Marple Website Community Calendar
Archive => Archived Boards => Local Issues => Topic started by: Basementlife on July 07, 2010, 01:34:29 PM
-
Last week the coalition government released a document detailing it's scrapping of some school building projects. A new document has now been released, after Education Secretary Michael Gove acknowleged that mistakes had been made in the original.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/10538754
However the document linked from point 2 under 'Further Information'
at http://www.education.gov.uk/news/news/bsf-review seems to have no Stockport information. Is it tucked away elsewhere ?
I was wondering if the Rose Hill rebuild was going ahead.
-
"I was wondering if the Rose Hill rebuild was going ahead."
That's a good question. I hope it isn't as I'd rather the school was split over two sites as it it now. At least we still have a large green field on Walton Drive. When the school goes, we'll get more flats/housing shoe horned into the available space. Wouldn't it be nice if it was left as a park? There's my answer to if I won a silly triple roll-over, I'd buy and maintain the Walton Drive site! BMX track, paddling facilities, benches, park attendant, luxury toilets etc. etc.
-
The projects being scrapped by the new government are all part of the Building Schools for the Future programme, known as BSF. This was the last government's scheme for getting new school and hospital buildings without paying for them (yet). It was called the Private Finance Initiative (PFI). Basically the PFI is a version of the 'never-never' - private finance (rather than the taxpayer) pays for building a school or hospital, and the Government pays them back over a period of years - and ends up paying much more, of course.
Stockport did not have any BSF projects, which until now many of us thought was a pity - Marple Hall School's buildings being pretty shabby. I believe that those local authorities which are regarded as more 'deprived' than Stockport were first in the queue for BSF funding. So now BSF has bitten the dust, but as far as we're concerned it makes no difference, except that in due course Stockport would probably have been able to get in to the scheme as well, had it survived.
The Rose Hill scheme was nothing to do with BSF, however.
-
Thank you Dave, for an excellent explanation.
-
And a thanks from myself Dave, for that enlightenment.
Memo to self: more research next time. !!