The Pigeonhole

By The Flying Pig

Has anyone else noticed how much school property money goes into flash administration blocks these days?  

You arrive at a school and are greeted by a receptionist behind a huge counter in a spacious area with soft couches, huge pot plants and a groaning cups cupboard.    This admin area can be miles from the rest of the school, and sometimes without even an internal connection between it and the rest of the school.  

 You are escorted to the office of the principal and it's tucked away at one end of a dead-end corridor, and guarded by a dragon of a secretary.   It contains more comfy couches, a highly polished meeting table, a desk you could set up as a double bed, a coffee machine and the obligatory pot plants.   In another part of the admin block are somewhat smaller offices for the DPs, somewhat less guarded, but equally removed from the rest of the school.  

When you finally make it out of all this and into the staffroom and the teaching areas, it's like entering another country: chipped paint, shabby furniture, pocked flooring, not a pot plant in sight.   Teachers are coping without adequate heating or air conditioning, without curtains to block the sun, without acoustic tiles to muffle the sound of students at work.  

 I remember one case where a school had just spent hundreds of thousands on a flash new admin block, but ERO closed down the Science department temporarily because they didn't have safe storage of their chemicals.   What does this say about priorities?   Who is all this for?  

And these flash areas are not confined to our high decile schools.   How do poor families living in run-down rental housing feel when they come to these admin blocks to enrol their kids?   Impressed?   Or overwhelmed?   What happened to good old slightly shabby but friendly admin blocks that made families feel at home and were highly accessible to teachers?   And to putting the money where it really counts, into things that help teachers teach and students learn?  

Is this what Tomorrow's Schools and making principals into managers and competition for students have done to us?   How sad.