Primrose High School

Well, more extreme gigging. it's back to the Bradford Mela in a minute. So here's another letter that I wrote earlier. It's my second formal letter of objection to the proposed closure of Primrose School.

[The way the "consultation" system works is to make all concerned make formal objections twice; this, I would imagine, intending to demoralise protesters into giving up at the second hurdle. Also they have advertised new headships of academies not yet debated and agreed on. Not only is this presumptious asnd demoralising; it is a waste of public money - these national paper advertisements don't come cheap.]

[PS See you at the Mela - best family day out I've been to in a very long time.]

letter of objection to the closure of Primrose School

My main objection to the threatened closure of Primrose School is that the difficult situation that Primrose finds itself in is entirely down to the actions of Education Leeds, which has bedevilled this poor staff and these poor children with one change after another over the past eight years, and no change for the better,

Go back over twenty years to a time before apartheid ended in South Africa, and visiting black South African teachers would spend a week or more at Primrose Hill High School to see an example of a successful inner-city school.

Go back to 1992, for the reorganisation of Leeds Schools. As the birthrate declined, Leeds finally decided to abandon middle schools and go back to primary and secondary. League tables saw off Foxwood/East Leeds and Cross Green, and in 1996 they merged on the latter’s site to become the ill-fated, short-lasting and pretentiously named Copperfields College.

Now we have a couple of hundred poor and mostly white children in need of a school. Let’s send fifty of them in one go to destroy the harmony that was Primrose. In vain the staff protested that to include so many new students at a time would too much to be able to integrate them successfully. Making matters worse, because of’ the school’s good record with educating “difficult” children, Education Leeds then started to send those excluded from other schools to Primrose. One year after these fifty pupils and more were dropped into Primrose, portakabins and all, the Chief Executive of Education Leeds, attended a meeting of Primrose union representatives, addressing them thus:

“While sorting out the problem at Copperfields, I think we have de-stabilised Primrose”.

In the middle of all these difficulties comes the Federation with City of Leeds, and this also coinciding with the a central government dictat that all teaching jobs are re-arranged with the new Teaching and Learning responsibilities.

As if this wasn’t enough comes the new build with PFI, and this is the last straw! The building is part prison, part holiday camp with concrete out door stair-cases, gangways for children to lean over, spit down and chuck things at each other, and a car park a mile hike from the main entrance. There’s no budget for IT; the dining room is too small to fit all the children in at one sitting; there’s no cookery room; the music practice rooms are on the other side of the corridor from the main teaching room, etc, etc, etc. Including all the constraints that having an exterior agency managing the building that the school is trying to educate in.

Today the new headteacher has come up with some fabulous initiatives; the school is recovering from the trauma of moving from one unsuitable building into another. The last thing that this school needs now is the change and further instability that becoming an academy would bring. And the intended sponsor, the Co-op had absolutely no suggestions for how they might “improve” the school. At the consultation meeting their representative said that they would wait until the school had decided to close itself before coming up with any ideas. And what educational expertise does the Co-op have anyway with inner-city high education?

Victoria Jaquiss

Power Corrupts

In my youth, I could never see the sense of the saying Power corrupts: absolute power corrupts absolutely. It seemed to have no logical basis. But, in the UK, our experience of "strong" third term governments with large majorities seems to make the point.

Obviously Thatcher was a bully from the off; and Blair compromised on so much that it was never strictly accurate to call it a "Labour" government.

But the absolute power that absolutely shocked me [putting aside the weapons of mass unlikelihood], was the amount of educational expert advice which was dismissed and ridiculed, and even left unread.

The Cambridge Primary Review [published October 2009], welcomed by most educationalists was sneered at Eddie and Vern. They misunderstood the most basic of reccommendations: that formal education shouldn't start till after children are six. They took this to mean no schooling till seven, and publicly dismissed the report almost as it was published.

Price Cooper Waterhouse concluded in their recent report [2008?] that academies per se made no difference to standards. But still Eddie and Vern continued in their quest to de-stabilise inner-cities communities by mashing up and smashing up the bog-standard schools in order to produce no overall improvement at all. Lives lost, careers in tatters, families and friends separated, demand for mental health health services at breaking point, really really rubbish building erected at some public expense, communities in chaos, and what for? Well, for no overall improvement in standards.

And power also appears to corrupt locally. Let's take our local council, and its relation to City of Leeds School, one of the three schools which essentially this blog was set up to defend.

We have written letters as part of the "consultation" on closure and academisation. But as we have to submit our objections to the very company who is demanding our closure, we naturally don't trust the system. And we usually send copies of our objections to our councillors as well.

Our Head of History sent his objections, as per, round the councillors with a demand of notification of recipient opening it [there's probably a technical term for this]. And yes, one Leeds councillor, who will, in time, vote on closing this school, did not even open the email setting out quite rational arguments why it should stay open.

Add that to the Lib Dem councillor who publicly described City Of Leeds School as "poor", and you have to question what good is power if those wielding it don't do so in an informed manner. I am rather thinking that these people will eventually be taught a lesson by History itself.