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News and Comment September 2021

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11 September (Part 2) - Not the happiest days of your life

School pledgeAn 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.

 

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