Forum Topic

Second Wandsworth Free School Planned

In answer to a question at the Council meeting, it was denied that this was true.  The Council meeting was on 7th December.  Who is telling porky pies and why?It should be clear by all by now that what the UK (or rather England) has lost over the last few years is the ability to be creative and drive development.  The last thing we need is rote learning and a 'traditional' education.  We need the ability to think, not regurgitate!It should be noted that the Government claimed that 'free' schools are established because of local demand.  There has been no local demand for this school and Wandsworth already has a considerable number of surplus secondary school places.

Jane Eades ● 4898d7 Comments

There is absolutely no call for your attitude. It takes an outsider to be objective without any issues or agendas. I speak candidly and am highly selective about sources of information. My comments were given as a friendly warning for parents to be aware. I'm pleased that you and your children are doing well in this regard but can see that you really don't want to know beyond that. This is the problem attitude, which makes people so easily manipulatd and selfish.Carry on assuming.But the moment you had your children registered by certification, they became wards of state with a debt tag on their heads. School is pure indoctrination and i know many whose children are learning things of no practical or spiritual value.

Serena Martin ● 4772d

This really isn't the impression I have had of our local schools having had three children attend them. There is a certain amount of rote learning but it is not dominant and there isn't really any other way to get across the key foundations of many subjects particularly for less bright children. There are more test but this doesn't really impact on children until secondary school because before then it is really the teacher not the child being tested. Other than that we've found tests really useful as parents to identify problems and sort them out. Teachers have been really responsive and never negative in this regard leading me to believe that they have little problem with the extra testing. As I have said before the impression I get is of an education system which is still far from perfect but has more structure and higher standards than the one I went through. Perhaps if you talked more to current pupils and teachers you would get a more rounded view of our education system than one that appears to be derived from an indiscriminate use of Google.

Mick Higgins ● 4772d

I know, it's Education 2000 and I've read all about what parents endured to have it scrapped with it's mind numbing tests and pressures on performance which have no place in healthy child devolopment or learning. I've looked into The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America and the UK has been applying the same techniques as John Taylor Gatto describes.I feel for any parents of young children and adults today, for they have yet to see the full bitterness of the fruits being seeded in their young.Children are being overloaded with virtually meaningless rote learning or 'look see' instead of being free to play and develop naturally through innate curiousity and love of learning for itself.I look to UNICEF/UNESCO for the strategy and implementation programmes and these correspond to what I am seeing in children's 'educational' programming. It is the end of the species as we knew it.

Serena Martin ● 4776d

Serena, do you actually have any children who have gone through the education system recently? From what I saw of the work mine brought home is that it was way beyond anything I had to do, they do have to work very hard but they all found it challenging and stimulating in the subjects they enjoyed.

Mick Higgins ● 4777d

Education is a mass dumbing down process to the basic necessities of being able to understand, follow and obey instructions. The rest is becoming social conditioning through false history, false science, false sexuality. Regardless of what the people want, these places of programming (and abuse) will continue to mushroom as funding is cut to mainstream and teachers hop camp or opt out.

Serena Martin ● 4779d

Mick: it is half the secondary schools which have converted or become academies, not all schools.  We now have the peculiar situation where some of the primary academies are amongst the worst performing schools in the country (according to KS2 results) and yet better performing primaries are being forced to become academies.  I don't think that Mr Gove took courses in logic or in evidence based policies!Just as with community schools, some academies are performing well and some are failing (even according to Ofsted which has recently been shown to be biassed).  This is despite the extra money that the New Labour academies were given.  We would be better off saving the money invested in "free" schools and academies and spending it on proper unbiassed research on what really does improve education.  I would suggest it might be "Politicians leave those schools alone!".  Each political vanity project costs a fortune - usually, only to be reversed some years down the line.  Remember direct grant schools or city technology colleges, etc, etc, etc.

Jane Eades ● 4779d

I thought the main concern of people was poor basic standards of literary and numeracy for many school leavers. Hard to begin to be creative without those.However, apart from a bit of rhetoric it doesn't seem like free schools offer much change in the school curriculum or the approach to teaching apart from dumping some of the worse examples of LEA inspired political correctness.I was amazed to fine that half the nation's schools are now academies and also that Trenton Oldfield the boat race loon included free schools in his rant on his blog. The only explanation as to why they seem to have grown so quickly is that they are exempt from the nationally determined pay scales for teachers. In Wandsworth this presumably means they can increase pay to attract better teachers which might provide one explanation as to why they are so popular.

Mick Higgins ● 4780d