Following yesterday’s cheaper, faster … and better? post, I must apologise for a lack of thoroughness in my research of the school building and maintenance section of the Gov.UK website. At the time of writing I had only read one of the DfE’s latest press releases, dated 21st September 2015, about their Priority School’s Building Programme’s new and clearly very modern schools.
It appears that one of the sentences that I elected to look at more closely-
Thanks to the PSBP, school buildings are being rebuilt faster and cheaper than those built under the previous school building initiative – Building Schools for the Future (BSF).
-was not simply a cheeky final flourish but a kind of catch-all punchline, if you will: one that also features in the second departmental press-release. I didn’t quote the final paragraph in full yesterday, but here are the two extra killer sentences that add to the general effect of a triumphant ta-dah!
Under the BSF it took 3 years for construction work to begin. This was slashed to 1 year for the PSBP, with projects costing around a third less.
This second press release, the one I neglected to write about yesterday, has the catchy headline Derby school reopens in multi-million pound hi-tech building, words that seem to positively drip with the promise of expenditure and investment (bringing the phrase having one’s cake and eating it to mind). It also makes some rather thrilling claims for the new school buildings, for instance:
Infants and juniors will all be taught under 1 roof, rather than in 2 separate buildings as previously.
Rather disappointingly, the word modern only occurs three times, losing out to the press release about the West Midlands primary academy featured in yesterday’s post, which scored four moderns and a mod-cons. Although I suppose two high-tech’s must counts for something.
Architecture and Education 