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Do not sweep our views to one side
• CAMDEN now knows the timetable it is working to for its plans to transform its secondary schools through the government’s Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme.
We are assured that over the next year, schools and community stakeholders are to be thoroughly consulted on these proposals.
We hope this will be a genuine consultation, and the people of Camden will not simply be listened to and then ignored.
Unfortunately, the Camden Together community strategy consultation, carried out last month, does not give us great confidence that this will be the case. We in the south of the borough were surprised to see that in the reports of these meetings in ‘Your Camden’, the borough’s freesheet, the issue which dominated the meetings in all three of our wards was not reported at all. The meetings in Bloomsbury, King’s Cross and Holborn and Covent Garden were unanimous that one of the greatest needs is for a secondary school.
In addition, the borough’s secondary school questionnaire, due in on January 12, has been poorly constructed and inadequately circulated.
Although it claims to be aimed at all parents in the borough, there is no box to tick if you have pre- and post-school children. There is no obvious way of indicating that you may have different levels of concern about finding a school place for a son versus a daughter, for example. And although it is available in community languages, copies in Bengali and Somali have not been sent to schools. The questionnaire hasn’t been received by Camden’s nurseries. Anecdotal evidence suggests that those of us who live in flats, particularly on large estates, are not receiving Your Camden (in which the questionnaire was inserted) at all. Will it be any surprise if the results do not fully represent the south of the borough?
We in the Holborn and St Pancras Secondary School Campaign have been calling on the council to carry out a full, statistically valid analysis of patterns of need and parental preference for secondary school places. We know that proper research would back our case for a new school in this area.
Therefore we will continue to urge the council to do this analysis, and hope our views as ‘community stakeholders’ are allowed to influence Camden’s ambitious plans for its secondary schools.
POLLY SHIELDS AND EMMA JONES
Millman St, WC1
• I HAVE heard of a school in Essex which allows the pupils 40 minutes for lunch and has a shorter day than most London schools.
Could there be a discussion about the short London lunches of 20-30 mins and the fact that the long day allows only an hour of sport of which 10 minutes is spent changing? Children are at school from 9am to 3.30pm, add in time for travel and extra sport and the day can last until 6pm.
During the long summer holiday, my child eats, gets fat and reads at least a book a day.
When he is at school, he does not read because he is too tired. He hardly reads in school and there is minimal sport (two half-hour sessions) and there is minimal music. He goes to school for friends. Is the push to long school days really so successful if children are too tired to concentrate on music, art and sport?
Name and address supplied
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