BSF, the current government’s Building Schools for the Future programme has once more been attacked for wasting taxpayers money. The latest news reports focused on the huge sums being paid to consultants and quoted Michael Gove as saying, Millions has already been spent on consultants with hardly any improvements actually delivered, while Ed Balls hit back with jibes about the Tories turning office buildings into schools. I would point out that one of the most delightful senior schools I have ever visited (and I suspect I’ve visited a few hundred more than Mr Balls) was in a Stockholm office building.

Before writing this, I did a bit of net research and found an absolute plethora of similar critical news stories dating right back to the earliest years of the programme and as I have just left my old company, where I have been heavily involved in BSF work since the very first bid began in Bristol, 5 years ago, I thought it would be a good opportunity to reflect frankly on my experience.

I started by considering listing the things I have seen which have shocked me: the perfectly good, recently built buildings which are being demolished, for example and the way appointments at local and national level are driven not by educational experience or professionalism, but by politics; the Kafkaesque way PfS employees police the programme, sitting silently at the back of meetings, contributing nothing, like some irascible, mediocre school inspector. But the list expanded so quickly I abandoned the idea and instead have these few reflections to offer colleagues and others still involved in the programme.

Five years ago, before the programme kicked off, I was asked for my views on it at a company board meeting because I had already built up a some experience of the people and businesses who were positioning themselves to get involved. I made two simple points. One, I was pretty dismayed at the fact that some of these people thought you built a school for 20 years. All great schools have two things in common, stability and longevity, and if you don’t build with that kind of vision, you may well build a school… but not a great school. The second was that I felt the government’s professed aim at the time, to rebuild every secondary school in the UK, was likely to turn into something less ambitious quite quickly and that some schools were likely to get a lick of paint. At the time I was told I was wrong and there were “no weasel words from government.” Within months I was proved right and most schools are actually being refurbished: not rebuilt.

At the very first presentation I gave to building companies before the programme began, I stressed how important ownership of space was in a school not just for discipline and maintenance, but because it is perhaps one of the most powerful tools any secondary school teacher has. That is as true now as it was then.

But above all, if you want to build great schools, ask advice from people who run and manage great schools, not techno-zealots or local politicians. I was really delighted a few months ago when the German headmistress of a perfectly good secondary school, currently housed in dreadful seventies buildings told me and my colleagues, I'm not the least interested in building as change agent, because we could get A stars...in a shed.

As the film director Josef Von Sternberg said when he disowned his film, Macao, Instead of fingers in that pie, a whole bunch of clowns immersed entire parts of their anatomy.  That has been my experience of BSF.