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Consultation on school? Council must do better
• ON Tuesday, four potential academy sponsors: Westminster School, Haberdashers Askes, North London Collegiate and a hedge fund operator called John Nash, came to look over Pimlico School.
The council effectively ruled out ARK and ULT because they already have schools in the borough.
For Councillor Sarah Richardson to say the council listened to calls for the school to remain comprehensive, even as it is cased by private schools, is an abuse of language: handing the school over to private school operators would keep it “comprehensive”! Only 4 per cent of those consulted favoured either an academy or trust for Pimlico – so the claim about listening is equally absurd.
Then there is the “extra funding” argument. Cllr Richardson will know that the government found it so difficult to find sponsors that the requirement to contribute £2m has been dropped, so one of the two main reasons given by WCC for forcing Pimlico to be an academy is gone.
As to funding the unique special music course, Westminster could support it by providing the funding for long enough to allow them to find a sponsor.
Business support for other arts initiatives does not involve takeovers.
She talks about the Building Schools for the Future funds, of which about £35m are to be used for the rebuilding of the school. Should Pimlico be given over to any of the private school operators, they will also get £35m of taxpayers’ money.
Have we been asked if we think private schools, who already have tax advantages because of their “charitable” status, should get another big subsidy from public funds? This is privatisation on the scale of the NHS, where public assets are handed over to private hospitals.
Cllr Richardson’s reading of the March 2007 PWC report on the improvement in schools brought about by academies is uncritical.
For example, the report says that “GCSE performance in academies in 2006 was broadly similar to that in comparable schools”. So in spite of the high cost, academies’ performance is “broadly similar” to comparable schools. We might wonder what comparable schools are, but it’s not a ringing endorsement.
As the recent Interim Report of the Parliamentary Committee of Enquiry into academies points out: “No evidence is provided for the assertion (that academies’ GCSE performance is better) and, averaging the Contextual Value Added scores, the difference seems marginal.
The truth is that well before any of the consultation or council meetings, the decision about Pimlico had been made.
On March 8 council leader Sir Simon Milton, as he mentioned at the cabinet meeting which took the decision on July 9, had declared he wanted an academy – so the “consultation” process is another part of the rich tapestry of farce surrounding the whole saga.
The issue of admissions and the high proportion of Pimlico pupils from other boroughs was repeatedly mentioned at council meetings.
For all its aspirations to be a “global city”, Westminster City Council feels very little responsibility to those from neighbouring boroughs.
Academies can set their own admissions policies. Parents from across the river are now very concerned about the chances of the siblings of children already in the school getting a place should Pimlico become an academy.
They are not reassured by the “invitation only” parents evenings organised by the interim executive board – the council-appointed body running the school.
As to the much-proclaimed desire for parental choice, with the threat of closure of one comprehensive – Pimlico – and the desire of the head of Quintin Kynaston to turn it into a trust, we could soon face the prospect of no comprehensive schools in Westminster.
Perhaps that was the council’s agenda all along?
PADRAIC FINN
Westminster NUT
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It is not easy to build the right public perceptions about the immigrants from CEE, who are most of them just fellow EU citizens. I am a journalist originally from CEE, but also a professional with two postgraduate degrees, so I am just a member of the UK professional class. When this public attitude towards CEE citizens appears, it is a sign of ignorance, as Coincillor Paul Dimoldenberg implies. There are ways to promote social cohesion at regional and national level and one of the ways to do that is to say that it is many of the CEE immigrants in Westminster, who actually contribute tax, thus subsidising the council housing, the schools and the rest of the public services. The trouble is that the most qualified CEE immigrants, who arrive in Victoria through the gates of Gatwick Express, the do not want to stay in the UK for long, which is not really what the UK government wants. One of the reasons for that is the public perception of CEE as a whole and central London boroughs can do something about that.
Rumyana Vakarelska |
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