East Dulwich Forum

@reggie: please explain more about money being stolen by a nursery - and how that is relevant here?

@Fuschia: thank you but I don't agree. Seems to me the problem in England is that education has been driven by political dogma for at least the last seventy years and policy has see sawed wildly from parliament to parliament and from Left to Right for ever.

Education should be about providing children with the best possible chance to learn to become rounded, competent adults who can fit into society comfortably. Children need stability, teachers need stability, people need stability in order to be effective and education quite clearly is not that way nor has it been in my lifetime. The perennial point locally that reflects this is that there is not enough decent schools let alone enough places for children from Camberwell or East Dulwich to go to. This is ridiculous and must change.

As for the political dogma about Free Schools, I'd appreciate it if you could specify just how a Free School will take resources away from others. What exactly is the mechanism, and where is this process described, that will make it so?

OH yes. The bit about defending our community schools instead of my putting myself forward as 'the darling of this ideological campaign'. Rubbish. There does not seem to be much to defend except that, evidently. 'our community schools' aren't good enough; besides, that's what you read into it and you are way off the mark, I'm just a parent who's really pissed off. I'm just prepared to stand up and do something about an inequitous situation and I cannot do that by keeping schtum... it needs to be broadcast or it will not happen. And no one else is going to broadcast it for me. Will they? I'm particularly driven by two things:

1) The realisation this year (because the train wreck of secondary education happened to my family and my friends' families together for the first time this year) that very little changes perennially because communities of parents are divided and counquered by a rubbish system that, in the end, lets everyone down and leaves everyone scrabbling around trying to find scraps of solace in a bad system that is letting us all down.
2) Knowing a boy in my son's class who was not offered a place at all. Nothing. The letter said 'Dear blah blah blah... your son has been offered a place at ___________________ school. No explanation nor apology, nothing. It might have been a typo for all his mother could work out. Nothing, just a blank space? What's that all about? That happened to 43 other children as well. In my view the people in charge of such incompetence should be sacked for stuff like that. Their complacent view is: 'unfortunately this is the way it is but they will all get a place in the end' so it doesn't matter. It's NOT GOOD ENOUGH.

By the way; IF my son had got into his first, second, or even sixth choice school and IF his friend had been offered a place at one of his choices, I would not be here - I would not have spent time trying to work it out because I would have had the (wrong) impression that everything was working out hunky dory with the system.

@sillywoman: who are you referring to and where exactly in the south of the Borough do you mean?