YES! No more public sector job ads in the Grauniad!

[longfingernails]

www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2010/jul/06/advertising-local-newspapers

Public sector vacancies should be on a .gov site. Of course if a private company runs the website more cheaply than the civil service, it is OK to contract out the operation of the website - but not to waste money paying for ads themselves.

Anyway, an excellent move. It will save money, and lead to more scrutiny of the hordes of non-jobs which abound so plentifully. Destroying just about the only income stream the Guardian has, given its tiny circulation, is just a pleasant side effect!

Well done Eric Pickles!

LFN - Do you think the Guardian will have to do an 'internet walled garden' thingy to survive?

gosh bet no-one ever thought of that before fancy that - we can use that tinterweb thing to put jobs on and everything then people can find them from their computers. glad we pay that pickles guy so much money for these brilliant ideas. what next?

jackstarbright Not sure.

I think the Guardian Media Group uses offshore trusts to avoid paying lots of tax. Also they own Auto Trader which is meant to be very profitable.

In any case, I'm not going to buy it, and I'm glad that my tax money won't be wasted paying for Polly Toynbee's Italian villa.

sanfairyann

Of course the idea isn't revolutionary - people have been calling for it for ages. Labour were hardly going to kick away the Guardian's only real source of ad revenue, were they?

Anyway, the taxpayer funded Guardian ads have been a bete noire of rightwingers for ages. The arguments for getting rid of this anachronistic practice are good anyway, but even if the sums of money saved are tiny, the fact that the Guardian is getting kicked makes it extra sweet!

It's the same for the Trade Union Modernisation Fund. If the trades unions haven't modernised after so long, they aren't going to now, are they? It's basically a taxpayer bribe to the Labour party. The annual amounts are tiny in the big scheme of things - a few million - but the satisfaction it will bring to Tories when it is scrapped will be astronomical!

Is this the best news you've had all day, longfingernails?

I would have thought that the huge cuts to education might have cheered you up.

LFN - don't you read the online comments following Polly T's articles? I think you might enjoy them . Not that I'd pay either.

Sorry, but didn't the Guardian put their support behind the LibDems prior to the last election (thus incurring much wrath from the readership - i.e. me)? They're not in the lap of the Labour Party these days - do try to keep up. And I see public sector ads all the time in my local rag. I don't really see the problem - surely advertising jobs to the widest audience possible, thus getting the best candidates possible, matters?

tethersend

I am happy at the Guardian cuts.

I am not happy at the education cuts but merely realistic. BSF was bureaucratic and wasteful. The litany of paperwork and regulation that contractors had to go through cost about £10m just for a construction company to place a bid, according to the guy on the Today programme this morning.

And I would much prefer education funding to be sustainable in the long-term rather than going on short-term spending sprees. That means sorting out the economy.

Of course we need decent classrooms but in general I would rather spend on teachers than on whiteboards.

Hassled One of the best sources of schadenfreude for Conservatives is seeing the Guardian coming to terms with the consequences of their editorial judgement I strongly suspect they regret their flirtation with the Lib Dems, and have gone back to Labour now!

Anyway, I don't think there is a problem finding enough suitable candidates for jobs at the moment - indeed, as the Guardian itself reported this morning, on average 70 graduates are applying for each vacancy.

Yes, it was all about whiteboard replacement.

Great. If you could just pop along to my dilapidated school and explain to the children (100% free school meals) that all the work they have put in over the last three years was for nothing and that the new school they helped design won't happen, that'd be wonderful.

I'm sure they'll understand.

If you think that a single penny of the money saved will be spent on teachers, you are far more deluded than I thought. And that was pretty far.

tethersend

If Labour hadn't wasted so much money on regulations for new schools (such as prescribing the exact configuration of bike racks) then they could have refurbished far more.

Anyway, if Labour hadn't refurbished your school in 13 years despite it being 100% free school meals, they obviously didn't see it as a priority either, did they?

In general I am perfectly happy for education money to go to an expansion in Teach First as opposed to BSF, and to the new academies and free schools. Hopefully there will be a new free school in your area - it will seek out many of the free school meals children you talk about, because of the pupil premium they bring with them, and the extra competition will really drive up teaching standards.

Do you think that the Gove will give the schools enough money to buy umbrellas and wellies as well as whiteboards? The roofs of many schools are leaking so badly that in bad weather some can't use parts of the building at the moment.

this is not satire or sarcasm. it is real.

Repairing is different to rebuilding.

I think the repair budget was kept the same as Labour's existing plans, though I might be wrong? Things like leaking roofs will be repaired at more or less the same pace as they would have been under Labour.

Toby Young on the BSF programme makes some interesting points.

"BSF was simply never going to survive in its current form in austerity Britain, regardless of the outcome of the election. It was a model of inefficiency, a textbook example of everything that was wrong with Labour?s attitude to public expenditure."

I will agree that the system was bureaucratic but this is throwing the baby out with the bathwater in many cases. The school where I work is not in too bad an outer shape except that the wiring caught fire four years ago shorting out the entire main building. The wifi, a year old at the time, has never worked properly (in my room and elsewhere) since.

It is just not up to providing the education the children need for this country to remain competitive.

longfingernails, have you ever been to a school?

"If Labour hadn't wasted so much money on regulations for new schools (such as prescribing the exact configuration of bike racks) then they could have refurbished far more."

This is just utter gibberish. I wonder what it's like in your head?

I teach in a PRU. Although we were rated as outstanding by OFSTED last month, we are prohibited from becoming and academy, and none of the children will be able to get into a 'free' school due to their ESBD needs.

Labour were 'refurbishing our school' through the BSF programme. Remember that?

Teach First? Well, that's just a load of shit. Untrained teachers requiring a huge amount of support, taking other teachers out of the classroom; and then going on to another career, probably in the private sector. Usually (About 50% of teach first graduates remain in teaching). Value for money, eh?

*an academy

thatbuzzingnoise

Rewiring could probably be done by a couple of local electricians over a weekend quite easily.

But actually, why does a school need wifi? I understand why teachers like it, but surely it is a massive distraction for pupils? And if it is useful in one particular room, say, the library - then a wireless router costs less than £50.

Repairing the roof isn't enough for many. Water damage will have penetrated the flooring as well.

For many schools it would be more cost efficient to rebuild. Our rooms are too small, the corridors too narrow. The faces of terrified yr 7's jostling with yr 10s and 11s between lessons is not nice. And our pupils are well behaved by and large.

The learning environment in some of these schools are so bad the kids ought to be rewarded just for turning up. I know that I would be truanting in one or 2 schools I have visited recently.

because we have had 30 laptops to turn any classroom into an ICT suite. There is no money to replace the buggers now so never mind.

Replacing the wiring took more than 4 working days plus the weekend. And we only went back on day 5 because the head would by law have had to rent alternative school accommodation for if we were off for any longer. It took weeks for the wiring of the whole building to be inspected and to repair what had burnt.

you don't really know what you are taling about here LFN. but that is ok. your agenda is not really about schools anyway.

True enough, I took the discussion off at a tangent, apologies...

Still, at least I got a laugh before bed on what has been a pretty depressing day. LFN's views are hilarious.

Well, at least they would be if they weren't shared by those in power...

tethersend Well, the analysis seems to show that a BSF school project cost about 3 times as much to build as an equivalent private project, on average. That doesn't seem like a good use of taxpayer money to me.

A 50% retention rate for Teach First is much higher than I would have expected, given it actively targets the most challenging schools.

I accept that very different circumstances apply in PRUs to other schools. However, in such schools in particular, capital spending is probably far less important than getting the best teachers.

Shame you think it has to be either/or...

Strange that you would think the money saved will be spent on recruiting and retaining teachers...