Wedg1e
They call me Mr. Bodge-angles
- Messages
- 7,739
- Location
- Teesside, England
A couple of years ago i saw a statistic in the D&T magazine that in southern england over 100 schools had dropped D&T completely in the preceding year & shut their workshops. This has been going on for many years. Literally thousands of school workshops closed down & scrapped all over the country.
The rise of the Academy meant service providers built new schools across the country with workshops full of far eastern junk & scrapped all the good stuff, accountants & bean counters rule.
My daughter went to my old school; I left in 1980, she'd have been there '95 to 2000. Before she started we went to an open day; I was wandering round going "...and this was the French department... and in here we did English... Art... and...er... the tech drawing room I'm sure was here somewhere... and where the f*** has the metalwork shop gone? What are all these bloody computers for?".
The nearest thing the kids got to engineering was to hold bits of plastic over a hot plate (careful! It's hot!) and fold it to shape (letter racks rings a bell)... but they didn't even have to cut out the shapes, they were supplied pre-cut. With the rough edges dressed off.
A few years back there was talk of the school fitting out a new craft department: instead they closed the school, then knocked it down. It'll soon be an extension to the local council estate... the one that was quite pleasant when we lived there, but is no longer, as the offspring of the other chavvy estates not only demanded housing but were allowed to choose where that should be.