King's College London is in the Strand. It has other campuses across the river but the Strand is where it is. The King's College Parenting Unit has just been awarded £30 million to assist parents in learning how to bring up their children. Government ministers have underlined the importance of singing nursery rhymes and reading stories to offspring, and classes in doing this will be arranged with tutors at the university, well-versed, no doubt, in what is to be sung.
The area south of the Euston Road as far as the river, Holborn and St Pancras South, in Camden, has no secondary school whatsoever. There are hundreds of school children who, on completing their primary education, are without a secondary school in the area; they go to the bottom of any school list in neighbouring boroughs, and even Camden itself north of the Euston Road takes only those from King's Cross ward. For decades it has been claimed falsely that there are so few families living in the area there is no need for a secondary school. For decades local families have sought a community school. The community, long settled, is one of the most diverse in London; nursery rhymes are not high on their list of priorities, but in such communities, as is typical, the education and skilling of their children is.
No secondary school in the whole of Holborn and St Pancras South for educating eager and motivated pupils, but thirty million pounds worth of government funding for university tutoring in nursery rhymes and story reading for unskilled parents.
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2 comments:
even more proud to be godless of gower street. kings sucks.
more constructively, it would be helpful if the libdem-tory coalition in camden would acknowledge the demonstrated need for a community secondary school south of the euston road and stop pursuing spurious alternatives in the wards they control.
Godless, Frank Dobson has been MP there (and mayor of Camden for a long time, and chair of Housing,) since time immemorial - well, since Lena Jaeger. He must know better than anyone about this, and how long it's been going on. He lives in Holborn doesn't he? What is he doing about this?
I can't get over the amount of money; it's like a slap in the face to everything any reasonable person would think, whatever political party they vote for.
The area is pressing, has always pressed, for a community school, local and accessible to all. That won't go down well with the Project; and any new school in such a successful inner London area is going to be a shining example of why the academies programme is wrong.
I'm going to post on what a school should be in general, and how it should respond to its community in particular. Something is going on in Holborn and St Pancras that is destructive of the children's life chances and happiness, and it's something to do with Labour and LibDem and Conservative attitudes to education and its benefits and purposes.
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