Don't Think of it as Decapitation, Think of it as a Challenge

Here is the magic whereby New New Labour intend to efficientise education spending without cutting frontline services (teachers, in Oldspeak): they have ordered head teachers to do the dirty work for them. The Department for Ignorance, Want and Family Values is planning to turn out a "document with examples of how to reduce costs", but the choice of whether to deprive classes of equipment or allow buildings to collapse will fall upon the head teachers; and so, the Government hopes, will the resulting public opprobrium. The Dickensianymous Minister for Human Resource Preparation, Vernon Coaker, trotted out the usual: real-terms funding, protecting the frontline, record numbers, record investment, tough and, inevitably, tougher. Daveybloke's Cuddly Secretary for Faith Schools, Charity Schools and Schools for Real People, Michael Gove, who believes that history should be taught as patriotic indoctrination, complained that "we cannot have a properly informed debate about the future of funding in schools" because "Ed Balls will not confirm which parts of his budget are protected and which face reductions" - quite unlike Daveybloke's Cuddly Conservatives, all of whose policies are such forthright models of luminous clarity. "The last thing we want is a return to the early 1990s, where schools had buckets catching water because they couldn't afford to repair things," said the general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, apparently unaware that those sad conditions afflicted only non-private schools and were thus a price worth paying. "You cannot get more for less," he continued, confirming that standards of teaching in arithmetic have indeed changed considerably since Gordon and his little Darling were at school.