Building Shiny New Schools for the Future.

The view from the public (school) sector - A boarder goes home for the summer hols

"Pa pulls up in his ropey old Audi. Massive cringe - The other boys zip home in brand new TVRs and Porsches, because their old men have made killings in the bond market or on their "property portfolios". My Pa's property porfolio amounts to a  crumbling old stately home and some cottages in Northumberland and Pa says that the upkeep means he'll never be able to afford a "fucking Porsche" which is no big deal apparently because they're driven by rich oiks anyway.

Everything's falling to bits on the estate. It's grimmer than school where the mould in the dormies was up to my shoulder this term. I shoved Dicky Drew against the mould last week and it left brown smears on his blazer. My mate Pablo told everyone that Dicky had shat himself in terror and it had all shot upwards. But Dicky then went and blubbed to the House Master and we all got end of term detention in that shithouse where the Removes jerk themselves off every lunchtime. Fuck, that place stinks of piss. It hasn't had a "lick of paint" for years and however hard we try we can't persuade the boys in Form One to chuck the old Dulux on their tongues and to give it that "lick" it richly deserves.

Ma and Pa couldn't give a toss about the dorms, although Ma says that if I left the old place and went to the local "Academy" school I could play my computer games in a shiny new "ICT suite". Pa says that these shiny new buildings are financed by a bunch of bloodsucking bankers, who charge an arm and a leg for buildings that will probably fall down within a decade.

He tells me to stop moaning about the dorms and the forms - it was the same in his bloody day. Shiny new buildings won't make you better at translating Cicero or Catullus. And mould is character building anyway. I told him that some of those bloodsucking  bankers he had referred to send their boys to the school nowadays. And he said "There you go. Even these arrivistes realise that a bit of mould won't do their precious little boys any harm. So why are they shoving their horrendous financing schemes on poor unsuspecting education ministers and their dim apparatchiks? It's just a bloody racket, spun by that crook and fraudster Brown and his bunch of Stalinist henchmen when Labour was in power. Well done Mister Gove for putting an end to this racket."

Then Ma tells Pa to stop ranting and says that she rather admires the architecture of the local "Academy". Pa says that just because it's designed by some wanker who lives in Islington, doesn't mean its worth twenty million quid to the taxpayer thank you very much. Then Ma just silently wanders over to the television and switches on Eastenders, while Pa storms off and locks himself in his study with his typewriter and a bottle of Jack Daniels. Ma says that if he didn't drink so much he'd see that his study could well do with a "lick of paint". I'm buggered if I don't agree with her."