I DON'T know what Mike Hatch the head will say about me saying this, but the new extension to Crosshill School in Shadsworth Road is worth a visit just to gawp at the building and the Japanese Garden.

I opened the new extension last Friday, all £1.5million of it. The site used to overlook two monuments to 1960s planning and architecture - the Queen's Park tower blocks, and even worse, the "shed" deck-access flats. Both sets of disasters are now gone, thank God. But the contrast makes an interesting point about how we value public services. It's this.

In the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century our public buildings were all better than the private housing, where people lived, or the privately owned mills and pits where people worked. Going into the "Tech" on Blakey Moor, the "Royal Infirmary", or one of the big old two or three decker schools in the borough was to discover an environment far better than the one in their street or mill. Warm, clean, well cared for, often elaborately decorated. Human behaviour is not that different from that for other animals. Give people decent conditions and generally (of course, not always) they'll respond. So it was. People valued their schools, hospitals, libraries because they felt valued by them.

Then, the accountants took over, who understood only the price of things, never their value. So we had those disasters of the sixties (and later). Public services quickly became equated with second best, not least because the buildings were second best - and so the staff often felt second best - and the public using them too.

If you went into the Crosshill extension blindfold, you could easily think that you were in the best of the private sector - some headquarters for a small but highly successful new firm say. And because the buildings are so good, the staff and the pupils and their families have had a real lift.

This would matter whatever the school did. Crosshill is a special school, for children of moderate learning difficulties; they have done terrific things for their pupils with their existing buildings: but with their new building, and the e-centre which is its focus, and all the services now being offered to families in the area I think it will really take off.

So for me there's a wider lesson from the school. Quality does cost a bit more in the short term: but it's a very good investment for the longer term. Crosshill's new building will still be there when the head's grandchildren are voting.