It’s pre-launch still, but someone may have noticed that we stopped blogging a while back.

This is obviously because everything has been going so smoothly for the coalition… *cough*

We missed the Budget (which was better than expected), and Gove’s schools fiasco (which is actually still going on – see Thomas’ article below). We also missed the launches of the online efforts to get public ideas to put in October’s spending review, and for laws to be repealed by the Great Repeal Act.

Other than that some men have been kicking around balls in South Africa, inexplicably watched by millions across the globe. A German Octopus named Paul predicted that Spain would win. He was right. You honestly couldn’t make it up.

Despite claims to the contrary from the Labour party, it is simply not true that the scrapping of Building Schools for the future was a breaking of a promise made by George Osborne not to cut the totals of capital spending. A casual glance towards the actual budget would make it clear: the Government will make no further cuts to capital spending compared with the plans that it inherited. It did make clear, however, that it would undertake a fundamental review of all capital spending plans to ensure they are affordable and to identify the areas of spending that will achieve the greatest economic returns. Michael Gove made it clear in his statement to the house that he was cancelling the approach of BSF because it was an expensive, long winded and inefficient way of building schools. He did not say he was cancelling all new schools building. According to the actual figures the Coalition government is going to spend as much on new capital projects as the outgoing Labour government, in that case they might end up building more schools than Labour for the same amount of money.

Looking at the cost of the programme in February 2004, the DCSF said that 200 schools would be built by 2008. In fact only 42 (just under a quarter) were ready in that timescale. The National Audit Office estimates that the overall cost of the programme has also increased by 16-23% in real terms, with delays being more and more frequent over the years it has been in place, in 2007, in a memorandum to the Select Committee for Education and Skills, the Government admitted: “There has been significant slippage in BSF projects in waves 1-3, with the majority of projects behind the ideal project timelines, an understatement given the actual number of these schools that have been opened , and recently Nottinghamshire county council spent £5 million on the scheme without a single brick being laid, another report by the Public Accounts Select Committee found that “the Department and PfS has wasted public money by relying on consultants to make up for shortfalls in its own skills and resources.” Has the Labour obsession with stocking up on masses of consultants been the driving factor around high cost and low results? The current approach isn’t good for school buildings, this isn’t good for the public finances, and it isn’t good for the both the children and teachers in any school across the country. Nor is it good for the people in the local area who object to some of the proposals made , a number of schools that local areas wanted to keep open or refurbish have been demolished. The Victorian Society says that a number of fine Victorian schools have either been demolished or taken out of use as a result of the programme. Many local authorities as well as a large number of other senior figures working on BSF have expressed concerns about the role of Partnerships for Schools (PfS) – the quango charged with delivering the BSF programme. One described them as “marching round the country in their jackboots, telling local authorities what to do” One example of which being that schools that were using BSf funds had to use 10% of the sizeable budget for computers and other technology, despite the spurious evidence it improves standards, and not being clearly taught how to use it (A common feature of all my old lessons.)

Why should we persist with an expensive bureaucratic programme which tramples on any concerns that don’t correspond with the wishes of Ed Balls? Some headteachers have said they had feared that their funding might be jeopardised if they were critical publicly of a programme representing such powerful interests, no-one denies that we need to build more schools, no-one denies that some schools need to be refurbished, but we can do this in a much better way, which some Tory MPs should attempt to understand.

As well as stamping out the message that has been blared out in the media that there will be ‘no new schools’ the coalition need to also quash the outlandish claims from the Labour party that BSF improved school standards, BSF is a bit like buying a new TV – the new set looks great when you put in the corner of your sitting room, but it’s the programmes that actually make you want to keep coming back for more – and after a while, you forget that you have even got a new telly! If the programmes haven’t improved in the meantime, everything goes back to how it used to be. The Labour party have repeatedly said that BSF is not just a “bricks and mortar programme” and that the buildings programme should act as a “catalyst” for wider scale “educational transformation”, they’ve attempted to define “educational transformation” many times, yet its definition has always been unclear. One senior advisor and former headteacher felt that the coupling of new buildings with “transformation” meant we might be erecting the 21st century equivalent of Victorian follies, saying: “I think there is a danger that we will build chrome and glass edifices to the egos of certain headteachers.” (Which judging by the treatment given to a local headteacher that lent a lot of support for the Labour party in exchange for a glass palace may well be true.)

It isn’t just speculation that pours cold water on the claims that BSF drastically improved standards. An exhaustive report for the Design Council found “clear evidence that extremes of environmental elements (for example, poor ventilation or excessive noise) have negative effects on students and teachers and that improving these elements has significant benefits. However, once school environments come up to minimum standards, the evidence of effect is less clearcut. Our evaluation suggests that the nature of the improvements made in schools may have less to do with the specific element chosen for change than with how the process of change is managed.”. PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC) for the Government in its first evaluation of BSF in 2007.following a review of the literature in the US and the UK this report concluded that, while there was a clear negative impact of poor design on attainment, the claim that good design brings benefits needed to be tested further in the BSF programme because the causality could not be proved. Other factors affecting attainment are, unsurprisingly, school leadership, pedagogical factors, socio-cultural factors and the curriculum. Its second evaluation, published in January 2009, reinforced this view: “In the statistical analysis of the impact of capital expenditure on pupil attainment, our results mirror the existing literature in not finding a strong correlation between the two. The results as a whole suggest a positive impact of capital on attainment, but the magnitude is likely to be very small. We also found evidence for considerable diminishing returns to capital investment.”.

The coalition must stress that pedagogical factors that were mentioned in the PSC review are going to be tackled through the introduction of ‘Free Schools’ and the expansion of the Academy programme which will allow for different styles of teaching to thrive, rather than focus on school buildings like the Labour party will insist on doing as it is the most obvious thing to attack , it’s key to highlight that Ofsted recently failed one of the first schools to be built through the BSF programme, Sandon High, in Stokeon- Trent, to give weight to the idea that other things must be tackled other than buildings, and can achieve emphasis on different style of teaching through holding up examples like Toby Young’s grammar comprehensive, and Lord Young’s technical colleges . We must stress the waste of money and the use of consultants, the crippling of autonomy of teachers, and constantly remind as to what what benefits these new schools can bring.

We base our results on what our children learn, not the number of glass palaces we claim (And fail!) to build, and as for Gove’s delivery when he announced the policy? Well, there may well have been some stichup on the way….

So, David Laws appears to have been a member of the Cabinet for 18 days.

But whose was the shortest stint? There’s a lot of history to sift through, but Twitter has come to my aid.

Fox Maule was President of the Board of Control for 16 days in 1852 (5th to 21st February)

Thomas Milner Gibson was President of the Poor Law Board for 16 days in 1859 (24th June to 9th July), but then went on to become President of the Board of Trade, so stayed in the Cabinet.

Sidney Herbert was Secretary of State for the Colonies for 15 days in 1855 (8th-23rd February).

James Waldegrave, 2nd Earl Waldegrave was de facto (though the term did not yet exist) PM for 4 days in 1757 (8th to 12th June).

Earl Temple was Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary for 4 days in 1783, two of which were spent finding his successors.

William Pulteney, 1st Earl of Bath was de facto PM for 2 days with Carteret as Secretary of State in 1746 (10th-12th February). According to Wikipedia, the exact figure is 48 hours, 52 minutes, 11 seconds.

However, the unclear winner seems to be Robert Peel in 1839. He certainly accepted the Queen’s invitation on 8th May, but she asked Melbourne back the following day when she refused his proposed changes to the Royal Household. He would thus have been PM for about a day, and thus a member of the Cabinet.

The problem with this episode, as well as the 1746 Bath ministry is that they hardly count. Depending on your pedantry however, the safest winner would be Earl Temple with his 4 days in control of two of the largest departments. Poor guy.

According to the excellent Tim Roll-Pickering, the briefest ministerial (if not Cabinet) career was that of Lord Frederick Cavendish, appointed Chief Secretary for Ireland on 6th May 1882, and murdered that same afternoon.

A similar ministerial non-Cabinet career was that of George Cowper, who was Parliamentary Under-Secretary to the Foreign Office from 13-14th November 1834.

(Thanks go to Tim Roll-Pickering, James Burdett and Ian Burgess for helping me out via Twitter)

It turns out David Laws has resigned, being replaced by Danny Alexander.

I very much hope he returns. He was able and competent, and possibly the only outwardly libertarian Cabinet member.

I have no opinion of Mr Alexander as yet, but I very much hope he rises to the occasion. He’s got some massive figurative shoes to fill, even if they were left by a physically small man.

With his resignation, Laws will have sought to retain some of his integrity and moral standing. To many, he should not have resigned at all, so his reputation will only increase. His noble political self-sacrifice will ensure that the perception of “new politics” will remain intact. He is the Coalition’s first martyr. Hopefully he will remain its last.

Edit: It turns out both the Prime Minister and his Deputy have indicated that they hope David Laws will be back in government at some stage in the future. I can’t wait until the next reshuffle.

So, it turns out David Laws may have had some expenses complications. It also turns out he’s gay. Frankly, I don’t care.

The man is able, competent, and should remain as Chief Secretary to the Treasury. His private life is none of my business, and it has no bearing on his suitability for the job. It may be interesting as gossip, and some may find his expenses reprehensible, but he’s bloody good at his job and ought to stay.

Once upon a time our politicians could get away with just about anything. Lloyd George apparently sold peerages, Henry Temple, the 3rd Viscount Palmerston apparently seduced the young wife of a journalist at the age of 78, as well as having numerous affairs, and George Canning and Robert Stewart, Lord Castlereagh fought each other in a duel. Even Arthur Wellesley, the 1st Duke of Wellington fought a duel as Prime Minister, and William Ewart Gladstone is said to have invited prostitutes into Number 10 for “correction”. These were all great men who did great things.

I said only a few days ago that Laws was one to watch. He still is.

Vince Cable has resigned as deputy leader of the parliamentary Lib Dems to concentrate on his cabinet role. “So what?” I hear you cry. Well, the Deputy Leader of the party, whoever it turns out to be, will have a crucial effect on the coalition and its running. If we elect a bullish anti-Tory that could have some serious repercussions…

So far, the only declared candidate is Tim Farron, although other names being thrown about include Don Foster, Lorely Burt, and the inevitable Simon Hughes. There was an early push for Jo Swinson to put herself forward, but she has declined.

There is a movement abroad to elect someone female to the role, if only to counter the bad press we have been getting on equalities since the electorate rejected our huge numbers of stellar female candidates – Susan Kramer, Julia Goldsworthy, Sandra Gidley, Bridget Fox, hell, even Hilary Myers in my own constituency. The fact that El Presidente and the party chair are both female doesn’t seem to cut much ice with the media, or the public, neither of whom pay any attention to either of these roles. The problem with this proposal is that there isn’t that big a pool to choose from. Lynne Featherstone, utterly awesome as she is, is a minister, and so is Sarah Teather. Lorely is chair of the party. Jenny Willott is due for maternity leave soon. Tessa Munt has endorsed Tim Farron. Jo has ruled herself out. That leaves Annette Brooke as the only female MP who is non-ministerial who could run… And nobody knows who she is.

So it looks like our MPs are going to be left with a choice between Simon Hughes, the perpetual candidate, and Tim Farron. Which means that the public face of our leadership is going to remain white middle-class middle-aged men in suits. Oh well, at least Tim is properly Northern…

The Future Jobs fund was broadly speaking a gimmick, and it has been condemned by a number of organisations that work with young people, including Rathbone. It ‘churns’ the NEET numbers rather than reducing them, and gets them trapped even more in a “low pay, no pay” cycle, which goes on into their 30’s. At best it’s a patchy solution to direly run careers services and not getting people the GCSE’s (Level 2 qualifications) earlier on, which stop people from getting onto the apprenticeship courses, A levels, or the basic skills they need to progress. When the money saved from cutting such waste is funding 50,000 new apprenticeship places, FE, and social housing, there shouldn’t be an outcry from the left – the goal is to get people into long term sustainable employment.

Apprenticeships are highly sought after, very competitive, and few and far between as it stands. Young people who are NEET have highly specialist needs. The ability to provide genuine, successful support to them does exist, and we believe the issue is as much about the sustainability of interventions as it is about getting the overall number of young people who are NEET down at any one time. Hopefully, we can have support from all parties for that, as well as embracing the need for Welfare reform as pointed out by that Labour blogger Hopi Sen.

Did you see it? No, of course you didn’t, because you’re not a geek like me, but David Laws’ defence yesterday of the £6bn cuts this year was masterful.

One Conservative MP was relieved to see the return of Gladstonian liberalism to the treasury. Laws accepted the compliment and then added that he hoped to bring social liberalism to the job as well. Conservatives and LibDems all seemed to murmur in contentment.

With his blonde LibDem hair, his dark blue Conservative shirt and his Coalition green tie, Laws epitomised the spirit of the coalition, giving an assured and confident delivery. He batted away Labour objections, channelled comments from his own side against the opposition, and dealt calmly and confidently with an absolutely fuming Dennis Skinner. At one point he even managed to defend localism and attack Big Government.

Labour was clearly in disarray, although without the need for patronage and no clear leadership, their MPs should have been on top form at holding the government to account. As individuals they were, but they could not land a single blow on Laws. Poor Darling was reduced to making his main criticism (rather hypocritically) the fact that the announcements had not first been made in the Commons.

Laws is one to watch. I wonder if next time he’ll wear a blue tie with a green shirt… or maybe dye his hair?

Is the Labour Party thinking seriously about becoming the BNP-lite? No, probably not, but the leadership candidates are still floundering around trying to outmanoeuvre each other on how badly Labour made mistakes on immigration, although still missing out the fact that most people are angry over how they were misled, rather than it all being about the numbers. Job security is important to people, being able to support your family through the recession is key, and the only candidate who wants to shy away from using immigrants as scapegoats is Diane Abbot (Not that I like agreeing with her!) – the fact is, none of them really have much of a clue about the situation, or the solutions for these (so often their core vote) working class communities.

The number of NEETs has risen to around a million yet employers expect a continued shift towards higher skilled jobs. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again – reforming education, and providing the skills that we need are the cures to solving concerns about immigration. What these young people describe is a period over years of churning between jobs, schemes, courses and unemployment; that is sometimes referred to as the “low pay, no pay” cycle. The current trend of interventions typically give young people six months’ training e.g. the Future Jobs Fund, “churning” the NEET numbers rather than reducing them – these were gimmicks to improve Brown’s election prospects, not solutions to our skills crisis – there is is nothing in place for these people to make the transition to the skills that they need for the way the jobs market is going in the future. The North East has a lower proportion of adults qualified to Level 3 and 4, and of those without qualification, than is the case for England and Wales as a whole. Only half of young people across the country currently leave school having achieved the benchmark of an A*-C grade in English and maths GCSE. Investing in the employability skills of young people and developing the occupational skills of everyone in the workforce are essential to support the country’s economic recovery and long term growth, and none of their candidates have the ideas, or the drive to tackle these problems. The pushing through of the BSF programme just before the election again shows how they’ve clung to gimmicks over solid policy.

We will need more flexibility in the exams systems so that state schools can offer qualifications like the IGCSE, which currently only private schools take on, giving them that ability to acquire the skills asked for by businesses.

We need to improve the quality of vocational education, including increasing flexibility for 14–19 year olds – 70% of firms want reform to focus on making the content of qualifications more business relevant, the same proportion would welcome the flexibility to mix and match different qualification units , and also the creation of new Technical Academies to diversify provision.

We need more schemes like Teach First, to build on the Graduate Teacher Programme, and seek other ways to improve the quality of the teaching profession to get the best teachers to the children that need it the most early on, as well as supplying them with the money they need to carry this out.

Most importantly we need to give parents, teachers, charities and local communities the chance to set up new schools, as part of our plans to allow new providers to enter the state school system in response to parental demand, the experiences in Sweden and America showing that it can transform the lives of those on the bottom rung of society.

All of these things I’m proud to say are in our coalition agreement. These are our answers to transforming education and tackling the concerns of immigration: if all that the Labour Party want to do is make noises about the problems we face without remedies, they may as well take the accolade of being the “BNP-lite”.