© Reuters / Eddie Keogh
Children across the UK are being failed by four-fifths of schools that are "beyond their life cycle," while 75 percent of existing schools also contain asbestos, the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) claims.
With 250,000 extra school places needed by September, the current wave of new designs is not big enough to prevent overcrowding, the society for the architectural industry's "Building Better Britain" advisory report argues.
"Overcrowding in narrow corridors exacerbates bullying and harassment, fewer social areas outside classrooms limit students' abilities to socialize," the report adds.
The standardized "baseline" designs are 15 percent smaller than those built under the previous Labour government's "Building Schools for the Future" program, the group said. The report claimed the next government must increase the cost per square meter of new schools by 20 percent.
Comment: While school buildings are crumbling, the ruling elites are busily waging wars overseas and implementing new ways of controlling the domestic population. Such is the state of Western societies.