I wrote this letter to the YEP before the tragic Tory success in the latest UK general election. Sadly this "success" will mean that the Conservatives think they have a mandate for dismantling our public education system:
This debacle over the allocation of places to the Khalsa Science Academy throws up a number of uncomfortable issues.
1. It is a free school/academy. As such it doesn't need to conform to national or even local educational standards, such as employing qualified teachers or providing healthy meals. Despite Gove and Cameron defending this "freedom", no one else in the country is buying this is as a good thing.
2. It is a Sikh school. Are the parents religious? Sikh even? Well, for me this begs the other question of why are Christian schools bursting with Muslim children? And one answer is that church schools only survive because they include children from other faiths. Is this a good thing? Debate. But when my Muslim friend was in 6th form at a Catholic college she had to attend masses in order to qualify for EMA - the allowance that sixth-formers used to get to help them finance staying on in education.
1. It is a free school/academy. As such it doesn't need to conform to national or even local educational standards, such as employing qualified teachers or providing healthy meals. Despite Gove and Cameron defending this "freedom", no one else in the country is buying this is as a good thing.
2. It is a Sikh school. Are the parents religious? Sikh even? Well, for me this begs the other question of why are Christian schools bursting with Muslim children? And one answer is that church schools only survive because they include children from other faiths. Is this a good thing? Debate. But when my Muslim friend was in 6th form at a Catholic college she had to attend masses in order to qualify for EMA - the allowance that sixth-formers used to get to help them finance staying on in education.
3. Fir Tree School in Moortown was one of those schools which the late unlamented Education Leeds took an axe to. Unlike the much missed Royal Park, this building is still standing and long since should have refurbished as an authority school, as this crisis clearly shows we in Leeds need.
Instead, this government, whose days I pray, in what ever religion is available, are numbered, has ordered Leeds Council to give a publicly owned asset to a private company. Unbelievably Cameron's take on this (YEP 2 May) was "free schools don't take money away from other schools. They're separately funded." and he suggests that "where a free school is built elsewhere it demonstrates that parents aren't happy with the education provision". I think we were generally happy until he told us that satisfactory wasn't satisfactory anymore.
And, Dave, your government decreed in 2011 that any and all new schools had to be free schools or academies, and that local authorities were not allowed to open new schools, even in a town where a private company has willfully and wrongly destroyed so many. This has nothing to do with parental choice as your paper's front page clearly shows.
4. By its name this new school seems to be a Science specialist institution. At primary age! Research clearly show the value of the Arts in education. This title does not bode well for them.
5. This local school isn't actually yet in Moortown, but presently housed in Chapeltown, not, I think "local" at all!
So, it's up to Leeds to sort this out, because this will be being replicated around the country and making us the world's laughing stock
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