsibility is damning, too:

Instead, evidence has emerged that, despite having been warned in December 2022 that there was a high risk of school buildings collapsing, Keegan hid the dangers. That was half a year ago:

Instead of tackling this urgent problem, affecting the safety of children across the UK, Keegan spent £34 million giving her own offices a ‘glow up’:

She told Kay Burley of Sky News that she had nothing to do with any such decision…

… but if you can bear to read the Sun article (link above), it seems that, while it was a forerunner’s decision to have the refurbishment, Keegan did sign it off – and in April, after schools had been asked for – and started returning – information about problems with RAAC concrete.

She has – apparently – sent out a questionnaire to all bodies responsible for school and college buildings… but that didn’t happen until 8.02pm on the day before term began again:

Keegan does seem to have been accurate about one thing:

Meanwhile, Rishi Sunak (remember him?) has called for calm, saying only a minority of schools are affected…

… and while we should note down the time and date of that claim for future reference, we should also understand that Sunak has apparently failed to acknowledge related issues:

To summarise:

Before Gillian Keegan took over as Education Secretary, Tory governments since 2010:

  • Cancelled a programme to rebuild crumbling schools.
  • Ignored evidence that schools were becoming dangerous and rebuilding work was vital.
  • After they allowed the situation in one school to become so bad that its roof collapsed – in other words, after ignoring a problem until a disaster happened – they agreed to provide just one-quarter of the money needed to rebuild the necessary number of schools per year.
  • And after he became Chancellor, Rishi Sunak cut the number of schools being rebuilt in half – to one-eighth of the number required.

After Gillian Keegan took over as Education Secretary, she:

  • Allegedly hid evidence of the dangers presented by crumbling schools, in the hope that the issue would not come to light until after a different political party forms a government.
  • Actually insisted that local authorities are responsible for school buildings, not the Department for Education – even though local authorities have to seek funding for school refurbishment from central government.
  • Signed off a £34 million refurbishment of her own DfE offices in London while denying help to schools that were crying out for it.
  • Launched a fact-finding exercise on the number of schools needing urgent help – the night before schools re-opened for the autumn term. Any help they get will therefore disrupt the education of pupils, and
  • Suggested that she should be thanked for her actions.

And Keegan calls that a “f*cking good job”?

Please remember what a “f*cking good job” she has done – at threatening your children’s lives – next time you get to vote in a Parliamentary election.


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Why are schools falling apart when the Tory government had ALL SUMMER to fix them?

Hands up if you think the Tories have been gambling with your life: the government has known schools are in danger of collapse for years, but hasn’t devoted enough funds to fixing the problem or enough time to get the work done. Why?

It’s September, and here in the UK – every year – it means “Back to School”. That’s apart from kids whose schools are falling apart because they were built with RAAC concrete, of course.

This Writer woke up to the following tweet:

Putting the “2018” claim aside for a moment, the number 572 is what leapt out at me. Didn’t I already do an article about 572 schools?

Yes! I did!

Back on June 28, I wrote this:

According to the BBC, it means 700,000 school pupils – a little more than six per cent of the total school population – could be in danger because of the dilapidated state into which the Tories have allowed schools to fall.

The National Audit Office (NAO) report says the Department for Education (DfE) has, since 2021, assessed the risk of injury or death from a school building collapse as “very likely and critical”.

The NAO, the UK’s independent public spending watchdog, said risks had not been addressed because of years of underfunding.

It said the deteriorating condition of school buildings was damaging pupil attainment and teacher retention.

Instead of acknowledging the failures, the Tory-run Department for Education has protested that it has been “significantly investing in transforming schools”. Into death traps?

The article went on to quote the claim that £15bn had been allocated to school repairs since 2015, and after 2020, the Department for Education was allocated £3.1bn per year to keep schools safe and operation. But the DfE had requested £4bn, with £7bn per year the “best practice” level.

So the government had allocated less than half the cash needed to restore these schools properly.

This information has all been regurgitated in the news today – although the £3.1bn has been increased to £4bn for reasons not known to This Writer.

Also repeated in today’s stories is the fact that the Tories stopped funding the Building Schools for the Future programme in 2010:

The only new element seems to be the identification of bubbly “RAAC” concrete is the reason these schools are crumbling.

And apparently 104 unsafe schools are set to close (although more announcements are happening all the time, so the number could become much higher):

Let’s get back to the length of time during which the Tory government has known about this problem.

If 2018 is indeed the year it was discovered, then the failure to use lockdown time (when pupils were at home)  during the Covid-19 pandemic is unforgiveable.

If it was 2021, then the Tories still had many school holiday periods to start building works to fix these problems.

Ah, but they had only put aside less than half the cash needed for it – and by this time, the government was spending huge amounts on the consequences of Brexit.

That brings us to June 28, when I published my initial article about this. We were told that the government was aware of the issue, and that it had been told the amount of cash allocated to solve the problem was not adequate.

It would have been reasonable to expect the government to allocate the necessary funding to this problem so that building work could take place during the summer holidays.

But it seems that has not happened.

And most people probably think this is something that has only just come to light!

Now, the education of hundreds of thousands of school pupils is going to suffer because the Conservative government was too irresponsible to do the right thing at the right time.

I saw a video clip by Maximilien Robespierre, suggesting a plausible reason for this, and I’ll put it to you as a question:

Did the Tories procrastinate about this because they were hoping it would become an issue for a different government after the next general election? Because they were hoping to be able to blame this on the Labour Party?

If so, you need to ask yourself a question that should be of paramount importance when you consider how to vote in that election:

Have the Tories been gambling with the lives of your children, just to save money and win an electoral advantage?


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The news in tweets: Wednesday, July 19, 2023

Falling energy prices are not being passed on to customers and the government is doing nothing. Why?

Tory energy security minister Grant Shapps was grilled over the government’s failure to support cash-strapped households, by Martin Lewis on ITV’s Good Morning Britain. His answers were revealing:

So: we will receive no more money to help with energy bills, even though the energy companies are charging us far more than the cost of the energy itself. The government is supporting these firms as they rip us off.

Shapps’s comments about standing charges are also useful. He said these charges are for “all of the network costs, the maintenance costs and the things which happen before you get the live supply of energy to the household”. He said these costs were “not for nothing”.

This Writer certainly hopes that is true.

But let’s have a look at another privatised utility that forces you to pay standing charges: water. If standing charges on water are said to be for the same purpose as for energy – network costs, maintenance etc – then the water companies are guilty of fraud because we have learned that none of our money is being spent on infrastructure (maintenance). The pipe system still dates back to the Victorian era and some of it is made of lead, which is poison.

The water firms also borrow heavily to cover day-to-day costs. That leaves me asking what the standing charge supports. Is it just feeding into the profits of shareholders? If so, then these firms are lying to us about its purpose and should be prosecuted, forced to return that money to us and the charge abolished.

In fairness, I have read that the charge is for the cost of reading meters and sending out bills – but with smart meters installed that tell firms what you’ve used without anyone having to come to your home, and with the facility for people to receive bills by a new-fangled device called email, those costs now must be very low compared with times in even the recent past. Why are the standing charges not being reduced, then?

Taking the subject back to energy, if standing charges on water are a rip-off, how do we know that the energy firms aren’t also charging us far more than is reasonable?

Answer: we don’t.

One rule for them: MPs get up to £16,305 per year for up to three children, but restrict your child benefit to two kids and £2,080

Yes indeed.

Current salary for a backbench MP is around £84-5,000. They get expenses to pay for food, rent and bills (on the second homes they need in London, if I recall correctly), and they also receive £5,435 per year to pay bills related to their children, for a maximum of three children. That’s around £104.23 per week, per child, up to £312.69 – let’s round it up to £312.70.

If you have three children, you won’t receive any child benefit for one of them. You then get £24 per week for the eldest and £15.90 for the second child: £39.90 per week or around £2,080 per year.

Your MP thinks this is fair – even those in the Labour Party who should be demanding equality for everybody (possibly with a few exceptions).

This is why we need to think very carefully about who we allow into Parliament and what they should be elected to do.

Meanwhile, Substitute Tory (formerly Labour) Rachel Reeves can’t see how a UK government can fund free school meals for children who need them, so members of the public have been offering helpful suggestions:

Howard Beckett pointed out: “In Norway the sovereign fund stands at over $1.3trillion. Norway tax[es] fossil fuel Corporate giants at 78 per cent.”

She could also reverse some of the massive tax cuts that the Tories have handed to the richest members of UK society since 2010. There are plenty of ways to fund a better future.

One can only conclude that Pamela Fitzpatrick is right: “Reeves really cannot see where the moneys going to come from because she simply does not have the skills, talent or vision for the role she is in.”

There is a lighter side to this – if you have a certain sense of humour:

Keir Starmer was ‘consciously dishonest’ when he campaigned for the Labour leadership. Shouldn’t he be given the boot?

We may conclude from the information available to us that when Keir Starmer was telling Labour Party members that he would respect and continue the policies of his immediate forerunner Jeremy Corbyn, he was actually planning to throw away all the popular policies that Mr Corbyn had formed, as soon as possible.

He lied in order to be elected.

That is not acceptable.

He should be removed.

He won’t be – because Labour disciplinary procedures are a bad joke at the expense of rank-and-file party members. But voters should – and will – remember his betrayal, and the cynical, calculated way in which he planned it.

Defence spending rises by nearly one-third of what it was in 2019 – while all other spending falls. Why?

Defence Secretary Ben Wallace has announced that the UK government will spend £50 billion on “defence”, for the first time in its history – more than £12 billion more than in 2019.

Jeremy Corbyn asked him about his priorities:

In response, Wallace said: “I am not out looking for war. We are all out here trying to defend our nation by avoiding war, but we do not avoid war by not investing in deterrence. Sometimes we have to invest in hard power, to complement soft power. We do not want to use it and we do not go looking for it. I know the right hon. Gentleman mixes with some people who always think this is about warmongering; it is not. But if countries are not taken seriously by their adversaries, that is one of the quickest ways to provoke a war.”

So he wants to avoid wars by rattling the sabre. This Writer isn’t sure that works – and I am encouraged to doubt him by his own prediction that the UK will be at war within seven years.

Mr Corbyn’s question was an opportunity for him to explain how his spending plan would prevent the UK from being at war within seven years. He did not answer that question.

What are these Tories planning to drag the rest of us into?

£500 million public money bribe to get Jaguar Land Rover owner to build electric car battery factory in Somerset

The Tory government is paying £500 million towards the creation of a £4 billion factory by Jaguar Land Rover owner Tata, building batteries for electric cars.

Is it really great news?

As migrant-housing barge arrives in Portland: how was the contract awarded and was it carried out corruptly?

Two tweets on this:

Is the illegal Tory “VIP lane” still operating, then?

Why is the government repeating consultation on wet wipe ban? Is it looking for a different response?


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