Primary School Places

This summer has seen problems with Primary school places in London as a whole and the Dulwich area. It’s believed that changes in London’s demographics, combined with the impact of the recession, have led to an extraordinary rise in demand for new reception places, leaving many schools with little or no capacity to take on new pupils.

Southwark purchases school population predictions, as do 25/33 London Boroughs, from the Greater London Authority and have done for a number of years. The models used appear suddenly wrong. The figures were revised by the GLA on 7 April, then 18 May and then 17 June. Each time upwards. This is unheard of.

But how has this impacted on how things have gone overall as only unhappy families contact local councillors. This was the first year East Dulwich families had reported problems.

For the Dulwich area and Southwark overall 304 and 2,370 applications respectively from Southwark residents on time with further 45 and 556 late applications. For the Dulwich area and Southwark 90% had schools offered and accepted within 1mile of home for on time applications. For late applications the percentages fell to 80%.

Of those who didn’t get a school within 1mile of home many were from choice – attending religious schools or the same school as siblings.

This appears a success but I dont’ yet know how many families had their first or second choice.  Once we have that information we’ll have a clearer idea how successful things have been overall.

BUT to make this happen in the Dulwich area an emergency extra class has been created at Goodrich. HUGE THANKS to Goodwich School.

Lots of efforts behind the scenes to work out is this a blip? how long if a blip? how to prepare for next year? how long would a new school take to build? is it necessary? where would you build one if necessary? government rules would probably result in a religious school and would an Islamic, CoE or Catholic school solve any problem? These questions if acted upon in series would normally take 7 years before a new school opens due to government rules and procedures.

What do you think has caused this blip and is it long lasting?

What do you think would solve the problem? 

Bojangles

Several weeks ago we suddenly heard the terrible news a registered private day nursery called Bojangles  close to the junction of Barry Road with Upland Road was threatened with closure.

It has run up signficant debt with Her Majesty’s Customs and Revenue. It was advised by accountants to go into liquidation. Bojangles changed its legal entity to Fingerprints (Dulwich) Ltd. Unfortunately that meant the lease with the church expired. So the church served a notice to quit on them. Overall this meant its Ofsted status ended and had to be reapplied.

Lots of worried parents contacted us. We quickly escalated this to Cllr Lisa Rajan who heads up Childrens Services. Quickly Southwark Council Early Years officers stepped in to try resolving the dispute between the church and Bojangles/Fingerprints without success. All parents were contacted and public meeting took place to help find other nursery places. Currently 95% of deposits have been returned to parents with remaining £6,000 to be returned. More importantly these young children have been offered places.

LESSONS LEARNT:

This is the fourth nursery in Southwark to take such actions to avoid HMRC tax debts. Officers are planning to proactively give advice to all such nurseries to reduce the risk of this happening again.

Back to school – East Dulwich Education

Back to school.

East Dulwich parents and children are anticipating the start of the new school year. It’s easy to forget what a major event this is for children. It’s less easy to ignore the lack of equality in educational chances. The gap between those who have and those who have not in education is stark in an area like ours. The whole range of provision is there to be seen, from the private schools of Dulwich Village, through our popular over-subscribed state schools to those schools that some parents fight to avoid.

Things have of course improved immeasurably over the past few years. It was only a few years ago, before the Lib Dems took control in 2002, that the local education service under Labour for 44 years, having failed two OFSTED reports was deemed so dreadful that it was privatised by the Labour Government and given to an engineering firm to run. That Labour period is behind us and now, year after year, our local schools under the Lib Dems are improving above the national average rate.

At primary level, the latest results show our primary schools to be amongst the best in London and at key stage 2 we are now at the national average for the first time in Maths and English. The  pupils, parents, teachers and governors who have worked incredibly hard to achieve this all deserve our congratulations but there is still so much to do.

But being one of the best in London is not good enough when so many parents want to leave London because of their concerns about education. Approaching the national average is great progress but we are not content to settle for average.

In East Dulwich we will continue to strive to improve the facilities and opportunities available. After years of community campaigning, a new secondary school for boys is now being built at Peckham Rye.  It opens in temporary accommodation in September and in the purpose built new building next year. We wish the school well in this critical first year.

But at primary level too it is suspected there is a lack of places available. This year a few parents were offered places at primary schools in Camberwell as competition for places at East Dulwich schools exploded. It seems this was partly through the popularity of East Dulwich as a place to bring up children and partly through fewer people being able to afford private schools.

We need to move quickly to address this issue before next year. Plans are already in place to expand the number of spaces at Goodrich. We may need to go further though and look for further expansion of other schools.  Expanding St Anthony’s is an option, although in my view, only if we can ensure those spaces are available for all the community. It may be that we also have to look for a new primary school.

One thing is clear: Education in our area is improving and it is great that more parents now want their children to stay within our local schools. But education is still one of the main reasons why parents think about moving to the suburbs. This year, we need to get our heads down and ensure that our rate of progress accelerates and we make the right decisions to ensure we in the years ahead we are top of the class.   

Remarkable school results

The GCSE results cross referenced across the country were recently released.

Southwark schools have had another remarkable year. The average GCSE A*-C including Maths and English results across Southwark have gone up by +4 points. Of the 149 education authorities across England and Wales Southwark has moved up from 125th to 110th place. Nationally the average result was +2 better. So Southwark improved at twice this rate.

What a great result for al the efforts of children, parents and teachers. Well done.

Under fives care provision

Ofsted has released a report analysing education authorities under five provision and whether it meets standards or not and whether its making a difference.  Looking at the results for Inner London boroughs I find it hard to work out if this report is generally highlighting good or bad news. Saying that it does show dramatic improvements in Southwark.  Its a shame the information isn’t ward based allowing local councillors to get more involved asking challenging questions. I have tried searching through the Ofsted website just for reports on East Dulwich and after a couple of hours hadn’t cracked it. 

Take a look and see what you think and let me know. 

http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/Ofsted-home/Leading-to-excellence/Introduction

Mr E.Mission

Adult habits can be swiftly changed via childrens pester power. You know you should do something and a kit of pestering can get you to d othe right thing. No parent wants their children to have less respect for them.

The Swinbourne University of Technology in Melborune Australia havea great kids game at: www.keepwintercool.com.au

It helps kids indentify how to save electricty and stop the bad guy Mr.E.Mission melting a snowman. My young kids thought it was great. If have kids try it with them. It made them think about turning lights and other items of.

Poorest kids GCSE results – a post code lottery?

The campaign group End Child Poverty has just compiled a new league table that reveals the best and worst places for the poorest students to go to school. It shows that Southwark is 21st best out of 148 education authorities in England, with 45.3% of children in receipt of free school meals obtaining 5 A*-C GCSE’s. The England average is 35.5% and London 44.6%. I was amazed to discover that London is outperforming the rest of England. The worst education authority is Nottinghamshire with only 22% on free school meals gained 5 A*-C GCSE’s compared to 59% of children who are not entitled to free school meals.The End Child Poverty group believe that London’s success is due to the London Challenge a £40m per annum program where authorities bid for money to give special extra help to poorer childrens education. I suspect its more complicated than this but either way such targetted extra spending to equalise life chances is exactly what we need more of.

Liberal Democrat policy is to dramatically increase this type of spending.

http://www.endchildpoverty.org.uk/news/press-releases/gcse-chances-of-poorest-are-a-post-code-lottery/24/113

Noise Pollution

A European Directive means central government must be able amongst other things to provide noise mapping.
Gascinating site: http://noisemapping.defra.gov.uk/wps/portal/noise/maps

Excessive noise is a serious pollutant which results in serious educational problems – people can’t concentrate with such noise around them.

It shows in East Dulwich that two of our primary schools Goose Green and St.Antony’s borders roads with noise issues. Fortunately St.Antony’s is more set back and probably no more affected than Heber or Goodrich.

Take a look.

30dB (decibels is a conversation in a private room), 55dB or above and people inside rooms will start to be seriously disturbed.

Adult education in East Dulwich

The Southwark Council adult education team run a lot of adult education from five locations in Southwark. They’ve just added a sixth location with some drawing classes at Grove Vale library, East Dulwich.

When the new Grove Vale library is completed by developers during 2010 we should have a facility that could host a lot more adult education in East Dulwich. 

Over many decades many people that received a state education in Southwark (and elsewhere) had a poor deal. Post school education is critical to help residents make up for this and have the best possible life chances. Without a wonderful mother who supported my waivering educational achievements as a teenager and without business sponsorship for Open University and other courses my life chances would have been diminished.

So how do we find the resources to expand adult education to fill this huge chasm?