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Doing down Edith Neville school pupils
• I AM a parent of three children at Edith Neville Primary School in Somers Town.
For years no one in the council has cared too much that our children work in small classrooms and use smelly, broken toilets.
So, during the past 18 months, the staff, governors, parents and children have worked extremely hard to design our “school for the future” in Somers Town.
We consulted all the local community because we are a children’s centre and a place for community activity. Now the council is trying to destroy all our efforts to give our children a good education and opportunities for the future by forcing another school onto our site.
Our parents are behind the governors of the school in opposing Camden’s decision to relocate Frank Barnes School onto our site.
They have not talked to us about their plans before they have made their decision. We ask the council to please reconsider and suspend the decision-making process.
The council have not listened to us and our views. Now they have written to all parents inviting them to come to meetings to hear all about their plans for our site.
How can we believe what they say to us as it is clear they just want to move Frank Barnes School from the Swiss Cottage site and find another home for it in a hurry?
We believe there are important things they are not telling us. There are many worrying things in the papers they were forced to release to our lawyers. One is that it is clear our children will be expected to learn British Sign Language.
Most of our children speak English as their second language. How can you improve children’s learning when you will be expecting them to learn British Sign Language?
As parents we don’t think this is beneficial or practical to be part of our children’s curriculum.
I said all this to Councillor Andrew Mennear after he talked at a recent Campaign for State Education meeting and he said: “It won’t be too hard, children don’t have to learn BSL immediately. It will be introduced to them slowly.”
We believe this is unfair and it’s not meeting the education needs of our children.
And it’s not fair on the Frank Barnes children either.
And there are lots of other questions that they cannot answer. They should talk to us properly before they carry forward their decision. Their meetings now are just pretending they are speaking and listening to us.
JAHANARA BEGUM
Address supplied
Perplexed
• I AM perplexed and dismayed at the current controversy surrounding Camden Council’s proposals to relocate the Frank Barnes School for the Deaf with Edith Neville School in Ossulston Street, Somers Town.
The letters you printed from Councillor Andrew Mennear (Two distinct schools and Linda Starkey Against merger, July 3) illustrate the confusion.
Ms Starkey, a former teacher at the school, states baldly that Edith Neville School “never was fit for use”.
Yet she apparently supports campaigners who want to turn down £10million council money to rebuild and to condemn the Somers Town children to a further five-year wait before their school is brought up to standard and enlarged.
I find it equally difficult to understand how Edith Neville School, which claims on its website to be proud of its inclusive approach to education, does not apparently allow that to extend to sharing a proportion of a much improved and potentially larger site with 30 deaf children.
My suspicion is that continual opposition to relocation of Frank Barnes, wherever it is proposed to go, is fomented and engineered by dogmatist opponents of the new secondary school (OK, it’s an academy) to be built in Adelaide Road where Frank Barnes is at present inadequately housed.
These people frankly don’t give a toss about the future standards of education in Camden.
In effect the Labour rear-guard (for it is they) are quite prepared to make sacrifice of Camden children’s education on the pyre of their “socialist principles,” just as they were willing to sacrifice Camden tenants’ welfare and housing repairs to their failure to force them into an arms-length management organisation.
Edith Neville School needs rebuilding.
It needs it urgently. It has actually needed it for years already.
Can governors who turn down £10million council money for that purpose really claim to be acting in the interests of their school or its present or future children?
Bluntly, all Camden needs the new secondary school (OK, it’s an academy) too, and needs it as soon as possible. At present Camden secondary schools can offer places to fewer than half the borough’s children. That’s not good enough. End obstructionism. Let’s get on with it.
ROBN YOUNG
Bedford Avenue, WC1
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