Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Tottenham Free School?
With all the brouhaha about Downhills Primary over the last few weeks did anyone else see this? I got a flyer through the door too about a public meeting they are having on Saturday.
They have backing from the Harris federation of Carpetright fame so I guess part of the post riots legacy.
http://www.haringeyindependent.co.uk/news/topstories/9467535.Totten...
Bit of good news for parents!
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by John McMullan on
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Billy, I am looking for a young person who can program a computer. Again, they are teaching what they can teach, not what businesses require.
Looks like I'll have to import someone. How bloody crazy is that?
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Sigh. No it isn't.
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Billy, young children learn to play the violin, why can they not learn to program a computer? I'm disappointed that your aspirations for the local youth are so low...
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Permalink Reply by Rachella on
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What exactly do by "program a computer" ? Are you talking about java, C++ or something else?
If you're looking for an entry level employee, check the colleges that have IT programmes, such as City and Islington college. If you want someone higher in their career, Barnet & Southgate college is running a training programmes for jobseekers. I'm taking a Web design course there, myself. I'm sure they could hook you up with several able and willing candidates.
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I think it's too much to hope for that the young person I seek can manage a heap and pointers given that even universities, teaching in Java for so long, are now moving to teach in Python. Decent proficiency in any programming language is a start.
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This is a problem I've noticed with most UK employers. There seems to be an aversion to training people up. You're right about Python, but surely if someone can learn Python, other languages shouldn't be too difficult.
If you're set on hiring a "young person" find a bright spark -- a college leaver perhaps -- who's willing to learn and train him (or her) to do what you want. I know plenty of teens who have programmed their x-boxes to do things they weren't designed to do -- that seems like it could be a transferable skill too, don't you think?
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Permalink Reply by John D on
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There was an item on the radio yesterday saying that ITC courses are all about communication, not programming, and that young people are taught Word, Powerpoint etc. But employers look for people who can program ie, modify or write new applications.
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Permalink Reply by Old-Age-Emporium(OAE) on
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In the early hours of this morning I found myself in my bedroom chairing a follow-up meeting of the Free School Movement. As the hours passed we struggled to maintain this difficult meeting quorate. None of my unruly flock agreed to take the minutes. I was reduced to jotting in charcoal some sketchy notes on the narrow white space of my duvet cover. I see some of the usual suspects managed to stay for most of the meeting: Paul Goodman, Ivan Illich, John Holt. A.S Neill - which didn't make my task any easier. I did my damnedest to steer them towards agreeing what they claimed they sought: a radical democratic educational vision - at which stage John Dewey stuck his head round the bedpost and disowned them all - but all they wanted was for the bastards of the Free School Govement who stole their title deeds to hand them back. I was just herding them towards the door, with an adjournment sine die, when Plato son of Ariston pushed in roughly waving a dodgy looking parchment he claimed was a patent on his Academy and all Academies in perpetuity, signed by Aristotle and Demosthenes. He started to shout that he'd see all pretenders and grabbers before the Council of 500. I managed to calm him down before the missus woke up, and got them all through the wardrobe door with the promise of a good lawyer to take on their very reasonable cases.
Any advice, anyone? David Schmitz? Alan?
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Permalink Reply by Alan Stanton on
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Well now, Eddie. Blowing the dust off your yellowing paperbacks from the sixties. Though you forgot Saul Alinsky. He's also safely dead, so he can be co-opted as well
You might want to dig out John Hersey's The Child Buyer. He suggests selling children to corporations. Which would fit nicely into Plato's Republic. It certainly trumps just handing schools to commercial chains.
Because this is all about having high standards and towering ambition. Loot trainers or a flat-screen TV, you get sent down. But announce that you intend to loot whole schools with their land, buildings and staff, and you get a pile of public money and an invitation to meet the Prime Minister.
In the same way, across the country, small children are taught to sing: "The wheels on the bus go round and round all day long". Pathetic! Such low aspirations! Why can't Michael Gove force them to become Toddlers' Academies and Free Schools? And make them sing: "The wheels of the Merc"?
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Ah yes, poor Saul. He didn't deserve to die so young - and he certainly didn't deserve to be carved up forty years later as putative inspirer of Cameron's Big Society one month and of Milliband Minor's vision the next. But I must declare an indirect and accidental interest. In August '67 I took up a teaching job in a rural secondary school in Eastern Sierra Leone. I was taking over from a young Peace Corps Volunteer, so I thought 'no sweat, just another PCV filling in a couple of years before going back to College, and meanwhile conveniently draft-dodging Vietnam.' Well no. Arnie Graf was a community organiser even then, a whirlwind and a questioner. A Jewish Canadian but by then a Chicagoan. I never met him as he'd left the month before I arrived, but for the next ten years the Arnie spirit pervaded the school just as the electricity generator he and his Jewish family had donated to this Irish Catholic-run school outran us all and was still chugging away when looted, along with anything else lootable, by the RUF rebels during the civil war in the mid-1990s.
After Grad school Arnie by 1970 was deep into Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation and after the post-Alinsky shake-up continued as one of the IAF's half-dozen leading regional organisers. Mid-1980s he was, apparently, mentoring young Chicagoan Obama towards politics rather than law, and over the past year he's been tramping Britain's streets with Maurice Glasman and a few others, trying to put some lead, so to speak, into Ed Milliband's pencil. Whether that's possible or not, the old survivors from Yengema Secondary School in the 1960s still take a vicarious pride in Arnie the Organizer. Maybe he's the man for Tottenham. His motto, though, has always been: 'Never help anyone to do what they can do themselves.'
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Thanks Eddie, for pointing out my embarrassing ignorance about Arnie Graf - especially as he was appointed a year ago to review the Labour Party's "operations and infrastructure". Obviously I need to do some reading.
But it won't be for a while. I've been told that Michael Gove's officials have gone through my old exam results and revised the pass mark upwards. So I failed them all. Meanwhile, OFFGUV are re-inspecting my election results.
Apologies for linking Saul Alinsky and D.Cameron. I mistakenly thought the latter meant our Prime Minister. But it seems it referred to Dee Cameron - someone literary from the past. The last century - or perhaps even before that.
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Thanks Alan for The Staggers blog. I hadn't seen this before. "Graf was adamant. If he wasn't coming with the full backing of the leader, he wasn't coming." That's our Arnie!
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