If someone gave you £30,000 to spend on your home, what would you do with it? You have to spend it - you can’t save it for a big post-lockdown foreign holiday.

It’s a huge chunk of cash, £30,000, and it’s very generous of us to give it to our prime ministers every year, to tart up their Downing Street flat. 

I can imagine that taking over from a retiring PM and inheriting their taste in decor is much like moving into any home that has been lived in by another family. My current house was entirely pink, mahogany and brass when I moved into it, and the past seven years have been spent eradicating all traces. Only one pink carpet remains - but then I don’t get a publicly funded grant each year, because I am not running the country. I am just educating it, slowly, lesson by lesson. 

David Cameron spent his £30,000 on a new kitchen one year. Theresa May spent a tiny portion of hers on some John Lewis and Habitat furniture (thrifty chic). 

Yet Boris - poor Boris - has stormed through his budget and gone into a spending spiral, like an episode of Grand Designs. It has been speculated that his renovations bill was as much as £200,000.

School buildings: What could we do with Boris Johnson’s £200,000 redecoration budget?

Considering all the hoo-ha surrounding this, with Tory ministers claiming that the British public isn’t interested in wallpaper and cushions (check out the TV schedules: we’re obsessed), wouldn’t it be better for us all if Boris made a grand gesture and donated the true cost of his flat makeover to boost the £1.8 billion intended for maintenance and repair that all the schools in Britain will have to share? 

I am not a maths teacher, but I have done a rough calculation. Based on there being 32,770 schools in the UK, according to BESA, £1.8 billion shared out is just over £30,000 each, which is a coincidence. 

If we divide the reported flat spend of £200,000 between those schools, that’s only enough for a nice box of biscuits each. So it’s probably better to spend it all in one place. Rather than gold wallpaper and overly chintzy textiles courtesy of Carrie Symonds’ favourite designer, Lulu Lytle, what could a financially beleaguered school use that money for?

A shopping list for school refurbishment

Here is my shopping list:

• Photocopiers that can cope with being used regularly.
• Chairs that are the right height for the desks, and are from the same century.
• A staffroom that is comfortable and welcoming, with a quiet outside space.
• An endless supply of stationery for students who never have a pencil, pen, rubber, etc. 
• A budget for the catering team that allows unprocessed, high-quality ingredients. Such as real butter.
• A car park with a space for every member of staff.
• Windows that open and close easily and safely, without the need for pseudo-yoga poses. And blinds that are fully functioning.
• Books in a library, which is staffed by librarians who can help students find escape, hope and wonder.
• Top-quality whiteboard pens, which still work after a week of use. Ideally with a homing instinct.
• Enough basic resources for each class, so that no one “borrows” your precious kit, and students don’t get sent on relentless errands for felt tips and white card.
• Staff toilets that are spacious, plentiful, well lit, fragrant, and with cisterns that refill in less than five years.

These mundane items are nothing when compared with heavy-based lamps, colourful prints of elephants and needlepoint scatter cushions. But, my goodness, they would go a long way to keeping the sanity of many a teacher and student intact. 

So, I wonder, what is more important? That thousands of children and their teachers are adequately catered for, and that the very fabric of the building they work in is fit for purpose? Or that a man and his fiancée have enough occasional tables in their temporary accommodation?

Zoë Crockford is an art teacher at a secondary school in Bournemouth