I won't send my child to a sink school

This year over 100,000 children didn't get into their first choice of secondary school - but even more shockingly there are many who haven't got into any secondary school at all. In the Sunday Times News Review this weekend we have a piece about some of the families who are caught in the hell of appeals and uncertainty trying to get their children into a suitable school - or in some cases any school at all. In one class in Hackney, East London, 14 out of 30 children haven't got a place in any secondary school at all. And this is not because the parents have only applied to over-subscribed schools but because there just aren't enough places in their area. When they complained to the trust that runs education in Hackney the best suggestion the officals could come up with was that they 'look into homeschooling' - fantastic! Is that really what we pay 40 per cent of our incomes in tax for? So that our children can be told that there aren't any school places - not just no good ones, we've kind of got to the point that we accept that, though we shouldn't. But that there are just no places at all! It's a total disgrace. 

Are you caught in this situation? Do you know someone who is? Post your stories and let's make a real fuss about this so the government can't just ignore it.

I

Comments

[J]

delilah those are excellent ideas and I hope they work for Mo. But like her I am angry that she has to solve the problem in the first place, and for every feisty mother like her there will be ten who do nothing, and whose children desperately need the chance of education.

Why exactly is it so hard for the local authority to rent somewhere and bus teachers in to create an instant school? 300 children would make a huge class action lawsuit.

I bet if poor Mo withholds her council tax to pay for the school she's not getting, they will take action fast enough against her, and I also bet nothing whatsoever happens to the local council.

Maybe we should set Boris Johnson onto them? I personally dont care whether he wins the mayor election, but if he thought it might get him votes, and it led him to solve the issue....

[Delilah]

If there are that many children being left high and dry perhaps there are enough intelligent, educated parents in a similar position in Hackney that you could organise some decent cooperative homeschooling? If you could get, say, twenty parents together, you could hire specialist teachers and buy specialist coursework, and take turns teaching around your university schedule. It actually is surprisingly affordable if the parents work together and have similar objectives. In fact, if you got a good group of parents the kids could get a rather better education than the stupid school was going to offer anyway, and you could have more flexibility to study than you would have with standard schooling.

If you're not an organiser, I bet a place like Hackney has a pretty good homeschooling network already that you could plug into, perhaps you could work something out with them that would allow you to do your degree and still support the homeschool in some way.

Yes it's appalling that they've taken the tax money and pi***ed it away but why are we still surprised?

[J]

Mo this is terrible. What is left?

Try for a full bursary at a feepaying school?

[MO]

I still can not believe how naive I've been...I've moved to this country 15 years ago, believing that England is a land of equal opportunities. How wrong I was!

Living in Hackney in 2008 mean that over 300 children do not have any secondary school place! The LEA Trust tell us to educate our children at home or send them to unknown boroughs miles away!

Great, why not? I will just resign from my job, refuse my hard earned place at university( I naively thought it's my time after having two children) and educate my son at home. I will rely on government benefits and promtly return to poverty. Why not?

Oh, hold on, there is another option...I will put my son on a bus at 6.30 am every morning, so he would get to school on time, and then worry all day how is he going to get home in dark winter nights because he need to take at least 3 buses.

The government is trying to reduce the poverty in the UK by 2010. Can anybody please explain to me how on earth is this at all possible, while our children are educated at home, or in poor achieving schools that even a dog would not enter?

As a single parent, I have always maintained to my children that education is the most important aspect of one's life. My son is above average pupil who have been allocated school 7 miles away in an such underachieving school that there is no suprise there are still places available. Not under any circumstances I will allow my son to join such a school. And no, I'm not narrow minded, I simply will not compromise on my children's future.

So what choice do I have? I have, obviously, filed a 5 page appeal which I do not hold any hopes for, I can not afford a private education, and I can not afford a home education.

But, hey...who cares?

[T]

The choice of school (or lack of it) affects such a large number of children, I'm amazed that none of the parties have seized on the topic to attract voters. My question is rather different though.
Why do the government turn a blind eye to schools who perpetually defend all children's appeals, never allowing any to be upheld? Is there an "old boy" network in operation or are government officers simply unbelievably naive or worse?

[mumoftwo]

Good idea SM and if that were me, I would be straight onto them, but as J says, many of those who are left without school places won't have the money or the knowledge of the system to do this.

One of the saddest things I saw when working in the absolutely worst inner city schools in London (not as a teacher, thank god), was that many of the mixed schools had predominantly boys, girls were a minority. I asked some of the heads why this was, and they said that when a school was really rough, the parents of local girls just withdrew them from the school and tried harder to get them into other schools in other areas; hence the gender inbalance (which of course perpetuated the feeling of out of control violence which permeated some though not all of these schools). The exception to this were recent immigrant families with girls or those who just couldn't work the system, so there was a small cluster of very timid, often Asian girls in this atmosphere of mayhem. It's fine if your parents will fight to get you in somewhere ok, appeal, consider home-schooling, pay or whatever, but it is often those most in need who are least able to work the system.

[supermother]

There are law firms that specialise in education law you can instruct. They could probably get a court order on an emergency basis for you against an LEA who did not provide any kind of school place and a letter from them would be likely to hurry up the process if you gave them say 7 days to produce an offer otherwise you would issue your court claim. That would get them working on it I expect.

[j]

mumoftwo, I agree. I couldn't afford to stay home and school my children and I would hate it anyway.

I think that probably they *do* have legal duty to provide a school- but all that means is that there is some penalty if they don't. Not at all sure what penalty a local authority would face for not doing it. I suppose individual parents could sue- but again, many will be too poor and disenfranchised to be able to.

[mumoftwo]

I am genuinely surprised that the LEA is not legally obliged to offer a place, I just assumed we had some kind of a 'right' to one! As for the suggestion of homeschooling, it's just laughable that any random parent would be expected to stay home, not work and teach their children to GCSE level across numerous subjects, even supposing that they had the ability, they simply may not be able to financially.

[Baggofbones]

Thank you, Jane, for the clarification. I like your leap-frog analogy!

[Lazy Mummy]

Has the moderator gone away again now? I haven't seen signs of it other than what others mentioned, but I wasn't online over the weekend.

[j]

Hi KM, don't let the Pope cancel the chocolate though, will you? :)

Love the idea of auctioning your school place on eBay. Sadly I am guessing it is also illegal to create multiple identities for your child? after all, in a lottery, the key is multiple entries.

One of my posts that the moderator ate said, I find it especially sad that this is happening in Hackney after all the money they have pured into it. Homeschooling should not be forced on anyone, and all children deserve the offer of a decent school place- but it's especially ridiculous to expect some of the poorest immigrant families in the UK to start teaching their children at home, when the mother may be barely literate in English herself and Dad is working all hours.

[supermother]

There is a right to a school place I thought, in law but it sounds like that is not working in some of these parents' experiences in the article. Pity those of us who pay can't get our children to get their local state places and then auction them off... it might help with the school fees.

[Lazy Mummy]

Yay - welcome back, KM!

I've said this before on other threads & I'll say it again here...the US is NOT a utopia for state school education. Yes, there are some things that are done v. well and yes, the principle (& often the practice) of local school districts (with board members elected) does provide lots of local accountability for schools to parents, but there are also problems, especially wrt. admissions.

If, as I do, you live in a large US city (Seattle) with a unified school district for the city, you still have to find a place within all of the schools of that city. Until recently, Seattle did lottery/random assignments. Massive outcry especially as primary-school age siblings were often placed in schools miles away from each other, but some elements are finally changing. There's no perfect system, though not providing a place at all as sounds like here really should be grounds for criminal prosecution, as others have said.

(Me? I'd pay rather than put my child in a bad school).

[Kieransmum]

No, I haven't Bushra - we must sort it out.

Lent is too long. I'm going to apply to the Pope to have it shortened :-)

[Jane]

Hurrah - no premodding! Brilliant. Thank you Times webby people!

[Jane.S]

When we moved to this town 26 years ago, we spent a year in rented accommodation sussing out the schools and the locations. We eventually moved close to what was then the best non-church secondary school in the area, and three years later had our first baby. Eleven years after that, she went to said school.
Nothing stays the same, though.
By the time number two arrived (only two school years later), and was ready to start school, we weren't so confident, and, at my instigation, scrimped and saved to send her to an independent school until she'd done her GCSE's.
That nearly caused marital meltdown, although after she'd left the independent school and was dong her A-levels at the local comp, hub agreed that the private school had been the best thing for her.
Number two actually got better A-level results than number one. The sixth form in the local comp remains one of the best for miles around.
Interestingly, both girls went on to study the same degree subject and are on course for similar careers. I think genes and family support count for more in the long run.
But the whole thing was an exhausting nine-year marathon. The money I didn't pay for the state education seemed to be balanced out by the time I spent supporting the school (as a governor) and supporting the daughter (with extra-curricular activities etc).
The marriage has never really recovered, but totters on as we support our girls in their flats and careers.
Parenthood is never easy, there are no easy answers. It's a mixture of stability and flexibility, with dollops of guilt at every corner and turn.
Good luck to all.

[bushra]

omg Kieransmum! have you had that meal out yet?! completely forgot!

re the blog post, i have all this to come as my boy is only 7 months old and i've been lucky sorting out his day nursery. baby steps...

also has moderation been switched off? my comment on t'other post appeared pretty much straight away!

[Gipsy]

yay KM glad to have you back!

[Kim]

Welcome back, Kieransmum! I love the way you're back the second Lent is over:-)

[Kieransmum]

I agree with Gipsy - I was confused by the post title too.

[Economom]

Really, the problem is that schools are not asked to be flexible enough. In the US, there are fixed catchments (school districts). If the number of students living in a district increases beyond the school's current capacity, then capacity is increased. This involves hiring teachers, possibly expanding class sizes temporarily, making better use of existing space, or if all else fails bringing in porta-cabins. Such drastic measures are usually unnecessary, because schools are quite good at adjusting their capacity in advance based on accurate forecasts of intake. They know who lives in the district currently, they keep up on new residential construction projects and trends in mobility.

It seems to me that the current system in the UK is nice for schools and LEAs, but a nightmare for parents. Why do people put up with this?

One advantage of the American system is that popular schools grow based on demand, and unpopular ones are closed or reduced in size.

Also, in the US it is not possible to parachute into a school district for 6 months, then parachute out again once one's children have a school place. Children attend school where they live, period. This makes planning much easier.

One final caveat: This system thrives on competition between local authorities. It breaks down when local authorities become to large, such as in Philadelphia or Washington, D.C. (to name but two), where there is effectively one local authority responsible for the entire city's schools.

[Sue]

Even reading this article brought tears to my eyes and took me back to the day 6 years ago when my own daughter received the letter saying she had not been allocated any of her 5 schools of choice.Embarking on the appeals process, filing all the letters, making all the phone calls and trawling the internet for any help totally consumed me for months.I felt I had failed her as her Mum, and can't remember a day during those months when I didn't cry. Eventually we remortgaged our home and sent her to a local girls Independent school, where 6 years later (and 9 A* GCSE's) she is Head Girl. We are thrilled that she has been educated somewhere where she has been able to realise her potential but I still resent hugely the impact that day 6 years ago had on our life. The trauma of having to acknowledge that the State education system was fundamentally flawed and had failed our daughter was one of the worst things we've dealt with as a family.

[bowleserised]

Um, Lance is a troll, in case the pre-mod is wondering. One of those ones who thinks that women's desire not to be raped, to be entitled to contraception and to be paid an equal wage has lead to the apocalypse.

[Jane]

Pre-modding is what is happening hear. It says so now at the top of the space you type a message in
"Comments are moderated, and will not appear on this weblog until the author has approved them."

It's happened on all the threads. It may be somethingto do with libel and Heather Mills, or with the author of the HM piece not liking being slagged by posters for raising the unutterably tedious subject of HM instead of a 'proper' subject for discussion for AM! It may also be because ofthe influx of yuk people on the Prostitutes thread (well, if the Times WILL put that article up on its main page, what do they expect? Nice family men replying - or the sleazeballs?...)(SOME of the former came, but more of the latter, who seem to get some sleazy pleasure out of showing what jerks they are ...)

But the result of pre-modding is that when you post a message, it won't appear immediate - it gets vetted. It's either deleted or goes up after a tedious wait. The problem is it stops the entire thread being in real time, so not only do you have to wait to see if your sainted post pasts the Times muster, but the entire 'conversation' gets totally disjointed because posts can be replied to, but the replies lag, so we're all constantly playing leapfrog in the dark.

It's totally tedious, and if it doesn't stop, I'm off. It will kill the blog. We've got better things to do than hang around 'waiting to see' if our posts appear!