On July 10 1994, lest they forget

On July 10th 1994, I was walking back from a party in the Burley area of area, near to the cricket ground. As I walked up Brudenell Road I became aware that the clouds in the sky were arranged in the wrong order. They were dark at the bottom, then light on top. I turned into Hyde Park Road and the full force of what I was seeing struck me. A fire. A really really big fire.

At the crossroads of Moorland Road, Royal Park Road and Hyde Park Road, I looked down and I looked up. The Newlands was in flames, and these flames reached as high up into the sky again as was the building itself. There were people in the streets, police cars and fire engines. Pupils of mine from Royal Park Primary School were outside in their dressing gowns. Families were evacuated from the houses that joined onto the pub.

Next day the bulldozers finished off what the fire had started. In the weeks that followed we got used to having our cars torched. Over a decade later you can still see the scorch marks on the tarmac of some of our streets. Where the pub once stood, our Ground Zero is just a patch of wasteground, an ignominous reminder of a glorious piece of local history.

Next day at Royal Park School, headteacher extraordinaire Rita Samuel made sure that the events of the previous night were incorporated into the school day. And children and their parents who could been traumatised by the drugs gangs who had fire-bombed my local pub, were helped to feel safe.

It seemed that someone in the drugs world had grassed on someone else, and they were using our patch to have the fight on. The national press had a field day. Hyde Park became a synonym for a no-go area; theatricals coming to lodge with us gave backword.

Enter Unity. A group of local poeple got together to reclaim the community. There were people in full-time jobs, but it was mostly pensioners, the long-term sick, the disabled and the unemployed who took on Unity Day - a celebration of all sections of our diverse society standing up to the gangs and saying we will work and we will celebrate together. Leeds Council gave them a grant; the rest was fund-raising, fund-rasing, fund-raising.

Now there is still drug-dealing in this area; there is still violent crime including rape and murder; cars still get broken into regularly; Chestnut Avenue "enjoyed" the reputation for years of being the nost-burgled street in the UK, but it's all less than it was. There is a bastion of stability in the middle of all this: City of Leeds School, with the neighbouring attached City Learning Centre, with a network of tentacles going out into the community with counsellors, youth workers and the like. The school now has its own police officer who has a background in youth work.

When children are frightened they know which staff they can approach. Close City of Leeds School, or reconstitute it in whatever way looks good on paper, and you can make the difference between a child disclosing and a child living in fear. Close City of Leeds and those families who can will start to drift away, and those who can't, the most needy will be even more in need. Even the families who don't send their children to City of Leeds School need it to be there.

There's a time and place for GCSEs and it's not always Year 11. Schools under pressure to deliver the exam goods may actually be be doing more harm than good to some of our students.

Four Funerals and no Wedding

I naively assumed that we voted in councillors and members of Parliament to represent and support us. My belief in democracy is teetering on a precipice.

At the last local by-election for Hyde Park and Woodhouse, two thousand plus electors voted for candidates all of whom made an election commitment to keep City of Leeds School open. Our two local MPS [Greg and Hilary, thanks, boys] have publicly backed the school.

Then, at a local ward forum last week, one councillor desribed City of Leeds as a poor school: the worst in the city. Naturally, I challenged this publicly, then engaged him in converstation afterwards. I opined that twelve successful inspections in fourteen years was hardly a failing school. He admitted that he didn't know much about education, and left that to the party spokesperson.

Well, there's my faith teetering again. This political group, en masse, as a party is taking a line about something so crucial as the stability in the lives of all these inner-city and immigrant children, and leaving it to one person. And this person, who was a teacher in a previous life, and a teacher at our school [!], should know better, and actually I think he does, but his new philosophy of education seems entirely governed by how much money central government will give Leeds to give to builders to build rubbish new buildings.

Well, obviously he doesn't deliberately set out to set up rubbish buildings, but he needs to know that they are. Rubbish. Leeds is careering down a path described last year by the National Association of Architects as "an opportunity lost". They even move children and staff into these schools before they are finished. Car park for Swallow Hill [that's West Leeds and Wortley to several hundred unhappy children, especially those two year groups who they didn't build enough rooms for]! Carpark! Who needs a carpark? Well, Science teachers bringing in equipment, music teachers bringing the steel pans after gigs, English teachers with bags full of marking, well everybody.

I digress.

And this spokesperson is guided by a already discredited private so-called education company and this is the line. If we do what Ed Balls says ie make academies and trusts, and judge schools by crude measurements, he will give Leeds 11 million pounds; if we don't behave ourselves we'll only get 9 million. I say let's behave badly, if only for the stability of our communities and their mental health.

Chris Crozier, Jos Lockridge, Michael Lorimer, and my own drummer, David Wright were all ex-Foxwood students, and why are they mentioned here? Well the clue's in the title. Take the heart out of the community in the ruthless pursuit of such a nebulous concept as a standard. What's the point? I thought that education was bigger than that.

Not really playing fair. Is this libel? Is this the death of democracy?

I've gone from being a hopeles digital immigrant to an reasonably competent website reader and user in five short weeks. So, after reading in the Online Guardian what Education was claiming about City of Leeds School, I checked for myself. And what did I find:

"City of Leeds [and Primrose High School] both face major challenges to improve teaching, attendance and behaviour standards and require urgent changes to meet the target."

Good Heavens, I said to myself. This is fiction. No wonder Ed and Vern are so keen to close it. It sounds like anarchy in the UK is alive and kicking and hanging out in Woodhouse and Hyde Park. I thought I'd check out the Ofsted report so I could publicly refute what really amounts to libel.

Hmmm, maybe not so digitally competent. Got fed up searching for the report. Take my word for it, check it out yourself, visit the school.

And I also read:

"Parklands Girls’ High School’s GCSE results have already exceeded the national target this year but due to a declining roll and difficult financial situation present a challenge for sustaining progress beyond 2011."

Now presented with this success, this would seem the natural response:

"Well done, Parklands, let's build upon this success. Now that your results are gone back up, the girls will soon come flocking back." Instead, Eddie Leo looks around for somewhere new to put the back of the net.

Then I read:

"Councillor Richard Harker, executive board member for education at Leeds City Council, said: “Public opinion is a vital part of the decision making process. We recognise that major changes for the three schools have been proposed and want to fully engage with everyone connected to the schools to gather their opinions. This consultation will ensure that all views will be taken into consideration by the executive board before a final decision is made.”"

Well, Councillor, in the recent by-election the public just voted 100% keeping City of Leeds open. So now how vital is public opinion? Or will Education Leeds just move the goalposts, as they are trying to do with Parklands?

To sum up, when the Guardian Online looked for information about the proposed closures, they turned to a website which provided inaccurate information. This is hardly playing fair, and I would argue it could be seen as libel. And, if the closures go ahead, what is the future for democracy?

Counting at the Town Hall

In early January 2010 Adele Beeson, Independent candidate for Hyde Park and Woodhouse, inner-city Leeds, officially confirmed that she was standing for Council. On February 18 2010, out of a count of 2200 voters she got 150 votes. Labour won with 1054 votes, and with rather more than five weeks experience and campaigning behind them. All the candidates declared their support for City of Leeds School, so we can also declare that 2,200 people, in fact 100% of voters, voted for City of Leeds School to stay open. Of course, this is just a way of spinning it, but I think it makes sense. And, for those who like to count things, something of a result, I would say, which They need to take heed of.

The Thomas a Becket of Schools and the Mother of All Parliaments

Just rereading the billets doux between our local education firm and comedy duo, Ed and Vern from the DCSF. Ed "thanks" them for their "dedicated support", and Vern is "grateful" for their plans to "accelerate the delivery of long term solutions." He goes on to note their "intention to close City of Leeds School" , and then welcomes "the immediate support that you propose for all the schools . . "

There's no support being offered here.it sounds more like the final solution to me! It's more like: Who will rid me of this turbulent school? And They've lost touch with reality. Interpreting facts to suit whatever.

In September Ed writes that he "particlularly pleased to see Parklands rise above the floor, " so well done there, Leeds. Oh no, it's January and Vern is happy to see Parklands become an academy. Looks like they're exceeding orders here, but it's going down well.

Back in September, having spotted that Intake has heroically achieved the magic percentage, Ed has to describe this as providing "a good platform for the new Academy", but really I don't think it needed this tragic turn of events - change and loss of teachers, change of uniform, loss of one of the most famous names in Leeds schools' history, living in a building site for the next couple of years, excluded from the central services.

So why, from a government, once so revered and respected, are two men sitting in an office, sending out letters, trying to make sure that they and their department are covered in glory, with their "ambitious programme to transform secondary school standards . . "?

And City of Leeds School stands in their way.

consulting

I've always thought that "to consult" meant to ask someone's opinion and then act upon it. As I said in my letter to the Yorkshire Evening Post [published 10.2.10], it's new meaning is "to tell the public, at some expense to the public, what one is about to do". Well call me old-fashioned but I think that if you have a really really bad idea, and you ask a lot of people what they think and they tell you that is a really really bad idea. Well, then I think that you should stop having ideas altogether. And, as for being paid to have bad ideas. It makes even less sense.

Over the past few years a group of people with no personal or historical loyalty to Leeds, have had some really really bad ideas, disguised them as proper educational philosophies and then foisted them on an innocent school-using public.

These are two of my favourites: 1. merging a single-sex state secular boys school [Braimwood] with a mixed church school [Agnes Stewart] on a site near neither of them, and making that school an academy, thus taking it out of council control or influence 2. consulting three schools [Farnley Park, Wortley, West Leeds] on the closure and merger of two of them, and explicitly suggesting to the third that because the new school will be too small for the merged schools, then they will collect the fall-out. Swallow Hill was always designed to be too small. What the consulters didn't expect was that a couple of hundred pupils would not meekly falls on their sword and decamp across the ringroad. So, having told Wortley what a rubbish condemned buliding they had, they then had to spend a whole load more on refurbishing it. What I mean is that we had to pay.

I think it's time that the some adults stood up to some other adults, before our children's respect for adults collapses entirely. And these adults know who they are!

City of Leeds School 2

The fight is hotting up.

City of Leeds School has now been threatened with closure or merger three or four times in the last decade. We think that it's not rocket science to note that a mix of students from relatively poorer families, some dysfunctional families, some ordinary families: either first, second or third generation Asian immigrant, or ex-Leeds Uni families, some children from local children's homes, some children excluded from the newly formed and highly contraversial academy, some children who arrived in Leeds from Europe or from Africa, and some from Africa via Europe, some foreign students struggling in English, some of them cheerfully trilingual, loads of children prefering City to their own local high school from all over Leeds - well you get the picture: it's a heady mix of students at different points in their lives, and their educational development.

Well, it's not rocket science to note that academic exam results will a, be variable and b, be irrelevant. So why judge the school by them?

It's an exciting, challenging and enjoyable place to work. So why does the government put so much pressure on Leeds Council to close it?

Every Child Matters! Hardly!