It has emerged that five times in the last fifteen months, Michael Gove has overruled the advice of School Playing Fields Advisory Panel to approve playing field sell-offs. This panel must, by law, give a recommendation on all sales before ministers make their final decision. The number of total sales since May 2010 is also higher than Gove previously announced – 30 rather than 21.
Before we get into any squabbles about the rights and wrongs of selling school playing fields, I’d like to direct you to Alan White’s excellent blog on the subject for the NS – as he points out, despite all the party-political howling about relative numbers of sales under different governments, there are only very tentative ways of determining the net figure, since we always talk about sales and don’t include the numbers of new fields.
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