PLEASE, no. Education Secretary Michael Gove is considering prefabricated classrooms as a way of saving money and providing a replacement for the Building Schools for the Future programme that he scrapped.

Children of the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies will have uncomfortable memories of portable classrooms. Condensation ran down the windows, there was not enough room even to throw a blackboard rubber and they were so unstable that they rocked when the teacher got really angry.

Perhaps, if your current school has a leaking roof and has become dangerous, the conditions in a “flat-pack” classroom, which will enable a whole school to be built in only 13 weeks, will be preferable.

Technology has moved on since all our yesterdays and so Mr Gove’s prefabs will, hopefully, be of a higher standard.

Even so, the age of austerity really should not be dragging our children backwards, plonking them in cramped, uncomfortable conditions without up-todate science facilities and sports halls.

Mr Gove argues, with some merit, that good teaching is more important than new buildings.

But if a school is situated in shabby surroundings, then it is no surprise when pupils behave shabbily and turn in shabby work.

Schools should inspire, from the headteacher right the way through to the buildings.

But if the whole atmosphere of a classroom or a school is that it was built on the cheap and that the pupils will have to make do in their mediocre surroundings, then even the most inspirational of teachers will find that their job has become harder before they have even said a word.