The anti-academies club

DavidDP

Assuming this is a full and accurate summary of the meeting, Gove has little to fear from opponents who apparently struggle to do more than hurl personal insults.

Pettros

You were obviously in a rush to finish this article. You haven't really given Academies a defence.

James

If I read the article correctly, there were 800 who turned up. How many of the 800 were parents of current pupils at the school?

It sounds like something that would attract the professional agitator class from Islington.

toco

The more failures around the more voters Labour obtain and the more obedient trades union members become.This suits both these moribund outfits admirably but like the dinosaurs they will shortly become extinct.Even the brothers in Russia and China have seen the light which leaves Red Ed and his trades union bruvvers in somewhat of a pickle.Good riddance.

Heartless Curmudgeon

Absolute unmitigated bullshit - and that's just the thinking and behaviour of those attempting to block justified improvement.

Better to pass over the end results of this 'school', and others like it.

TimC

"All the money will be siphoned off to pay executives hefty salaries" When it is supposed to be siphoned off paying NUT activists to 'work' at Local education authorities.

Ha ha ha

toco's punctuation suggests he, too, should name a sponsor and expect to be taken over.

Janee

toco: great intellectual contribution to the argument. Why is it the right so often resort to abuse rather than discussion.

tom

Wow, your anecdotal wall-display kneejerk totally dealt with the wider arguments about democracy, ideology and consensus there didn't they.

Nicholas

"Why is it the right so often resort to abuse rather than discussion."

Probably because the left habitually duck objective discussion for a combination of dogma, propaganda and abuse. You can almost guarantee that if you either challenge a leftist argument cogently or present a logical counter argument the next stage will be an emotive denunciation using all the old class-war clichés - as in this "meeting". Gove suddenly becomes Mr Burns.

Nicholas

Leftists always need bogeymen to justify their "struggle". So this Haringey business becomes a trite and grotesque characterisation of good versus evil with plenty of emotive grandstanding by people more interested in the abstracts of their political ideology than the specific needs of the school. This won't change until the left accept that it is legitimate in a democracy for the right to pursue policies based on something other than socialism and they can learn to respond to them maturely with an objective open mind rather than emotively with an ideologically closed one.

Sean Haffey

Ally Pally?

I like Gove and what he is doing. But it's clear from this that he needs to communicate the benefits of academies better.

Verity

Good piece, as always, Lloyd Evans.

Ian Walker

I didn't realise that 'multi-ethnic' was a category of school. I think you'd be very very hard pressed to find a full-sized school in Britain which had pupils and teachers entirely from one ethnic group.

I have some sympathy for Downhills, because they are categorised as 'failing' entirely based on the SATs results at the end of KS2. While this is indeed an important measure, it is naïve to assume that the socioeconomic makeup of the intake has nothing to do with it. Schools CAN and DO turn even the lesat promising pupils into useful members of society...when there are one or two in a year. When it's 50% of the intake, there's only so much that the school can achieve.

Until Ofsted come up with smarter ways of measuring school and teacher performance, converting schools to academies will only be an expensive sticking plaster.

Anan

Oh yes, executives shouldn't get high pays but illiterate union fatso "teachers" should?

Mirtha Tidville

Ah well an evening with the usual suspects and quite safe therefore to ignore.....obviously shows that Gove is on the right track

ButcombeMan

Ethnic minorities and foreign languages are not just causing problems for schools in inner city areas.

The problems of unfetterred immigration, on tottering public services, especially education, is spreading.

In Gove's own constituency I was told last week, of a school with over 20 "mother tongues".

Of course that is not true everywhere. In my Ruralshire environment there is hardly any foreign language.

I was surprised to find quite so much in leafy Surrey, Gove's patch.

When he does his rounds he should ask about the issue. Even he, will be rather surprised.

Fred

Is the comment about 26 primaries in Surry doing worse than this school true? If so, the point made is valid.

Verity

I posted earlier, and my post inexplicably failed to appear, that something had struck me about the banner pictured above. Then I realised it had three indigenous faces and no politically correct (ie., destructive of civil cohesion) ethnics pictured.

michael

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
"Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted."

michael

Josef Stalin:
"Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed."

Steve Tierney

I think you had it right the first time. Leave them alone. If they care more about some weak political stance than they do about their kid's future - there's no helping them.

PS

How dare you call a child's work 'illiterate bilge' when you do not know the child. For all you know, that child could be very new to English. Glad that the school celebrates ALL levels of work and not just pick the best for display purposes.

Robin

Re: the comment from 'James' about those present who were not parents of children in that school.

Funnily enough, people care about what happens to schools because they care about the community around them.

Some won't have children at all but want the school to prosper for the good of the area and to put children on the right path and give them the best opportunities available. To avoid the chances of future riots,yes, but also to fulfil potential for the next generation.

Many of them will have children at one of three other schools in the area threatened with Academy status; many with children at schools on Gove's 19-strong longer-term hit-list for the area.

And all parents are trying to understand why schools in this area get £1,500 less per child per year than in neighbouring Hackney and Camden. And, moreover, why Gove is pushing academies as the only model, when they are known to produce mixed results.

Anthony Zacharzewski

A few hearty blasts of the dog whistle and out come the comments about immigration and "illiterate trade unionist teachers". Just another day down at Spectator towers.

Dimoto

The parents probably feel confused and under siege, and are more likely to follow their "community leaders" and friendly union reps than someone from Whitehall.

Afro-Caribbeans, Bangladeshis etc. all schooled in socialism in the grand old days of Empire.

As for Lloyd's examples, you should get out more Lloyd - to other blogs. That style of text-speak, fractured English is exceedingly common amongst our native youth these days.

I wonder if Gove chose this school, not because it was "failing", but because he sees it as a good test-case to show what academies can achieve.

Touristfromthefuture

Did it ever cross your little journo mind that this is a very rough draft of notes that would be written up later. These children probably have EsL and so this is a good diagnostic. I bet the latter example was taken entirely out of context. What a creepy little toad you are for not declaring who you were. Pathetic piece of journo nonsense. Could do better - I bet this does not get published as, unlike other publications, the Spectator vets and censors comments it does not like.

Cynic

"David Lammy, the local MP and an old boy of Downhills." Living proof that Downhills is failing! DL was the chap who said Henry VII came after Henry VIII! Not just ignorant of history, but innumerate as well! Incidentally, I should be surprised if five-year-olds couldn't spell much better than that when all age classes were the norm in elementary education.

ancien prof

@PS "Glad that the school celebrates ALL levels of work and not just pick the best for display purposes." So you don't think there should be anything to aspire to? Like a good level of literacy so that once you've achieved it your work can also be on display? When I was teaching, my pupils had to earn rewards by reaching standards - it motivated the boys particularly because they loved the competition (a lefty "dirty word") and the challenge.

Cynic

"Gove might learn something from this campaign. His oft-repeated promise that profiteers won’t be allowed anywhere near the academy system hasn’t got through." His message hasn't and won't get through because the people aren't listening; they've got their fingers stuck in their ears and are babbling 'la-la-la'. They see it in terms of ideology; evil Tories, a manifestation of all they abhor. It's their class struggle (pun intended). The only thing Gove might learn from this campaign is that there are none so blinkered as dyed-in-the-wool socialists.

NotaTory

Aren't you jumping to conclusions over the work on the wall? Despite the child's age there are valid reasons why their English might be poor: a recent arrival in the country, or difficulties of some kind.

Perhaps what is on the wall actually represents a great achievement for the child, and has been displayed to encourage them.

And maybe not. But you don't know, do you?

Nick Kaplan

Its seems to me completely wrong to think that the first display is 'not really' a problem and that only the second one is.

Firstly the mistakes on the first display are not merely trivial spelling errors (like a confusion between their and there) but disastrously wrong, spelling class 'kluss' is almost unbelievable suggesting no grasp of the connection between certain letters and the sounds they represent when spoken. That 'Cluss' is also written suggests either that more than one person has almost no idea how to spell, or, what may be worse, that whoever made the mistake doesn't even realise some form of consistency in spelling may be important.

Moreover does it not occur to you that the fact that this work was put up on display UNCORRECTED, may be the very reason why the children at age 10 still have no idea about basic grammar?

What clearer demonstration could their be of the ideological nonsense (egalitarianism) that infects all too many schools, forbidding teachers from correcting students (lest it make them feel inferior) thereby poisoning the essential work they should be doing.

Nick Kaplan

It is hard to imagine a more inane comment than the following by PS:

"How dare you call a child's work 'illiterate bilge' when you do not know the child. For all you know, that child could be very new to English. Glad that the school celebrates ALL levels of work and [does] not just pick the best for display purpose"

Is this serious or just a perfectly pitched bit of satire which beautifully encapsulates the grotesque stupidity of relativist egalitarianism?

Why would one need to know who wrote something in order to determine that it is illiterate? The fact that the last sentence quoted is not even coherent is enough to know that it is. Would you care to hazard a guess as to what the child was trying to express in this ill formed sentence? Trying to do so defeated me. As far as I'm concerned it is just a chain of loosely connected words arranged in no particular order.

And who exactly is helped by pretending this rubbish is worthy of display? What message does it send to a child who works hard to get things right, when no distinction is made between his work and work that cannot even be read? Perhaps more importantly, how is the child who wrote it ever supposed to learn anything if their teacher is so terrified of telling them it is wrong that they would rather just pin it up to the wall? What kind of life can a child expect when he has never been taught to express himself coherently in writing?

And you want not just to excuse this poison but positively encourage it?

(And sorry if your post is genuinely satirical, it's hard to tell!)

Jon Stack

The problem with leaving these people to it, in true localist style, is that admissions regulations tie the local catchment into this school. In my view these regulations should be relaxed and allow parents to choose outside of the catchment area. We'll soon see how many parents would like to see their children grow up with such inadequate grasp of the English language as demonstrated in the display material.

zakisbak

I've been to the school several times.There is always work on display and the spelling and punctuation is always absolutely atrocious.They seem almost proud of it.Very odd,sorry,I mean,verre od.