Some toilets play tunes when people sit on them, others when they are flushed. And readers of some newspapers may believe that musical toilets are being installed at Kingswood College of Arts in Hull.
A Daily Mail headline about the school last week announced “Crisis-hit school facing closure spends Pounds 100,000 on toilets that play classical music to pupils”.
It transpires that the lavatories don’t actually play bursts of Vivaldi themselves - the music is piped into the room. And the Pounds 100,000? Well, that was spent on the whole room, plus a communal area and lockers - oh, and changing rooms and the conversion of an entire room above into a dance studio.
Tony Hammond, the school’s head of resources, said: “The fact that we included some additional wiring to allow us to play music in the toilets seems to have upset some people. But the cost was negligible and the result is a calming atmosphere with added privacy.”
The school is due to be rebuilt in four years’ time, but Mr Hammond said pupils should not have to wait so long. He said they were “flushed with pride” about the new facilities.
