Imagine a school having $800,000 in the bank.

Imagine all the things a school could buy with that amount of money.

This is a state school I’m talking about, not a Flash Harry private school that can put the call-out to the old boys and the old girls when it needs cash to do something.

So a state school with $800,000 in the bank, and this state school has to spend that money fixing up a cock-up forced on it by the Ministry of Education.

The cock-up I’m referring to is that disastrous experiment called the “modern learning environment” – where our kids have been the guinea pigs, forced into huge barns instead of your old-school single-cell classrooms.

And the school I’m talking about, having to spend $800,000 of its own money to get out of this ideological nightmare, is Shirley Boys’ High School in Christchurch.

Good on it for flipping the bird at the modern learning environment, but I think it’s crazy that the school has to dip into its own reserves to pay to sort it out.

I know whether it’s the school that pays or the Ministry of Education that pays, it’s all pretty much taxpayer money. But the difference is Shirley Boys' is spending money it’s actually got in the bank, which could be spent on all sorts of other things. That’s why I think the ministry should be paying for this work.

I’ve been anti this modern learning environment nonsense right from the outset. Which was pretty much straight after the earthquakes when schools in Canterbury needed rebuilds.

And what happened is the powers-that-be jumped on the bandwagon and started telling schools that this is how it was going to be. That, if they wanted classrooms, they were going to be barn-like structures with up to 200 kids in them.

To be fair, it wasn’t just the Government and the Ministry of Education forcing this one. There were some teachers and principals who thought it was a brilliant idea too.

I’ve mentioned before how I was on the board of our local school for about six years, and they got sucked into the modern learning environment frenzy.

In fact, they didn’t wait for new buildings. They had the caretaker knocking out walls left, right and centre every weekend, it seemed. And I thought it was nuts at the time and I still think the concept is nuts.

As does Shirley Boys'. As does Rangiora High School, which did the same thing. It cost them even more – they spent $1.5 million turning their open-plan classrooms into single classrooms.

But here’s what the principal at Shirley Boys', Tim Grocott, is saying about why they’re doing it.

"The level of distraction was just too high. There was too much movement going on. They can hear what is happening in the class next door. Particularly if something was being played on TV or anything like that. So that level of distraction was a negative factor."

He says the school did a formal inquiry into how the kids and the staff were finding the open-plan set-up and found that there was widespread unhappiness and so the school had no option but to do something.

So it started the work during the last school holidays and will finish it during the next holidays.

Tim Grocott says the changes that have been made so far have gone down very well.

He says feedback has been “overwhelmingly positive and instantaneous”. I bet it has.

He says: “The staff on the first day were absolutely thrilled. One of our teachers was hugging the walls in her classroom because she was so thrilled to have walls. The boys are just much happier too."

Tim says he thinks that open plan classrooms are a flawed concept that just did not work for his school.

Are they ever.

And the Ministry of Education needs to admit that and needs to front-up with the money to pay back Shirley Boys’ High School for the $800,000 it’s spending to fix up this flawed concept, and elsewhere too.

Or, more correctly, it needs to front-up with the money to pay schools back for the mess caused by this failed experiment.

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John was joined by Matt Doocey and Tracey McLellan this week for Politics Friday.

They discussed the situation with Shirley Boys High School, who have spent $800,000 to move their school away from the modern learning model. Is it fair that schools have to foot the bill for this? The decision has been made around punishment for Te Pati Māori, does this affect Labour's view of working with them in future, and is there really gas to be found in New Zealand?

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I love this idea the Commerce Commission and the Grocery Commissioner have come up with, of supermarkets giving us everyday low prices instead of the ever-changing, so-called “special prices”.

The supermarket specials that really brass me off are the ones where you might see meat in one of the fridges, and they’ll have a sign showing the price per kilo.

That means absolutely nothing to me. Maybe there are some shoppers who know all the ins-and-outs of prices per kilo, but I’m not one of them.

The other thing about specials is that, most of the time, it feels like the supermarkets are yelling “special special special” at me, but it doesn’t look like much of a special.

I’ll be the first to say that I’m in the lucky position of not having to rely on supermarket specials. That’s a financial thing, but it’s also because I’m no longer at a stage of life where there are three kids at home and where it’s not unusual to kiss goodbye to $400+ a week at the check-out.

But I’ve never been one of those people who buy their bananas at one place because they’re cheap and my mandarins somewhere else because their cheaper.

And, when I see and hear the ads about specials, they pretty much don’t register with me.

And it’s not just because I can afford to pay what I have to pay. And it’s not just because the supermarket shops are cheaper these days because there aren’t three kids living at home.

It’s also because I see supermarket specials in the same way I see cafes with signs outside saying “great coffee”. They can tell me what they want as much as they like, but whether I believe it or not is another thing.

The other week I went into Pak 'n Save and when I hit the fruit and veg section there was a sign telling me that the 99 cent broccoli heads were an amazing special.

I wasn’t that convinced because they seemed pretty small to me, but I grabbed a couple anyway.

But as I kept moving around the fruit and veg section, I saw another bin of broccoli heads —again with the sign saying 99 cents a head and “amazing special”— but these things were about twice the size of the smaller ones at the start of the fruit and veg section.

What was that all about?

And it’s little examples like that —as well as the one I mentioned earlier about specials being based on price per kilo— that demonstrate how much of a rort this whole “special” thing is.

So I agree with Grocery Commissioner Pierre van Heerden who is saying that doing away with specials and having everyday low prices instead would be more straightforward and transparent.

He also thinks it would allow any new operators coming into the market to put real pressure on the existing supermarkets. I’m not as sold on that bit, because I don’t think there are any foreign supermarket companies interested in coming here.

But if he thinks that, that’s fine.

The only problem I’ve got with this idea is that it’s going to be voluntary —for now, anyway— whereas I think it should be compulsory.

The Commissioner says they’ll give the supermarkets a year or so to get with the programme, but I want to see this happening ASAP.

So does Consumer NZ. Its boss, Jon Duffy, says: “We know New Zealanders love a special. We also know there’s not much that’s special about supermarket specials.”

He’s spot on there.

He says: “Everyday low prices would benefit all shoppers, so would price transparency. Right now, it’s so hard to know what’s a fair price because the prices of certain goods fluctuate so much.”

And that’s the nub of it right there. If you go to the supermarket today and see all these signs saying special here, special there, all you can do is take their word that it somehow is a special.

And like the sheep most of us are, we think ‘aww, on special…I’ll get a few of those”. But how do we know we are actually getting the best deal?

We don’t. Which is why the Grocery Commissioner and the Commerce Commission think the days of the supermarket special should be numbered.

I think so too.

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