While the DCSF’s priority currently is to make all schools “zero-carbon“(an ambition which always somehow reminds me of Pol Pot’s “year zero” objective), this amusing take on today’s announcement that each school shall have the option of having a policeman on hand reminds us what schools were for before the state got too involved. A police blog has noted how this policy isn’t, as the government like to say, “joined-up” with the latest police procedures. It is becoming increasingly difficult to tell whether a new Government announcement is meant to be about crime or about education. In years to come, we can expect the two to blur until schools (or, by then, child management centres) look more like prisons, while prisons will look increasingly like schools. “Zero carbon” prisons will be an interesting challenge for architects!

The government’s pledge to re-build every secondary school in the country, together with the rapid rolling-out of the academies programme, has put school design at the forefront of the DCSF’s mind. Apparently not, according to the government’s architectural advisers who this week have expressed serious concern over the ‘substandard’ designs of the majority of current plans. Rather worryingly, the design quality architects propose to local authorities is currently largely irrelevant to whether their bid for the contract is successful. As a result, it turns out that 21 out of the 24 proposed school designs seeking planning permission today are, the people at the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, tell us, unsound.

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As father of two teenagers growing up in the nation’s capital, I am only too acutely aware of all the physical as well as moral dangers to which young people are exposed these days. No weekend passes hardly but that, along with countless other parents, I spend many hours plagued by mounting anxiety as to their physical and moral well-being, until, by the sound of their latch-keys turning in the door, I know them to have returned safely to the nest from wherever earlier that evening they may have sallied forth with friends.
No one can or should, therefore, reproach me for complacency or callousness if I say I am beginning to suspect that recent media concerns about a so-called epidemic of knife-crime as well as of drug-taking among the country’s young, may well be something of an artificially engineered moral panic that could obfuscate attention from being drawn to what needs to be done in relation to these problems.

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