School being set up by wealthy city types "snubs" poorer children

[ISNT]

I saw this headline in the shops today - article is here. If what it says is correct it's terrible, surely. Does anyone know anything about it? Aren't there any rules about how these new schools can choose their pupils? It all seems very strange.

crisps - I am quite anti private education (and schools that exclude children in general) but I don't know how Wandsworth can expand CG into Hearnville Road without booting HH out. That would either mean compulsorily purchasing the site or buying out the lease (like you, I suspect that many of the sites have, however, been sold rather than leased). Wandsworth is not going to be able to do that without spending many millions, many more millions, I would argue, than opening a new school at Bolingbroke. Unless CG does expand, it will not be able to take children BTC - I know one family who applied last year, living about 1.5 miles from CG who did not get a place - many, many families whose children attend the feeder schools proposed for Bolingbroke live much further away than that.

Regarding why ARK can't take over CG, I suppose they haven't been asked to. I expect there has to be some sort of invitation from the HT or LA before they just turn up...

I know several people who would send their children to state schools from private primaries if they felt that they were going to (a) be academic schools (b) have the "right sort of people" in them. The organisers of Bolingbroke want to stop it becoming this sort of hot house/yummy mummy school by feeding from state primaries (schools such as Holy Ghost where the parents have opted out of mainstream inclusive education will also be excluded). I think that what they want to avoid is a situation like Graveney where an awful lot of the places in the grammar stream seem to go to children that have come from extremely advantaged children (prep-schooled and otherwise).

Finally, I would say that not having English as a first language at Honeywell and Belleville is comparable with a lot of much more disadvantaged schools - it's just that the children there tend to have a European language instead (French especially as there are huge numbers of French and Belgian parents at both schools) and, for some reason, this never seems to count. I don't know what the official figures are for the schools but many, many children do not speak English as their first language at home - perhaps the parents feel stigmatised by putting it on official forms - I don't know. I will agree that fsm are around 12-15% from the figures I have seen rather than 30-35% for some other schools locally.

My earlier post wasn't aimed solely at you but was repudiating the Mirror's use of the term fatcat.

What's in it for ARK? ARK are paid to run the school and were asked, along with a few other school management companies, to tender for the contract. Theirs was the winning bid - I don't know if that was down to price or breadth of vision or what.

I can't remember why I mentioned the Belleville expansion, quite possibly it wasn't anything to do with your post and was responding to someone else. I don't know how much you know about the Belleville expansion but long story short: next year Belleville will start to split its intake over two sites, the Belleville site and one about 0.6 miles away on the other side of Clapham Northside, Forthbridge Rd. Belleville still wanted to admit all its pupils on distance from the Belleville site with the last 30 qualifying being taught at FR but, understandably, residents near FR felt that this discriminated against their children. Wandsworth is now trying to impose a new admissions scheme that would have "priority areas" around Belleville and FR and which would not allow siblings automatic entrance. The school is opposed to this.

HTH - I really don't think Wandsworth would spend millions of pounds setting up a new school if they felt they could get away with no doing it.

disorganised - I really don't think there is a conspiracy here, unless you know something that I don't. As I said in my earlier post, the man who has been the main force behind it is a builder and I know a couple of other people involved who are really ordinary - one works in a shop, one is a part-time book-keeper. If anything, the steering committee is under-represented by the sort of people you refer to given the proportion of wealthy people living in the area.

It's really easy to portray this as some attempt to ring-fence the new school for very privileged children but everything I have seen so far from attending a couple of meetings and reading the literature on it (not just the Mirror's report) suggests they are trying to mitigate this as much as they can.

I don't understand why parents who can afford Westminster want to set up another school for their children.

the council has bought the site so things are moving ahead

I personally dislike the feeder schools plan and prefer distance criteria

ISNT said:IMO people of a certain mindset see all of the money sloshing around in the public sector which is not accessible to them, they see all this cash and they can't get at it and it drives them bananas. Naturally the conservative govt change the rules so that public money is accessible to the private sector. Problem with this approach is that pay and conditions for normal employees in the private sector are shitter than in the public sector, and the private sector is purely driven by the need for profit. So instead of the money circulating into the pockets of public sector workers in their pay and conditions, it goes into high salaries for a few people at the top and profit for shareholders.

Thank god someone sees it the same way I do, you have summed it up perfectly, am so busy ranting I can't get my words in a coherent sentence!

The private school argument is just disingenuous, to use a popular mn word of yore.

For a start, why should children attending a private primary school be disbarred from entry? There is no good reason, in this particular instance. In fact, as possible reasons present themselves, they implode in a puff of illogic.

And the situation is worlds away from that at Haberdasher Askes, where the feeder school thing was used to secure access to a good secondary for children at a poor primary, and to make an unpopular primary more popular. Not the case with these primaries at all.

There is no logical argument for feeder schools other than to keep out the school(s) with a high number of children receiving Free School meals.

How depressing.

I can see the logic of a school in that area, just about (the premiss of Wandsworth secondary schools being full is a little wobbly). There are justifications. i can bite the bullet about money being taken out of the budget, now, to pay for the site. But the feeder schools, rather than distance? It's so obviously discriminatory, it's a little insulting.

Oh. And there's a demonstration tomorrow, at Wandsworth Town Hall. Wednesday 19th January, 7pm.

It's worth attending, if only to show that, if this goes ahead, Wandsworth Council is acting for a minority, in the face of popular opposition.

But if it was done on distance wouldn't it be only children from Honeywell and Belleville (plus some coming in from outside the state system possibly)?

I'm not asking this in any sort of aggressive (or disingenuous) way, but how do you think admissions should be prioritised?

ISNT, pretty well all of your taxes go into funding public services already. Even with the bank rescue.

Wouldn't THEY of the evil rich do better to make school fees tax deductible as they are in Australia? Or even reviving the subsidy for fee-paying schools - also in Australia? Things can get a LOT worse.

TigerseyeMum wrote "instead of the money circulating into the pockets of public sector workers in their pay and conditions, it goes into high salaries for a few people at the top and profit for shareholders". I don't think this is the case for the Bolingbroke school as ARK is a charity and therefore doesn't have shareholders. It may be the case that as they can set pay and conditions, the employees may actually get higher salaries!

If it were just distance, then it would be only Between the Commons families and some from just over Nightingale Lane who got in (including, no doubt, those who live there currently using private preps).

I still can't believe the figure they've put on Wix household income though - looking at the area, it seems far, far too high.

I agree onimolap. I did a few calculations on the back of an envelope. Wix has 31% on free school meals (to qualify for free school meals you need to earn less than £17,000). So the other 69% must earn an average of £125,000. Don't think that's quite accurate!

I don't really see what's so wrong with children going to their closest school

What is the alternative? Some complex banding arrangement like CG?

I've just had a look on the map again. Falconbrook is the other side of major railways lines (which seem to form the natural Northern boundary to the proposed catchment area), and much nearer to the existing secondary school than it is to the proposed one, and from that direction there is also the far closer Sacred Heart primary school.

I've just had a look on the map again. Falconbrook is by Battersea Park Road and the other side of major railways lines (which seem to form the natural Northern boundary to the proposed catchment area), and much nearer to the existing secondary school than it is to the proposed one, and from that direction it is not the closest - there is also the far closer Sacred Heart primary school (also not included).

By contrast, Wix is a mile south of Battersea Park Road, by the natural boundary of the borough limit.

There are a few issues here:

1. It is right and proper that children can go to their local school. I don?t really know whether or not there is not enough capacity in the existing Wandsworth schools. But it is probably right that there are not enough school places for the middle classes in schools where there are just (or mainly) PLU.

1. So does the school get started up to fill that gap (for people like us) or because of a genuine overall lack of places for all? Dunno ? but it smacks of the former. (Debate above with lalalonglegs saying it?s the latter.)

1. Feeder schools are fine. If it wasn?t feeder schools then there would be admission by distance which would then limit the intake to just people living around Honeywell and Belleville. Should Wix?s have been included when Falconbroke is not. Perhaps not? It does have the taste of trying to skew the intake away from FSM (even if that isn?t the desired aim of the founders) . And if it excludes the people who chose the local prep schools that?s fine too ?the advantage of feeder school process is supposed to be to keep children together and so those kids not in the system are quite rightly excluded.

1. The main problem with this is that if there is not really an overall lack of places the school (as the free school movement generally) will just be diverting resources from other needy schools whose capital budgets have been slashed.

1. Widening the debate from just this Wandsworth proposal. Free schools (or some of them) are going out of there way to make the poor feel unwanted. (Grammar school education with compulsory Latin for all, anyone? As per Toby Young?s West London school. Please. Or ?Christian ethos? for all in a multi-religious area such as Isle of Dogs (Canary Wharf Academy). ) If parents want Latin for all, why not lobby for existing schools to do that (governing bodies do have a say in curriculum and involved parents can achieve much); you don?t need to divorce yourself off from the community and do it alone. Much on this debate on www.localschoolsnetwork.org.uk/.

But as I say, it then really turns on whether or not there is a genuine borough wide need for places ? which is logically a question for Wandsworth council and not central government and parent lobbyists. (Unless of course you want to found a PLU school in which case Wandsworth won?t help you ? hence the reason for this Tory policy in the first place?.)

There aren't enough places in Wandsworth.

Is the proposed site is the best one? Don't know, but I haven't heard a single alternative proposal for adding more places.

The distance to school bit has, I think been deliberately obfuscated. Both measurements are given "as the crow flies". From Wix, that is pretty much the walking route distance. From Falconbrooke, it isn't as you have to add the distance it takes to get to the bridge where you can pass the railway line. So they do appear to have taken the nearest 4 primaries based on length of actual walking route.

Even if you were to apply the "crow flies" and take the 4th closest state school, it would be neither Wix, nor Falconbrooke, it would be Sacred Heart.

I don't understand why parents who can afford Westminster want to set up another school for their children.

Well because it'll be identical to private school but without having to pay the fees, what is not to like ?
I'd be focusing my energy to getting in one if I was local rather than moaning about it, the rules of the game change so you make them work for you, it's not rocket science.

There are three fair methods of allocating school places.

1. School by Lottery - will result in more travelling though.
2. Free choice - Will result in schools with good results having HUGE class sizes, becoming worse and then hopefully evening out over time.
3. First come/first served - Probably online.
4. Place by lottery - Succesful applicants are picked at random from the pool of all applicants.

3 and 4 are probably the same in practice, and may actually not be that different to 1.

All other allocation methods can be manipulated, and can be manipulated better by those with more resources.

Obviously there are 3 not 4 methods there. I thought of the 4th one after I'd started typing.

Or even 4 not 3.

/gets coat

First come first served online would lead to massive web crashes, plus discriminate against poor and chaotic families.

Lottery strikes me as an awful system: for environmental and community reasons. It has a sole advantage of openly eliminating parental choice; and only works if all schools in an area participate: VA schools may be a problem here - can the Government afford to buy out the Churches? Probably not possible in the short term.

Free choice - could work, but I'd hate to have a DC in the early years of it.

onimolop - Ticketmaster/Glastonbury etc. handle similar web traffic loads now - the technical side is not the difficult bit.

Doesn't need to discriminate against poor families - chaotic families will just end up having to take what's left - the same as happened now.

This all assumes all schools participate. We don't need to buy out the VA schools. We just take take them, counting the 90% of the costs we have been paying for them as compensation for the capital costs.

There isn't a GOOD way to do this, but these methods at least can't be manipulated. If you want fair you have to use one of these.

If you want the best outcomes then you need to have a more nuanced debate.

And if you want MEANINGFUL choice, then you need a surplus.

Even well-run sites can fail - especially council sites that are not set up to handle sudden spikes in volume.

Only 60% of UK is online (source: National Statistics Online). That's a big chunk of the population you're happy to exclude.

I didn't mean chaotic as a synonym for disorganised: I meant those with challenging social circumstances. These are typically the poorest families (and I think there's a correlation to online access too). Until this changes, you have a system which disproportionately excludes the most vulnerable. Chaotic families may make poor choices now, but at least there is a whole application window during which to try to help them - that would vanish on 1st come 1st served.

VA schools (I'm thinking here of the older ones which predated the sounding of the state schools) own both the land and the buildings. Contribution to running costs doesn't give rights to capital assets.