z46\doc\web\2000\11\ukshut.txt
From: Stewart Deuchar [mailto:Stewart@sdeuchar.freeserve.co.uk]
Sent: Thursday, November 16, 2000 9:53 AM
To: ClearingHouse
Cc: education-consumers@lists.dundee.net
Subject: [education-consumers] Failing schools




=====================================================================






According to the BBC's latest radio news bulletin the education secretary, 
David Blunkett, has identified a hundred failing secondary schools in England 
and Wales. They are being given three years in which to improve, otherwide 
they may be closed down. 


Fair enough, you might think, but in yesterday's Daily Telegraph there was 
an article by John Clare about one of these failing schools; Firfield, near 
Newcastle upon Tyne. Having already once been shut down and reopened 
under a 'superhead', who resigned after eighteen months in the job, it is now 
due to be shut down again in 2002. 


 But John Clare poses the question, "What is wrong with Firfield?"  His 
answer: "The problem, simply, is that its pupils are so appallingly taught at 
primary school that they are barely able to read when they arrive at 11. 
Some cannot read at all. Yet the 'system' - as represented by Ofsted and the 
Department for Education and Employment - requires the school and 
perhaps 500 others like it to carry on as if nothing is wrong, doggedly 
teaching the national curriculum to children who cannot cope with it and 
become increasingly frustrated, bored and badly behaved. Then the school is 
found to be failing."


It seems that what is failing is not Firfield but the primary schools and the 
whole insensitive bureaucracy. 


Blessings, Stewart