Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Landmark school admissions ruling for Haringey mother.
Pupils cannot be denied a place in their preferred schools simply because they are full, a court ruled yesterday.
The landmark High Court judgement is likely to give hope to thousands of families who challenge the schools they are allocated each year before independent appeals panels (IAPs).
In the case, the mother of an 11-year-old girl took her battle to London's High Court after an appeal panel rejected her choice of secondary school because it was full.
The mother - referred to as M - wanted her daughter (MC) to be educated away from her London inner city neighbourhood and its problems of crime and bullying. The mother had applied to a popular and oversubscribed school but she was rejected by Haringey's schools council admissions service.
The ruling means M and her daughter are entitled to a fresh hearing before the IPA.
This was the first High Court case to examine provisions of the new schools admissions appeal code 2009. It will provide guidelines for parents and education authorities in the future.
More on the ruling here.
The landmark High Court judgement is likely to give hope to thousands of families who challenge the schools they are allocated each year before independent appeals panels (IAPs).
In the case, the mother of an 11-year-old girl took her battle to London's High Court after an appeal panel rejected her choice of secondary school because it was full.
The mother - referred to as M - wanted her daughter (MC) to be educated away from her London inner city neighbourhood and its problems of crime and bullying. The mother had applied to a popular and oversubscribed school but she was rejected by Haringey's schools council admissions service.
The ruling means M and her daughter are entitled to a fresh hearing before the IPA.
This was the first High Court case to examine provisions of the new schools admissions appeal code 2009. It will provide guidelines for parents and education authorities in the future.
More on the ruling here.
Tags for Forum Posts: haringey heartlands, school funding
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by John McMullan on
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Actually, I had no choice. We were zoned for the "crap" school.
By the time I finished there it was not really a crap school, as per Julie's point above.
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Permalink Reply by Old-Age-Emporium(OAE) on
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Just to correct my earlier assumption that Fortismere is an 8-form entry school. Clearly the 243 figure makes it 9-form entry. 27 pupils to a class makes for better teaching and learning than the 30+ many of us were used to in the past. Certainly something to be defended against Lord Carlile, Ed Balls or whoever.
(Judging by the 'compact' size of classrooms in the new Balfour-Beatty erections on secondary school sites in local boroughs, maybe even 27 will be overcrowding. Are these the paperless, storage-free classrooms we were promised thirty years ago? Scarcely enough place to rest a coffee mug or hang a cane, never mind swing a cat.)
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Permalink Reply by Malcolm on
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I agree - schools can and do get much better (or much worse) in less time than the 5 years that a child spends there.
The problem as a parent is how to give your child a reasonable chance at a good education. Since league tables and GCSE results are almost all the information we have, they tend to loom large in the discussion.
One possible upside of the recession - lots of middle-class kids who might previously have gone to private school will now be in the state system. Will this result in general improvements for all?
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Permalink Reply by Liz on
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Mark Easton has written an interesting article here addressing the issue of educational underachievement.
and there are some unexpected knock on effects from expanding school entry!
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Perhaps they could make it a condition of admission that the pupils live close to the school...
Oh...
Hang on....
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Permalink Reply by Alan Stanton on
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There are more elephants in this room.
Frinstance, take a peek at this online discussion forum. Including the comment that "it's a minefield choosing a house on catchment as they change every year".
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Well mums.netters all, you have less than 40 hours to get your Fortismere application to secondaryadmissions@haringey.gov.uk. but first get your cash along to that house you've been eyeing on Tetherdown, or is it Creighton Ave N10? Damned posties have decided to mess you up for spite.
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Permalink Reply by matt on
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Mark Easton summarises well in Liz's linked article;
If there are sizeable parts of our cities where it is perfectly normal for people to have few if any qualifications, then ambition may be blunted. Bright youngsters grow up in an environment where joining the dole queue at 16 is par for the course. Talent is wasted.
The challenge is to inspire those children: to encourage them to aim high wherever they live.
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Permalink Reply by Julie on
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I would argue that children whose parents don't care, or don't know any better, will find it much harder to aim high, if their classes are full of others just like them. When ambitious parents move house or send their kids out of the area to go to secondary school, it's a double whammy for the ones who are left behind, and a double whammy for the local school.
I love the 'crime and bullying' argument in the original article. Parents don't properly consider the difficulties of a long journey on public transport. Your child can got to the sweetest little school in the world and be beaten up on the bus home. And 'bullies' are always children with undesirable postcodes, for some reason. Middle class children with working and educated parents are always kindness personified, as we all know.
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Having worked for 9 years in one of 'those' schools that parents went out of their way to avoid, our biggest challenge was that many of the kids were uncomfortable with ideas like university and hi powered jobs etc as they simply did not feel that they would be accepted.
I took a group of our kids to Oxford Uni, who, by the way, were wonderfully welcoming and very sincere in their wish to recruit working class kids (unlike Cambridge...another story).
One of our girls, a bright and perceptive girl who had been kicked out of a "good" school for being 'disruptive' stood up and one point and said this, "I'd like to come here, I know I'm clever enough but I won't fit in at home anymore once I've finished here"
It was a revelation for me and the deeper I delved into the motivations (or lack of them) of my 14-16 yr olds the more I discovered that they simply did not believe they would 'fit in'. Many were unclear about how to get into the jobs that interested them and didn't know where to start finding out, and their parents were not unwilling to help them but unable to guide them as they did not have the links that more middle class parents have.
As a school, we offered work experience at places like Deutsche Bank, the Inns of Court, the hospitals, schools, we even got a placement for one kid at number 10. We tried very hard to inspire but fear was a big factor in holding them back; fear of debt from student loans, fear of not 'fitting in', fear of losing ties with their people back home, fear of having to travel into big old London to go to work.
The good news for some is that the excellent further education system in this country, underfunded and the cinderella at any educational table, often rescues those kids that don't make it at 16.
Many of my ex-pupils have gone on to great things, doing far better than I ever did in education with a M.A from SOAS, making films, working for major firms in the city, nursing (ah the wonders of FaceBook for keeping in touch) among their many achievements.
We really need to start having some pride in our young people instead of pitching them against each other with the whole good/bad school thing at 11, characterising them as feral and out of control in the media, and making their schooling the subject of political and ideological battles to get the votes of the middle classes.
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Very perceptive, Liz. What you say of the need, and difficulty, to inspire young people past their fear of fitting in and breaking old ties to aim higher is very familiar. It can be exaggerated, of course (as in "Why was I the first Kinnock in a thousand years to go to university...etc"), but I still haven't recovered from the accident of 'passing' the old Eleven+ in 1955 when none of my mates did. Without even Secondary Modern schools or a decent 'Tech' then, the only choice was stay at Primary till 14 with your mates and family or go into semi-permanent exile in the Grammar Boarding school 25 miles away, where the support, career guidance and inspiration was at best narrow, traditional, 'classical'. Yes, I did enjoy it, but there was real deracination and I'm still looking for those old roots!
In my 25 years teaching just over the border in N.Islington, I found much of that 'first generational' fear of not fitting in, reluctance to commit to staying on in Sixth Form (such as it was!) or even to opt for Izzy Sixth Form Centre, more pronounced among many English and Irish lads from Islington, Haringey, Camden, Hackney (Our school had a fairly expandible "Catholic Catchment area"!). That is, of course, a generalisation and (six years into retirement) I don't have figures to back it up. So often, especially around work experience placement time in Year 10 or decision time in Year 11, the readiness for a challenge was more evident among boys of other ethnic groups, often themselves refugees or children of migrant families. As if these lads were old hands at breaking ties, border/language-crossing and fitting in.
How should local authorities, schools or communities give under-achieving or under-responding groups something of that readiness for challenge within their own stomping grounds - rather than bussing/shipping them out, or falling back on that old canard of 'white/black working/under-class' excuses?
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