The tl;dr of this Guardian on Labour cutting spending on schools article is that we have literally no money, so schools are going to have to start “tightening their belts” (a phrase used at least four times in that article), and a lot of small schools will have to close, or partner with others and share resources. Despite that, they still plan on opening at least 167 new Academies in the next year, albeit with them all having reduced budgets.

That’s analogous to building hundreds of level one pellet towers and hoping you can get to level fifty. It’s quantity over quality and that’s not how I want England’s education to be heading. I don’t care if people have to get up at seven o’clock in the morning to get a fifty minutes bus to school (I had to do that for college and it didn’t harm me, and I had to go up hill both ways). It’s freaking free. They should be happy to be getting it.

I’d rather people be getting a good, well funded education a bus ride away than being taught the difference between meiosis and mitosis from a browning leaflet from a museum, in some shack at the bottom of their street.

But I also think that schools don’t make the most out of their possible revenue avenues. For instance, my old school is a sports college so we had a pretty decent sports suite. I thought they rented it out during the evenings, but every time I pass there there’s clearly no one parked outside. People would pay good money to use the massive field, three good sized sports halls, and a fitness centre.

The school also has hundreds of computers just lying around at night. It’s a computing school too, so their equipment is nothing to sniff at. Why not rent those out during the evening to people doing night courses on how to use Word and whatever?

My school also has compulsory uniform. Why can’t some company has their logo on there? For instance, Adidas could have their logo on the pupils uniform; they’re generating brand loyalty from the kids, making uniform more fashionable (I guess), and hundreds of people will see the kids walking from and to home each day with the logo. It’s pretty good advertising. So long as the advertisers knew that they could have no control over what was being taught in the school, I don’t see a problem in that. The school could earn a hefty sum from that.

Schools need to quit looking for money from the government and start looking for ways they can make money for themselves.