Camdcen New Journal - Letters:marathon

Publications by New Journal Enterprises

Home

Archive

Competition

Camden New Journal - LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Published:28 June 2007

School run is a marathon!

• I AM a mother living in the Finchley Road area. My daughter is due to start school this September this year.
We applied to two schools in the area which are a five to ten-minute walk from our home. We were offered neither.
We have just been allocated a place at a school which is two bus rides away. The journey will take me 45 minutes to travel to and from school each day.
By law our children must be in school by the age of five. Mothers have a hard enough job already. Little of the work that we do raising the next generation is recognised or appreciated. Instead, we are blamed when anything goes wrong.
Schools are quick enough to target us if our children are late in the morning, yet when the local authority allocates our children to schools miles from our home they never consider the impact on my child or me.
My daughter will not be able to bring friends home from school. I have to cover the cost of travelling out of my benefits.
I have been trying hard to get back to college to improve my chance of getting a job that pays enough to support my daughter and now I have had to pull out of the course near my house because I will be travelling to and from school.
We work hard to do the best for our children. We know best what they need. Why don’t they take into account the extra burden on us when they make decisions like this and for once make our lives easier not harder?
KATE DAVIDSON
Kentish Town Road, NW5

• IF consultation is to mean anything at all then councillors Andrew Mennear and Chris Bryant should not persist in trying to squeeze a large new secondary school on to the Swiss Cottage site, cruelly evicting the excellent Frank Barnes School for Deaf Children in the process.
The message has come out loud and clear from the recent ‘consultation’ meetings on the Camden Building Schools for the Future proposals that Swiss Cottage is wholly inappropriate for a secondary school.
The need is greatest for a new school in the south of the borough where the most deprived children are currently being disgracefully overlooked (Bulging primary schools show real need is in south, June 14.)
There is also a universal call for the new school to be comprehensive, totally inclusive and democratically accountable, which means it should be a Camden-run community school open to everyone including adults at evenings and weekends – an academy or a church school would naturally be selective.
Councillors Mennear and Bryant should take on board what everyone is saying and look more closely at alternative sites – Mount Pleasant and Gray’s Inn Road, and renegotiate a better deal with Argent, the developers, for more money (the £1 million offered is peanuts) or even some land on the King’s Cross site for a new community school.
KATHARINE BLIGH
Priory Road, NW6

Send your letters to: The Letters Editor, Camden New Journal, 40 Camden Road, London, NW1 9DR or email to letters@camdennewjournal.co.uk. The deadline for letters is midday Tuesday. The editor regrets that anonymous letters cannot be published, although names and addresses can be withheld. Please include a full name, postal address and telephone number. Letters may be edited for reasons of space.

Comment on this article.
(You must supply your full name and email address for your comment to be published)

Name:

Email:

Comment: