There will be a meeting at 7pm tonight, Wednesday 29th November, at Balfour Junior School.
The Balfour Parents have invited parents from Stanford Junior and the Patcham area, but also welcome any other parents concerned about the new proposals on secondary school admissions.
We hope some of you will be able to come.
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3 comments:
Tonight's meeting at Balfour was very valuable. There was an excellent turn out, probably in excess of 200 people, representing not only the imediate Balfour / Stringer / Varndean area but Westdene, Patcham, Coldean & of course a few of us from Coombe Rd. As well as the head of Balfour there were 3 speakers: Gil Sweetenham; Martin Powell (Parent Representative on the SAR Working Group) & Robert whom I believe is a governor at Balfour. Gil's speech was pretty much the same as the one he addressed at Coombe Rd on Monday. After each had spoken it was open to questions from the floor. My overall reaction to the evening is that we are not alone in our protest over the fairness of the proposed policy. Different areas disagree for differing reasons. Patcham parents present expressed protestations similar to those at Coombe Rd - i.e. that the choice of one school in effect is no choice at all, regardless of what school it is and how well / poorly it is achieving. Parents in the immediate Stringer / Varndean area tended to express disatisfaction with the ballot system in the likely scenario of Dorothy Stringer being oversubscribed.
The views of the Coombe Road area were very well put forward again this evening - thank you Cate!
There was also a general (very strong) concensus of opinion that the public had not been fairly consulted. It was suggested that this concern should be raised with our local councillors. (I actually emailed my local councillor last night asking how the public meetings had been communicated to the local community, seeing as so little people were aware they had happened, but unfortunately my councillor could not answer this question and has redirected my email elsewhere, from whom I'm still awaiting a reply!!!)
It is good to realise we are not alone in this protest and there is a slight glimmer of hope in the fact that if the whole city is up in arms about this then surely they will have to go back to the drawing board.
I will be feeding back details of tonights meeting to my colleagues on the governing body at our school and ensure some very valuable arguments are included in our protest to the proposed plan.
I urge you all to make your views known to EVERYONE involved in the review, NOW, i.e. the members of the Children, Families & Schools committee; Council Officers; Des Turner, Member of Parliament for the area; The Argus; and first and foremost your local councillors. All contact details have been handed out by the school but please feel free to contact me should anyone not have these contacts.
Thank you.
Thank you Mrs K for your comment. The meeting was fascinating and very valuable.
For me, it also undid the notion that the proposals would bring in a transparent and simpmle admissions system. There was concern about oversubscription of Varndean and Stringer that might lead to children being sent out of the catchment, i.e. the "catchment would not catch". This would be decided by ballot - like a lottery - and would leave parents and children in a state of considerable uncertainty until the last minute.
So, the "problem" of Falmer exists beyond the boundaries of the potential Falmer catchment, and we are not alone in our concerns.
I just wanted to say it's great that you've been able to attend these meetings and express our concerns so articulately. I'm encouraged that people in other catchments have issues with this, too, even though theirs may be different from ours. I'm doing the blurb for the front of the petition, and if you have no objections, I'll use points you've raised in your meetings, as I think they address the wider picture, which is what the argument needs. I just wanted to add, I was thinking of attending the meeting at Moulsecoomb leisure centre, as this is a chance to raise our objections in the context of regeneration of the Lewes Rd area.
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