Education policy was clearly short-sighted

YEP Letters: September 12

Published on the 12 September 2013

Shock, horror! Leeds needs 4,000 new school places. To start off with, I think a few I-told-you-sos are in order.

Summer or winter, campaigners with local knowledge and educational expertise attended endless meetings after their days at work. And they opined that Educational Leeds’s car-crash of a school building policy was short-sighted.
I well remember the midwife at the West Leeds High School meeting who told the consultation meeting that the birth rate was going up, not down in Armley. And, on the other side of Leeds we noted that growing immigration trends was more likely to need Leopold expanded rather than closed down.
We argued the case time and time again against a smug and well-paid Education Leeds, whose representatives did not hail from Leeds, and who had no local knowledge; we pointed to Africa as we would now point to Eastern Europe. But they were on a mission to make a difference, and they closed down and/or merged approximately 40 Leeds primary schools.
Today we have to put things right, but there are mistakes we should avoid. We must:
1. Listen to the unions and other campaigners. They are not in it for the money or power – there being none for this type of work. They are in it for the children and their education.
2. Understand that first generation immigrants tend to have bigger families than any subsequent generation.
3. Large schools for little children are not a good idea.
4. Children should not have to go to school in building sites
So, as the remote Gove spirals out of control, and has decreed that all new schools should be academies, play the game. Restore Royal Park, for example (a building much in need of occupants), call it Royal Park, Brudenell Annexe.
Give Miles Hill its heart back. But remember stuff happens and things change, so build in flexibility and community use provision for when the refugees go back and the families get smaller again.

Victoria Jaquiss FRSA, Education campaigner

Poor Old John Smeaton School

Poor old John Smeaton School. Until it started with its cavalier attitude to applying to become an academy, it did nothing wrong except be at the receiving end of two East Leeds schools’ exoduses.

When Foxwood School, late of Seacroft estate, lived, all the aspirational parents walked past us and sent their kids to Smeaton. When Foxwood, by now pointlessly renamed East Leeds, closed, all the other kids went as well. Reading the Ofsted reports before and after shows the devastating effect of that on John Smeaton.

But Smeaton picked itself up and it’s last but one report talked of good with outstanding features. This must have gone to the school’s head. Did they not see waiting in the wings the new David Young Academy throwing out all its riff raff in order to ensure its own Ofsteds improved?

So, when the YEP headline says, “’Act now’ order to failing school” [19 July 2012], it would be nice to know that the council has the overview and the power in order to be able to support the school. It would be nice if schools weren’t enticed into being [private] academies by the short –term fix that having their budget deficits paid off; it would be nice if all schools took their fair share of disadvantaged children, and it would be nice when schools who serve what we call the “inner-city” are not penalised for the disadvantage spilling into exam results.

And it would be nice if speakers on Any Questions and the like acted responsibly, and didn’t puff themselves up all indignant with the old poverty is no excuse line! Because believe me, a child who is hungry, a child from a house with no books, a child who has to share a bedroom, a child who doesn’t get relaxing holidays, a child who is abused on a regular basis – well, believe me, they tend not to achieve their academic potential. And they never will unless their disadvantages are put right.

Hillcrest at Risk from its own

This is Yorkshire Evening Post on Thursday, in response to shocking statement by their Chair of Governors [who is a Leeds councillor!] that becoming an academy will sort out the school's problems. He should know it will increase them.

22 June 2012

Cllr Gruen is kidding himself  [YEP 21 June 2012] if he thinks, for one minute, that giving away council-owned buildings and council-owned land is going to transform poor old Hillcrest School into a “beacon of excellence”. And, he is kidding his fellow-governors if he has talked them into this act of treachery. “Unanimous? I would like to see the written minutes of that governing body debate!

Do the local community or the parents have a view or a say? After all, in any school, the children, the staff, and the governors are just passing through. For a while, a few years, they hold the school in trust for the next generation.  If a school belong to anyone, it belongs to the community.

It looks so innocent, so matter-of-fact: that academies “receive their funding directly from the Education Funding Agency . . .”, but this disguises that this is just another nail in the coffin of our local educational services, of which one very successful one is described on the very same page.

Under the title, “Record pupil numbers at school”, the second article describes how “schools, Leeds City Council and voluntary services work together to tackle poor attendance” with interventions which “address problems such as mental health, domestic violence, unemployment, crime and anti-social behaviour.”

Let us be clear, any school taking the extra 10% of the government money [paid for by our taxes] which now goes to fund our wonderful central educational services [psychology, music and arts, attendance, etc] 1. by law, loses the right to access them either freely or at the local school discounted rate, and in time, 2, kills them off altogether.

Academies which “succeed”  [pass exams] in the inner-city, such as the David Young Academy, only do so because they select their intake, and this one, in fact, excludes more children than all other Leeds schools put together. South Leeds on the other hand gained a satisfactory result [ie a pass] after its merger between Merlyn Rees and Matthew Murray High Schools, but was obliged to become as academy three years ago, and is now given notice to improve.

It’s bad enough that the long shadow of Michael Gove is falling on so many of our schools and telling them they must become academies, simply because he wills it, but unbelievable that a school would willingly even contemplate it.

Victoria Jaquiss FRSA [Leeds teacher]

Why we all should oppose academies

1. Why teachers: Because academies don't have to uphold the state agreement on pay and conditions. And quite a few more things besides.
2. Why parents: Because the quality of teachers will decline as good teachers leave. Because the people in charge of education will no longer have a background and training in education.
3. Why childen: because they will put the needs of industry above the needs of  the individual student. Because you will have to cram for subjects that will get the institution results that make it look good, and noone will care about your needs and your abilities .
4. Why the local community: Because the local school buildings will leave public ownership, and no longer be a resource that you can legitimately access.
5.  Why the lexicologists: Because the word academic will no longer mean something above average?
6. Why the governors: Because one day in the future, someone will ask you what did  to protect educational standards.
7. Why the politicians: Because schools not publicly accountable  and run by people not educationally trained will be sub-standard, and quite quickly.

Private companies: public services: Hmmm.

I know I am not the only one to wonder why the public is not more concerned that this crazy coalition of an incompetent government is giving away public land, public buildings, the right to educate, and accountability to private industry and private people [with varying degrees of educational knowledge]. 

In Leeds our very own crazy private education company, the erstwhile Education Leeds [wrongly named on both counts] was suddenly dismembered two years back, and care of education returned to its rightful place as a council service.

Education Leeds specialised in closing innocent, viable and excellent schools, mostly in inner-city Leeds. These are the ones, in an orgy of blood-letting that they put an end to:

And only five years later they are desperately adding on extra classrooms to schools all over Leeds, while some of the poorest families still stagger up Sugarwell Hill, with their pushchairs and their toddlers from where Miles Hill Primary School once proudly stood to where Millfield Primary now caters for them.

We are short of school places in Leeds : they are short of 500,000 places country-wide, a sad indictment of both governments, and absolutely no consolation to the Royal Park team whose glorious Victorian building has stood pointlessly idle losing bits of lead here and there from its roof for seven years now.

We campaigners turned out at one public meeting after another and argued as best we could that basing the numbers of schools needed on projected live UK births wasn't that clever given the unknown variables of asylum-seeking; and one midwife in Armley even pointed out that the birth rate was actually rising there, and that merging its high schools was stupid. Suffice to say, the new Swallow Hill High School opened on two sites and now operates with staff cuts and portakabins.

The point I'm making here is that private companies' track record on education is poor.  Possibly because they don't know what they're doing; possibly because of their motivation. Councils run schools on behalf of the people they represent; teachers go into the job generally because they want to help others; what's in it for business? Hmmm, I wonder.