Bishop Gilpin parents - And you call yourselves Christians?? (MERTON SCHOOLS)

[NutellaWithEverything]

Name changed because I need to rant about my DS not having been offered a school place and don't want to be outed. I am in Wimbledon and my nearest school in Bishop Gilpin. My DS has not been accepted to start in Reception this September coming even though it takes us three minutes to get there. Yet, they take in children from the other side of Wimbledon even though they have to drive through town to get there. And why?? Because they go to the right churches. So last November there was a request from the Council to add another Reception class but parents voted against other children from their own community benefiting from attending a good school. They felt it would be in the detriment of their school's community feel!!!!! AM I THE ONLY ONE WHO THINKS THIS IS SELFISH, SHORT-SIGHTED, UN-GODLY AND JUST PLAIN WRONG?????????????????

Religion has no place in state-funded education. That's all there is to it.

But how would parents keep their children from mixing with us lot off the estate then Hammy? Horrors!

"cantspel, there are plenty of desperately poor people living in Kensington and Chelsea. Lots of them are recent refugees or immigrants, struggling to stay aflost, often with traumatic recent pasts in war-torn countries. They are often transient, lack knowledge of how the system works. They may be desperate for their children to be well educated, but they don't know that you have to attend a certain church every Sunday for four years, and get your name on the parish roll and help out with Sunday School, in order to get your child into the local school."

Bears repeating.

I don't generally agree with the idea of faith schools, but this one did follow the rules as they are at the moment. What I want to know is, why aren't their schools for Atheists? Schools where religious children normally wouldn't get to attend?

People would think it bonkers if we had different schools for children of parents with different political ideas so why is it OK to segregate kids according to their parent's religion? I see the two as daft as each other.

Close family friend is a parish priest, he alsways knows when its school selecton time,church is full to the rafters of bods he has never seen before or since,,letter, telling him how the school would benefit from their kid,we always have a good laugh over a glass or two at those,, endless inducements,,get over it,your kid simply didnt get a place,,or pay for his education.

oh i will agree there and i do think the game players should lose their place.
The church is getting wise to some of the tricks like late baptism and removing priorty on sibling places.

As a person who choose a faith school because my faith is important to me i probably get more annoyed at people who play the system than someone who is unwilling to. It makes a mockery of my beliefs.

It does make me despair how many parents take an 'I'm alright, Jack' position on education. And yes, I did have the privilege to move to an affluent area with good schools. My kid did ok; that doesn't mean I don't care about the children who didn't - the ones who don't have school places, or who travel miles out of their neighbourhood to get to school, or who go to frankly crap schools.

The system isn't working, and faith schools are part of the problem. You honestly have to be wilfully ignorant to argue the opposite.

Hey, what would Jesus have done?

northernrock...have you told them how to get into the system?

A school for 'atheists only' would be amusing just to make the point of how wrong it all is. Of course Atheists wouldn't want to keep out religious children and certainly not on the basis of what their parents do. That would be disgusting.

If you have to label schools, just call them all agnostic schools. Lets be honest, not a single soul on this planet has a fucking clue why we're here.

and maybe if a area has a too high number of refugees or immigrants then we need to look at our immigration policy and where we place refugees within the country.
The simple fact is we are a very small land mass and we are full to bursting. Everyone likes to think we are a liberal rich country and can afford to open our doors to all who knock but the simple facts show we are not coping with the large influx of people coming in.

You know we wouldn't really have much of a shortage if we did refuse to fund faith schools tomorrow.

We wouldn't be short of teachers because the church is not going to pay the faith school teachers to stay at home. They will be down the job center and guess what? there will be vacancies for teachers. They would just have to get used to putting the education of the child before the interests of the church.

There would be no shortage of classrooms either. The church would be stuck with all those empty schools which have to be maintained anyway. They'd be happy enough to rent them out to local authorities to use as .... schools.

So is that what Jesus would do? Lock the doors and look after his own?

In your area faith schools might be seem to not taking the under privileged but that is not true of all areas. I know of catholic schools in my area that are struggling because of the influx of catholic eastern europeans (mainly poles)

onagar but the local authorities would have to raise the money to pay the rents and as it is the dont have enough money to stock school libraries so where is the extra millions going to come from to pay the rents?

onagar can you IMAGINE the uproar at the thought of a atheist school

The humanist society only put a poster on the side of a bus suggesting that god might not exist and there was an outcry FFS!

Fallon, i was quoting hester.
And I dont know how to play the system clearly, otherwise my kid wouldnt have been allocated a school miles away.

I agree with Eric too

AS a Christian

Whose kids attend a faith school with an excellent rep only becuase it is the closest to us

Nobody should be prevented from attending their closest state funded school on the grounds of belief system alone.

And yes I do think choosing to not build an extension to teh detriment of the local community is Unchristian.

Oh, and cantspel-that must be it.
If only Johnny Foreigner would stop coming to Blighty and filling our schools with their funny smelling offspring it would all be alright.

Incidentally, where I live which is heavily mixed, racially, classwise, age wise, the "local" schools, both of which are faith, are overwhelmingly white, British, middle class.
Funny thing that.

cantspel, we're already paying for the faith schools. If they were ours we'd just be paying for them from a different part of the budget.

CurrySpice, I know. would be nice to pretend to open one just to hear christians saying "but you can't have an admissions policy based on what their parents believe!"

Peachy, NICE!

Onangar - let's do it. Just for the laugh

And let's have some TOTALLY random entry criteria. Only kids whose parents can prove that they have shopped in Sainsburys at least once a month for the last 2 years. Receipts required and if you have been in Tescos, you're out

onagar - the teachers would not be unemployed because the churches don't pay for them in the first place. Only a tiny part of the budget for Church schools is actually provided by the Church - none of the operating costs and usually less than 10% of the capital costs. However, despite the Church's minute contributions to the running of so-called Church schools, they still get to set the admission criteria to keep all us dirty Jews and Catholics out

GArnish

Sorry can;t so emticons / sarcasm (ASD traits) so if ehre's a specific issue you have can you spell it out? If not sorry, impossible to know!