Feature and news articles by Max Rashbrooke
While citizen involvement has become an election buzzword, local groups are left railing against the reality. A warm, sunny Sunday in April brings the season’s first sunbathers on to the shingled beaches of Hastings, in East Sussex. A perfect day, too, for promenading on the pier – or it would be if it hadn’t been...
Read more →As the heavy wooden disk loops through the air and crashes into the pins, flattening most of them, the cry goes up: “Good cheese!”. Both crash and cry echo around a small room, under the Freemasons Arms pub in Hampstead. This is London’s last functioning skittles alley. The game thrived in the 1930s, when hundreds of...
Read more →Could money be saved by turning empty office blocks, and even old Woolworths shops, into schools? Bristol Cathedral choir school’s principal, Neil Blundell, is striding along the corridor of the school’s newest building, the Parsonage, when he spots a pupil leaning against the wall, shirt-tails peeping out from beneath his sweater. “Would you like...
Read more →John Carleton is the head of Local Partnerships, the newest body trying to help councils drive a better bargain with private companies. He brings a wealth of experience from public service, banking, consultancy … and international rugby Perhaps one of the lowest points in John Carleton’s international rugby career, in which he garnered 32...
Read more →Haringey council “squandered” the equivalent of 700 social workers’ salaries on private consultants while overstretched staff failed to save Baby P, the Standard can reveal. Sharon Shoesmith’s department for children spent £23.8 million on external advisers for the borough’s school renovation programme between 2005 and 2008. The money – four times the recommended level...
Read more →The costs of planning and setting up new schools have soared by 50% under the government’s rebuilding programme, with one council paying consultants £24m before a single building had even been constructed. The massive rises in the cost of new privately financed schools – obtained under the Freedom of Information Act – have contributed...
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