11 September (Part 2) - Not the happiest days of your life
An
acquaintance with two children at a primary school in Thamesmead thinks it falls way short of their Pledge to Pupils.
The problem arises because one of the children is a clever little thing as most
of them seem to be these days and the other is what my mother would have called
‘a little tinker’. He is excitable and runs around and tends to wear the
patience of someone like me whose children are both fiftyish. Not always, but sometimes.
His parents love him and he gets treated the same as his older sister. Lavish
presents on occasions and trips out to museums and tourist attractions etc.
However his school makes little attempt to cater for his over-activity by incarcerating him all
day with two similar ‘little tinkers’ learning next to nothing from a teaching assistant. The
sister reports that they are not the only disturbed children in the school but
by coincidence the white ones attend regular classrooms.
The father has asked me what he can do because his complaints are ignored and I
explained that Academies are pretty much exempted from Council control and the
sort of people who run these institutions are not easily shamed into changing their ingrained attitudes.
The Head in this instance reported my friend to Social Services for being a bad
parent without even telling him, it was admitted only after Social Services
began to, figuratively speaking, bang on his door.
After being subjected to a stressful period of investigation the family was given
a clean bill of health leaving them to face the failing school alone. I have
suggested that they might start by submitting a Subject Access Request to the
school and maybe send a description of the predicament to the
Cabinet Member for Education and his Labour shadow but beyond that I am bereft
of ideas. This brief report is by his request.
The school pledge is full of trite claims (Be open in all our endeavours! Individuality is paramount! Nurture every child!) culled
from some catalogue of politically correct BS, screaming insincerity at full volume.