We've failed economics

That was Tory sage Oliver Letwin’s contribution to the philosophy of modern Conservatism, and although it sounded more voter-friendly than Thatcher’s “society doesn’t exist” (ie every man for himself), the problem was that nobody knew what it meant - including members of the present Cabinet. So we owe a debt of gratitude to Michael Gove for getting down to brass tacks: what it meant was scrapping Building Schools for the Future.

The problems with the way BSF worked were many, and wearyingly familiar. But when it comes to the programme as a whole, the picture is more complex. After Tony Blair announced the policy in 2004, nothing happened. At the end of 2008, a mere 34 schools had been built and 14 refurbished - but by then an OECD study into international education standards had found that British secondary school pupils, who were eighth best at mathematics in 2000, were now 24th. They also fell from seventh to 17th in literacy. No other country fell out of the top 10 in either subject. A plausible interpretation of this result (which contrasted strangely with the ever increasing numbers of A grades those pupils were attaining) was that decades of underinvestment in the physical infrastructure of education were feeding through to the end product. The chickens were coming home to roost.

It’s hard to read our education special without suspecting that it’s the smallness of the exchequer rather than the bigness of the society that is motivating the new approach

One response to this crisis in British education would have been to acknowledge that BSF had indeed shown all the problems that arise when big government tackles programmes of this scale, partly because the spending of public money has to meet all kinds of standards that private money does not, partly because of the extraordinary difficulty our civil service has in doing anything new. However, whatever your ideology, after all those painful lessons had been learned it didn’t make much sense to abandon BSF at the point that output reached 167 renewed schools a year, which as any (South Korean) schoolchild can tell you is one every 2.18 days. Unless, of course, you just didn’t have the money to continue it …

It’s hard to read our education special, which is in effect a guide to school refurbishment, without suspecting that it’s the smallness of the exchequer rather than the bigness of the society that is motivating the new approach. Whichever way you look at it, £7.5bn will be taken out of demand for construction services, and the effect of that on our increasingly innumerate schoolchildren is not hard to predict. On the other hand, it’s also hard to read it without coming to the conclusion that the new system (if you can call it that) is going to be a lot more fun than BSF.

It’s going to be fun in the sarcastic sense, largely because projects will involve inexperienced but hands-on clients, nebulous groups of “stakeholders” that must be consulted and an uncertain regulatory framework. As Pascale Scheurer points out on page 41, this puts the client design adviser at the centre of the project - which makes the government’s decision not to fund Cabe’s service quite perverse. But it will also be genuine fun. As our case study shows, refurbishment can be as intellectually demanding as new build, and architects are going to enjoy the novel challenge of turning a magistrates’ court into a primary school. What to do with all those detention cells? Smaller firms are going to find that they’re back in the game. And as Scheurer argues, civil society may indeed play a part in the free school movement through online networks that are able to salvage experience gained on BSF. So although the future looks bleak, there is some scope to make the best of a bad job. And at least it won’t be boring …

Sarah Richardson, acting editor