College Shambles Comes Crashing Down

Pie in the sky plans to create shiny new  college cathedrals to New Labour learning have come crashing down around the government's ears, with a mixture of incompetence and broken promises leaving the building programmes a shambles, as funding cash dries up. 

Colleges in England face going bust as they embarked on a massive £5 billion rebuilding programme on the back of a promise the funding would be available. 

Now saddled with debt, some students are packed into temporary accommodation. No buildings means no students and no income to repay the loans.

Some 144 college building projects in England are on hold while the monstrous quango, the learning and skills council (LSC), dithers around after promising funds for refurbishment. 

Now, as the colleges face going bust, they stand to lose £100 million because of the delays in construction. 

The amount of cash needed is eye-watering. The 79 schemes approved in principle would cost nearly £2.7 billion, with another £3 billion needed for the 65 colleges that had also submitted bids.

But the cash had to come from somewhere and with the recession starting to bite, banks are increasingly reluctant to stump up the cash.

The government is in a complete pickle and the LSC could face legal challenges because they had given assurances to colleges over the funding.

But in a classic case of the left hand not knowing what the right is up to, the LSC, which has approved 8 projects, says "it has always been perfectly clear that full funding and final approval was not guaranteed and that colleges were proceeding at their own risk".

Branding the delays as “a quite extraordinary catalogue of incompetence”, exacerbated Tory spokesman, David Willetts, said ministers need to come clean on the scale of this problem. "At every stage we've had to wring information from them using freedom of information requests."

Colleges were "actively encouraged" by ministers to go ahead with works and "now they are all at a standstill because of this extreme mismanagement."

Skills minister, Sion Simon, has admitted the programme “has not been managed properly” by the LSC and even its own quango doesn’t know how and what mistakes were made.

Refusing to accept any of the blame, ministers have resorted once again to their favourite trick and appointed  a trouble-shooter to investigate delays and look into the mistakes.

Colleges are not the only shambolic building plan which is starting to eat itself and disintegrate, as a damning report on the government's over ambitious plan to refit every secondary school recently revealed it is up to £10 billion over budget and almost two years behind schedule in a discredited PFI sham.

Like the college rebuilding, the scheme to renovate England's secondary schools could grind to a halt because banks are not lending money as building firms struggle to raise the cash needed to take part in the £45 billion 'Building Schools for the Future' scheme.

The college confusion illustrates the reality behind the delusions of Brown's pledge to bring forward capital works as the recession bites and makes a mockery of the spin to give priority to training and apprenticeships which are at the heart of further education.  

Fine words are one thing but with a government living on borrowed time with borrowed money, delivering on an over ambitious and unrealistic promise is quite another. 

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Inflated GCSEs Let Everyone Down

The government's obsession with GCSE targets is an inflatable joke. They've let the schools down, they've let the pupils down and they've let themselves down.

Schools are playing the education system and fighting government obsession with league tables, to produce record GCSE results, to stave off closure and meet unrealistic targets. A view shared by the leader in  today's Independent.

With the spotlight on school league tables, today's GCSE results show more and more pupils are being entered for soft option and 'pointless' vocational subjects to boost results and school performance. The biggest jump in top grades since 1990, according to the BBC. 

Traditional tough subjects like physics and chemistry and being replaced by the easier combined science and languages shunned altogether. Single subjects are being rebranded as 'studies' which require less rigourous academic study.

Schools, afraid of being branded failures, are coming under increasing pressure, as the government tries to switch schools to its flagging Adonis academies programme - using PFI schemes to keep public spending off the balance sheet and handing control over to big business backers, sympathetic to the government. 

In June, it was highlighted by the Orange Party here, that the government is planning a cull of one in five secondary schools in England, unless they make the grade and hit the benchmark targets of 30% of pupils gaining five good GCSEs including maths and English. 

In a desperate attempt to boost targets, the government has already threatened to take funding away from so-called 'specialist schools', which promote themselves in areas like arts, technology, unless they deliver.

These schools face being stripped of funding and placed under the control of New Labour sympathisers as part of the 're-education' process.

The 638 schools targeted are being unfairly stigmatised as 'failing' as an excuse to hand them over to the vast army of education consultants and bureaucrats in privately managed academies.

Teaching unions are rightly indignant and reject this "focus on failure and closure".

Meanwhile, the government is trying to massage the GCSE figures by introducing course-work modules and more retake opportunities for students. 

In an attempt to produce a meaningful 16+ examination and counter the spin, some schools have started to switch pupils to the International GCSE which is more akin to the old 'O' level.

Today's artificial 'record' GCSE results come hard on the heels of last week's artificial 'record' A-level results. Both spun in a desperate attempt to prop up the government's failed education policies which are failing our children. 

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Ministers 'Failing' Schools Gimmick

Schools secretary Balls' latest academy plan for 'failing schools' is a cheap gimmick, a government wheeze to privatise state education and put it in the hands of the 'education' business.

New Labour has squandered millions of pounds on education over the past decade and little has been achieved. How embarrassing.

The much vaunted 'flagship' plan for academies is stalling. It's not working fast enough for its architect, Lord Adonis. So schools are being unfairly stigmatised as 'failing' as a pathetic excuse to hand them over to the vast army of education consultants and bureaucrats in privately managed academies.

This has nothing to do with raising standards or performance and everything to do with the half-baked ideas of politicians who are systematically undermining English state schools to save face and put their own political self-interest over the education of children.

The cull is targeting one in five secondary schools in England, so in two years time (election time?) almost one in 10 secondary schools will have academy status.

The teaching unions are rightly indignant and reject the "focus on failure and closure". These schools are not failing. They just haven't met the ridiculous and unrealistic targets set by this government.

The education of our children should not be in the hands of politicians looking for cheap headlines and education consultants after a quick buck. Academies and trust schools are part of the problem, not the solution.

Maybe Edward Michael 'call me Ed' Balls (independent public school and Keble College, Oxford) and Andreas 'Lord' Adonis (independent public school and Keble College, Oxford) should listen to what the real and realistic education professionals have to say, starting with the Campaign for Real Education.

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