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….

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.

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”.

Peering through the new Programme for Government under Banking we have this gem:

We will work with the Bank of England to investigate how the process of including housing costs in the CPI measure of inflation can be accelerated.

It goes to show that the smear campaigns against George Osborne have been untrue; he is not a chancer, he is a chancellor. (To use that old Labour pun.)

A lot of the justice and home affairs ‘pillar’ is dependent on a mutual recognition of rights and liberties between member-states, and this is effectively what the ECHR has become – a minimum standard for all member states. To withdraw would create, effectively, a constitutional crisis in the EU. (Not that the ECHR orginates from the EU, it comes from the Council of Europe)

I don’t think that anyone is representing the Conservative Party position correctly here, a British Bill of Rights has been suggested for a long time, and even when the European Convention on Human Rights was being made it was suggested as a possibility for the future. Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights have been considering this issue at length, Gordon Brown has expressed interest in this policy – indeed, it was accepted by the Labour Party back in 1997 that the Human Rights Act was not the final word when it came to rights in the UK.

It was accepted therein as clear that any British Bill of Rights would have to build on the ECHR, and could not be a step backwards in that regard. That is most likely what will happen, not necessarily even to give us new rights, but simply to make the whole thing more palatable to the public, which is why Cameron wants to create a British Bill of Rights to legitimate the culture of human rights in the UK and to build upon it, making the HRA  redundant.

If anyone, including Cameron, ever suggested (and some of the grassroots of the party have, sadly) that taking away ECHR rights was a realistic possibility, then they’ve either not considered it properly or are talking rubbish. People have either fallen into this trap, or are purposely exploiting the public’s ignorance on the matter in the name of political gain. The ECHR is one of the greatest documents on freedom ever written, now it’s time to make it legitimate, and even more refined.

I’m going to ignore how loaded that question on the ConHome survey was and just tackle the point, has the influence of the right been diminished? If what they mean is that rabid Euroscepticism has been dropped, then yes, if what they mean is that the coalition take a more serious view on climate change then some old Tory figures would like then yes, Cameron has reduced the power of the right. If however, you’re looking for a smaller state, more personal responsibility, and more freedom which we claim to stand for in the Conservative party then we have a bright future ahead of us.

Look at the Liberal Democrat appointments to the cabinet: Vince Cable, while there have been rumours thrown around by all parties as to whether he would be able to work with George Osborne (Which can’t be confirmed) there is another report today that he would have preferred a coalition with the Labour Party. This would fit in, given that he is an ex member – Ken Clarke described him as a social democrat but this is under the assumption that views don’t change, and his have changed drastically. Cable contributed to the Orange Book, written by leading Liberal Democrat figures which called for a renewed look at classical liberalism, sadly it doesn’t seem possible to get a copy in print if you need a clue as to what Cable’s outlook is now you merely have to look at a report he wrote for Reform (Yes, that centre right thinktank) calling for most of the brunt to come from reducing public spending and which included some of the measures that the Conservative right called for, the scrapping of regional development agencies being a case in point. Cable also has things to say about Europe, notably that “the CAP is an economic, environmental and moral disaster”.

Again David Laws as Chief Secretary to the treasury should be a pleasing appointment. When he worked work and pensions and then, in 2007, to speak on children, families and schools he earned plaudits from some in the Conservative Party in this role, have places like Conservative Home forgotten that he agrees with almost all of our education policy? Is there any wonder how our radical free schools program and pupil premium has managed to stay in the agreement? Laws is another contributor to the Orange Book, and as a former investment banker we can be sure that he’ll be shredding through wasteful spending in no time at all. If you have any doubts then this clip from the Liberal Democrat conference in 2008 is one to watch where we can see his commitment to localism a smaller state, and measures to reduced educational inequality, although none of us would agree with his sentiments towards the end about the Tories.

In work and pensions, Iain Duncan Smith has managed to secure that key post, which will be vital in tackling Welfare dependency, there’s no doubt that the work that the CSJ have done over the years has been mostly excellent, and while Liberal Democrats may has some issues with the prescriptions, I’m sure we can agree on the analysis. On drug dependency, on welfare reform, if these aren’t the things the Tory right want tackling, what do they want our government to focus on? Steve Webb, another Orange Booker (Are we starting to see a theme here?) argues that liberals should not take a laissez-faire approach to the family, and that reforms are desperately needed in the NHS – we spelled out our priorities in three letters – NHS

Conservative Home pick up on the quote that Michael Gove made: “We have five years when Conservatives can vanquish some of the myths that have grown up about us.” and use it to imply that Cameron wants to vanquish the right wing of the party, in fact it is quite the opposite. The aim is to vanquish that rather than squabbling over internal politics (As was the case towards the end of the Thatcher years and the Major years) we put differences aside and implement our values. With our colaition with the Liberal Democrats there should be no issue with that.