The real political manifesto for the next election won’t be education, education, education it’ll be green, greener and greenest!
While public service spending is tightening, Gordon Brown’s Comprehensive Spending Review is thought to have agreed to give the DfES an extra £100m to try and help schools cut their carbon emissions. Most of this money is likely to be spent on solar panels, high efficiency light globes and wind turbines, while water reduction, an equally if not more immediate and important environmental issue, doesn’t rate a mention.
The target of 2000 carbon neutral schools out of 30,000 will probably do much to help propagate Labour’s green education credentials, but the impact of throwing £100m at this area is dubious - surely the £45bn being spent on school refurbishment via BSF must already include this as a core part of the programme?
The absolutely mad bit of this initiative is that it is thought to have allocated £10m to twin UK schools with foreign schools, presumably who have their own ideas about saving energy. £10m would buy plenty of resources and extra teaching for a more direct impact on raising educational and environmental standards in school.
It took two decades for the idea of Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) to catch on in educational ICT. Most likely it will take another 20 for the same thing to happen in terms of energy efficiency.
