Yes, I guess it's not easy after all, and after a request, I thought I'd write an article to help.
1. If you want to comment on an article here, then you need to click on the pale blue "comments" link at the bottom of an article. You'll be taken to the comment page.
2. You can fill in your comment in the box where the cursor, or text line, is flashing.
3. After that you'll need to click to select whether you want to post from either:
a. your gmail account, if you have one, but most of you will probably want to select "other" or "Anonymous".
b. "other": you can just put in a first name/surname name, or an alias (Marta Hari, Ghandi, Bart Simpson, whatever you like), and you can leave "your web page" blank, unless you have one and you want to put it to go in as a link at the end of your comment.
OR
c. "Anonymous": the easiest to use, as you are not required to put in a name.
4. When you have selected the right one and added the details you need to add, then go down to the bottom of the page and click "Publish Your Comment".
That's it. I hope.
With any luck, I'll check shortly afterwards and get it put up on the website. You'll be a published writer at this point.
I'm moderating comments to make sure that they are "family friendly," i.e. no swearing or malicious personal attacks. I will happily put up comments that disagree with my point of view as I'd rather a good honest debate than evil censorship.
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4 comments:
Great website, lots of points spot on. I help run another group. If you want info or help log onto schools4communities.co.uk.
Parents desperately need to write (or email) their councillors. With elections coming this is the perfect time to remind them of who they actually represent !
I see you too have been depressed by the level of debate available with the people who are meant to to be running admissions i this city. Did you kow they dont actually realise how the new system would work !! They havent modelled it properly. This means that the statutory consultation with schools is flawed and would in theory have to be started again (as they will have to withdraw the Equal Preference element of the system - it doesnt techicnally work with dual catchments and a lottery) There are so many grounds for the Schools Adjudicator to get involved.
Cheers
I gather from you Website that you feel the current system should remain, and that the 'walking distance' criteria should be retained.
Do you support this from a because its best for your kids and never mind the rest, or do you genuinly beleive it is a fair system?
Perhaps the principal could be extended to other Council services, for example care of the elderly: why not use the distance a person lives form either town hall to decide if they should get a home help or not?
Or perhaps the level of Council Tax: the closer, by walking distance, you lived to a school, the higher your Council Tax would be. After all, if its fair for one, its fair for the other.
It doesn't seem to me that the blog has supported the "Walking Distance" criteria, but that it opposes the proposed system. There are several reasons I can see for this:
- Parents in many areas of the city were not consulted about the proposals, and in fact were not even made aware that there was a consultation ongoing.
- The proposed catchment areas appear to favour the more affluent areas of the city, putting them in the catchment area for the best-performing schools.
- The catchment areas for the poorest performing schools appear to include the poorest areas of the City.
- Those parents that were not consulted have ended up in the catchment area for the worse performing schools.
It would be a fairer system, surely, to have joint catchment areas for the better and worse performing schools. Say, DS and Patcham, and Vardean and Falmer, with all parents in those catchment areas (rich or poor) in with an equal chance of getting the best education for their child.
I think the current system is very unsatisfactory, and I totally understand why the families in the Queen's Park and Hanover areas have campaigned to have it changed. This, however, does not detract from the fact that the new proposals are even worse! The 'losers' are just moved to a different area of the city, and real areas of social exclusion are created by ghettoising the catchment to Falmer. What we need are better schools, so that all of our children get a good education. I don't think we should accept the new proposals, simply because the current system doesn't work. The working group needs to go back to the drawing board and think again!
It is clear that the Working Group has spent a lot of time thinking about this issue - unfortunately they left it rather late to consult with large areas of the City. One issue seems to be the numbers of pupils within each catchment area. I wonder if they have spent time examining the impact of substantial numbers of families moving from the Falmer fixed catchment area to the dual Dorothy Stringer/Varndean catchment. What effect would this have on the claimed percentages of children getting their first preference (sorry, I nearly said 'choice' there, but I caught myself just in time)? This would leave increasing numbers of properties in the Falmer catchment area to the students, and leave Falmer school in an even worse predicament than it is under the current system, with an intake, the majority of which does not want to be there. It would also condemn primary schools in the Falmer catchment to decreasing intakes.
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