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Hayek’s auction

So, the central planners couldn’t accurately estimate the values of Hayek’s personal effects because the necessary information was distributed among all the auction participants?

Via MR.

3 thoughts on “Hayek’s auction”

  1. BBC Fake News Exposed

    A £15million development grant, more teachers and a whopping to £125,000 pay rise – despite ‘Tory cuts’: Why the head teacher who claimed she had to clean loos should get full marks for school austerity scaremongering

    …The report explained: ‘The list of subjects Ms Lowe can’t afford to offer includes information technology, design and technology, and music.’ The story was headlined ‘The head who also cleans the school loos’ and was accompanied by a photo of Ms Lowe in a classroom of pupils.

    Yet the picture showed them in what seemed to be a well-equipped design and technology workshop. How did that fit with Ms Lowe’s claim that her school is too poor to offer design and technology on its curriculum? This apparent discrepancy leads to a much wider issue of how so-called ‘Tory cuts’ are being weaponised by opponents of the Government.

    As for Ms Lowe’s Tolworth Girls’ School, its student handbook states that it offers not just Design Technology (to A and AS levels) but also the other two subjects cited in the newspaper article: IT (to BTEC level 3), and Music (to A and AS level).

    Angela Rayner MP (Lab) congratulated the BBC for featuring Siobhan Lowe’s story and highlighted the cuts

    Meanwhile, the true state of the school’s finances is set out in paperwork that the school is required to file at Companies House.

    They suggest a very different state of affairs to the one presented by Siobhan Lowe.

    The financial statements reveal that the head-teacher herself received an inflation-busting pay rise of between £10,000 and £20,000 last year. Her annual package rose to between £125,000 and £130,000, plus another £15,000-£20,000 in pension contributions. The previous year, it was between £110,000 and £115,000.

    Cash-strapped indeed!

    Meanwhile, despite Ms Lowe saying she’s had to mop toilets because she can’t afford to employ cleaners, the school’s annual cleaning budget rose from £30,000 to £57,000. When these facts were reported this week, Ms Lowe said she’d been given her bumper pay-rise because ‘the pupil population of the school has increased significantly’.

    That, however, is not exactly true. The number of pupils has declined significantly in recent years, from 1,350 when it underwent an Ofsted inspection in 2012, to 1,262 when inspectors last visited in 2017. Its last financial statements, filed this month, state that there are 1,264 children on the roll. So what’s going on? I have reviewed all the school’s financial reports dating back to 2012, when it moved out of local authority control to become an academy, which has means it has to file records with Companies House.

    Siobhan Lowe has been headmistress throughout that period.

    The records shed more detail on her pay. In 2012, her salary is recorded as between £95,001 and £100,000. Considering that it is now between £125,000 and £130,000, that means in six years it’s risen by between 25 and 40 per cent.

    Then there’s the issue of staffing levels. The school has not lost ‘dozens’ of teachers, as the head said. In fact, the number of employees on the payroll remained constant between 2012 and 2017, at roughly 130. And last year, it rose, to 150, with seven new teachers, nine ‘administration and support’ workers and two new members of ‘management’.

    Remember: these additions came when the number of pupils decreased. In other words, they now have more teachers per pupil than before.

    Not all Ms Lowe’s staff enjoyed a pay rise like hers. In fact, Tolworth’s total salary bill fell in the past year from £4,522,000 to £4,512,000. What about Ms Lowe’s claim that she only has £10 per student to buy ‘basic equipment’ such as books?

    The school’s accounts say that last year it spent £155,000 on ‘educational supplies’ — which surely include books — up from £137,000 the year before. That equates to £122 per student, more than a dozen times the figure Ms Lowe told the BBC. Also, the school has recently benefited from a £15million ‘educational redevelopment’.

    According to its architects, the building project (which finished last summer) involved creating ‘an attractive, bespoke sixth- form centre including study areas, social space and a stunning balcony area with far reaching views’.

    This supposedly cash-strapped school has an ‘attractive new pupil entrance, flexible performing arts theatre/lecture space with retractable seating for 250 people, performing arts teaching space, dance studio, music classrooms, music recording studio, ensemble rooms and practice rooms, library, media studies suite, 12 English classrooms, faculty resource bases and an enlarged inclusion department’.

    Girls also enjoy the use of a ‘new high-specification floodlit multi-use games area’. Despite the head-teacher’s claims about having to mop the toilets, these new buildings are so large that (having doubled its cleaning budget last year) the school is currently hiring two extra cleaners.

    The recruitment advertisement says the jobs come with pensions and holiday pay, adding: ‘The academy has seen huge investment over the last few years.’…

    Siobhan Lowe and BBC are Left Activists; worse is they know their lies will be exposed, but they don’t care as the lie has already been spread and believed as intended.

    Sack Siobhan Lowe and close BBC

  2. Pcar,

    Anyone who’s been into the public sector knows that the Evil Tory Cuts are nothing of the sort.

    What I saw in a local authority (who are supposed to be hardest hit) was what I’d describe as normal private sector stuff. People finding cheaper ways to do things, cutting superfluous crap out of project scope.

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