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

This blog has been set up to provide accurate information about the campaign to keep City of Leeds School open, successful, still at the heart of its community and including as it does, children bussing themselves over from all over Leeds and flying in from all over Africa and Europe.

My background is that I worked for 16 happy years at Foxwood School, Leeds [led by Bob Spooner:heateacher of genuine vision and genius], and only left because they closed that amazing place. The despair that I shared with other staff, and with parents and children from Secroft and Gipton was almost unimaginable.

Next I sent my youngest children to Royal Park School [led by Rita Samuel, renowned throughout Leeds for innovation and high standards], and even became a governor and after-school teacher there. I only stopped working there when it was closed. Years of despair followed, bumping into ex-pupils all round Headingley, Burley and Kirkstall, who couldn't understand why they had been separated from their friends and favourite teachers, and why they had to go so far to school now.

My personal interest is that these same two children of mine went on to City of Leeds, and left, both with 8 or 9 A-C GCSEs, including several As and Bs. Living in the area, I had heard the rumours about the school, but a when I started to do the odd music lesson there, I realised it was Foxwood all over again: great school, terrible reputation.