Is it a school or a carpark?
Britain’s most expensive state school is being built without a playground because those running it believe that pupils should be treated like company employees and do not need unstructured play time.
The authorities at the £46.4m Thomas Deacon city academy in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, due to open this autumn, also believe that the absence of a playground will avoid the risk of “uncontrollable” numbers of children running around in breaks at the 2,200-pupil school.
As Blood and Treasure remarked, it’s got everything that makes the Blair regime so vile: unaccountable private enterprises slopping at the state trough, the managerial structuring of everyday life, the idea of the population as the enemy to be strictly controlled and regimented for their own good, to be made into good little citizens, a distrust of everything not controlled by government –or preferably– PFI bureaucrats, “all melding into a kind of counter-insurgency approach to government”, as Jamie calls it.