Noone needs the poor
kids.
Well all this started
with the previous government with a Labour unelected politician name of Lord
Adonis. No not his name, Lord, - he was a lord, a titled person, and obviously
been given, or had he assumed a brief that was quite beyond his experience or
knowledge.
He will go down
infamously in history as pulling the first thread that unravelled the great UK education system. And he
abused the powers that he had assumed for himself by giving away public
buildings and public institutions to private companies for no other reason than
they were exactly that: private companies.
He wasn’t the first to
start on the demonisation of the teaching profession. No, that honour rests
with Margaret Thatcher. And he wasn’t the first to mess about with the English
language. Just as “With all due
respect” came to mean “with no respect at all”, so a secondary school, if now
controlled by a private business was to be an “academy”. This had an implication of high
standards, building on the use of this term for advanced football and other
sporting institutions.
The definition of an Academy is that there is no definition. - usually this
meant just a school that is excluding the children with challenging behaviour
as fast as they can.
This way, no inner city kids were troubled by kids with troubles and
troubling behaviour, and why not! You don’t send your kids to school so that
they sit next to kids who have no control over their own behaviour and who can
and do trash lessons.
So now your new school
is named an academy, and it is placed in an inner-city area, eg Seacroft Leeds,
but it doesn’t take all the children from the immediate neighbourhood. In order to
have a greater mix of social classes it is operating a system it calls
“fair-banding”, and selects the clientele. And it selects in the first place,
and then again in the second place [by excluding anyone who is not going to give them to grades].
Thus, in Leeds, the
David Young Academy. Of course the
other schools in Leeds are picking up its reject pupils, and it is not as if we
all don’t know this, but how it is spun?
So this is the
problem, and it is not the one that is being addressed. There are children in
this country being abused, physically, mentally and sexually. There are pupils
who live in such desperate poverty that are hungry; they go without holidays;
they have no space to call their own; these children barely have shelter; and
do you know, they sure do drag a school’s results down. And the school gets the
blame for keeping these children.
For the school’s survival, you need to lose these needy children. It
hardly seems fair that a school should be blamed for the neighbourhood’s
problems.
And of course life is
complicated these days by our immigrant kids; some families come to the UK as
economic migrants [posh expression for from abroad and very poor], or as people
fleeing persecution [euphemism for surviving war zones, in itself euphemism].
And how can you concentrate on life in a schoolroom when your head is still
full of dead relatives?
I think the best
answer is to close all the high schools in the inner-city, so that the poor kids
get dispersed around the city’s periphery and then, logically the richer kids
will outnumber the poorer ones, and the school’s academic results won’t be too
badly brought down. Obviously where this has started to happen the richer kids’
parents are now sending their children further out of the city, so now the
ringroad schools have a disproportion of the poor, needy and non-English
speakers. Only now they have travelled three miles away from their family homes
to be there.
And actually that’s not really going to improve their academic performance. If anything I’d say it was likely to worsen it.
And actually that’s not really going to improve their academic performance. If anything I’d say it was likely to worsen it.
random bird of prey hovering over the charity run at Harewood House |
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