Categories: uncategorized
Date: 01 October 2005 10:35:29
Just to kind of round off last months personal bits, modem thing has miraculously turned up, so like to think it was just wrong info on the Royal Mail system yesterday.
In terms of the bus pass appeal I lost, but at the end of the day I understand the guidelines they were working to. Which brings me onto the fact I actually, partially agree with some of their argument, which whilst not stated was implicit in the final judgement.
As a parent I am using the fact I happen to go to church to help my daughter get into a church school, which I believe she is academically more suited to because I want to give her the best chance to get a good set of GCSEs, etc, etc. Whilst it is a stretch I am able to pay the bus fares (I have a nice middle class job and a nice middle class family who are there to be in a position to give me a loan when I get stuck).
In light of where I live we are just outside the catchment for the local good comprehensive and so the school I actually rejected is seen as a skink school, which comes very, very low in the league tables (read bottom 10 in the country last year) and was until a few years ago in special measures. This is also technically an all ability school. Parents, such as myself, who are in a position to choose just tend to take the view, "any school but there" and so in reality whilst it should take all the local kids who don't go to grammar school it ends up taking, mainly, those who have no other choice.
The parents of these children have the same aspirations for their kids and want them to do just as well. However if the arguments given about the benefits of Comprehensive education are right, parents such as me work with the grammar system (which we are so keen to citicise) to ensure that these benefits are not there because there tends to be a lack of the more academically able and the more financially affluent (you may choose to read middle class) so it tends to end up a school for the less able and children of the so called "underclass".
Politically and from a religious perspective I have an issue with this. I know my decision was not the one I should have made if I was going to take the WWJD idea seriously,however, as a parent I made a decision to put my daughters future first. So yes I am a hypocrite, and yes I probably do deserve to have to pay her bus fares (although I would argue so do the parents of those children who go to grammar schools or happen to be the right denomination to get a bus pass on church grounds).
We somehow need to get out of this circle, because I know it is not fair on the children and teachers who are in the schools at the bottom of the league tables, (like the ones I described), who work doubly hard to get the good GCSE's, (after all if the parents couldn't pay to get their kids in anywhere else they're also not going to be able to pay for all those extras the schools which come higher in the league tables view as the norm). I don't think PFI type acadamies are the answer, in fact I don't know what is. I do feel the expansion of faith schools is not (they just encourage people like me to sell out) UNLESS these faith schools are working with existing local undersubscribed, struggling schools, ensuring local children get priority and that their role is just to ensure that the "nice, middle class, church attending parents" don't go elsewhere and abandon their local communities.