Launching our draft Charter for Education in Waltham Forest

Our Community, Our Schools is a parent-led campaign, set up to defend our community schools against attempts to set up Free Schools and to convert our community schools to academies. But we weren’t defending community schools for the sake of it.

We believe that our community schools are a historic achievement. It was not so very long ago that the idea that everyone was entitled to a common, shared education, regardless of their background and their wealth, was considered dangerous and radical.

However, successive governments have failed to support our community schools and now the Coalition government actively attacks them at every turn. Whoever forms the next government will inherit a fragmented, divided and partially privatised school system. They will need to work hard to restore parents’ faith and teachers’ confidence.

Yet in spite of the attacks on them, our schools continue to perform heroically. And in spite of the fear-mongering, people continue to believe in the ideas that motivated the great education reforms of the past because they are basic, common-sense, powerful and democratic ideas.

Every great advance in education was won by people standing up to fight for it. We believe that it’s time to start uniting people and campaigning positively around a vision of education. It’s time to start a debate and a discussion in our communities about the kind of education system and the kind of schools we want.

That’s why we have launched our draft Charter for education in Waltham Forest.

This is not a finished document. It’s a starting point for a wide-ranging discussion in our community and we want that discussion to take many different forms. We will be proposing meetings, articles, discussion, and opening up the document to you to comment on and discuss online.

But what we want to do is play our part in building a local movement that can be a powerful force in the community, helping all our schools to meet the highest standards we should expect and that can help build pressure on local and national policy-makers and decision-makers to listen to us. 

We want to know what you think, so please join the discussion.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE DRAFT CHARTER

‘What do we want from our Schools? Building a Charter for Education - New speakers announced and how to book your place

What do we want from our Schools? Building a Charter for Education

Tuesday 21 October 2014
7.30pm, Harmony Hall, Truro Road, Walthamstow

• Melissa Benn, education writer and author of School Wars: the battle for Britain's Education
• John Cryer, MP for Leyton and Wanstead
• Jenny Smith, Headteacher, Frederick Bremer School, stars of ‘Educating the East End'
• Kevin Courtney, Deputy General Secretary, National Union of Teachers.

We believe that it’s time to start a discussion about how we build a new, positive and progressive vision for our education system.

We’re delighted to have a stellar line up of speakers to start that debate at our public meeting, including education expert and writer Melissa Benn, Kevin Courtney, the Deputy General Secretary of the NUT, John Cryer, local MP for Leyton and Wanstead and Jenny Smith, headteacher of our own Frederick Bremer School, currently starring in ‘Educating the East End’.

We'll be asking:

• How should we measure success in schools?
• Are our kids being ‘measured’ and tested too much?
• How should schools be run?
• Who should our schools be accountable to?
• How do we ensure that all kids get the same chances?
• Should we, as parents, be more involved in our schools?

Come and join the discussion. Help us to shape a Charter for education in our borough.

Reserve your place at this FREE event now by booking tickets online here. Make sure to bring your tickets with you on the day.

Great new speakers announced for our public meeting on 21st October

‘What do we want from our Schools? Building a Charter for Education’

  

Tuesday 21 October 2014

7.30pm, Harmony Hall, Truro Road, Walthamstow  

• Melissa Benn, education writer and author of School Wars: the battle for Britain's Education)
•  John Cryer MP for Leyton and Wanstead
•  Jenny Smith, Headteacher, Frederick Bremer School, stars of ‘Educating the East End’
• Kevin Courtney, Deputy General Secretary, National Union of Teachers

We believe that it’s time to start a discussion about how we build a new, positive and progressive vision for our education system.

We’re delighted to have a stellar line up of speakers to start that debate at our public meeting, including education expert and writer Melissa Benn, Kevin Courtney, the Deputy General Secretary of the NUT, John Cryer, local MP for Leyton and Wanstead and Jenny Smith, headteacher of our own Frederick Bremer School, currently starring in ‘Educating the East End’.  

We'll be asking: 

• How should we measure success in schools?
• Are our kids being ‘measured’ and tested too much?
• How should schools be run?
• Who should our schools be accountable to?
• How do we ensure that all kids get the same chances?
• Should we, as parents, be more involved in our schools? 
  

Come and join the discussion. Help us to shape a Charter for education in our borough.

 

 

PUBLIC MEETING ‘What do we want from our Schools? A Charter for Schools’

OCOS Public Meeting, Tuesday 21 October 2014

‘What do we want from our Schools? A Charter for Schools’

7.30pm, Harmony Hall, Truro Road, Walthamstow

Speakers include Melissa Benn (education writer and author of School Wars: the battle for Britain's Education) with other speakers to be confirmed shortly…

After a summer break., Our Community Our Schools is back with a new public meeting. It’s almost exactly two years since our campaign was set up, prompted by the proposals to establish two Free Schools in the borough. We saw Free Schools, like Academies, as a dangerous way of fragmenting our school system, taking schools out of the hands of their communities and increasing social divisions of all kinds in our diverse borough.

Yet right from the start, we have tried hard to promote a positive vision of education and schooling as an alternative to the policies being pushed by the Coalition. Now, as Free Schools and academies come increasingly under the spotlight and their achievements are thrown into question, we want to start to build that alternative vision of education by starting a discussion in our borough about what people really want from their schools.

Our schools are answerable to national politicians, but shouldn't they also be organic parts of their communities?

What should our schools be trying to achieve? How should they be run? How should we be involved in our schools?

To help start this discussion off, we are hosting a new public meeting on 21^st October and we’re delighted that one of our main speakers will be Melissa Benn, education expert, writer and author of the excellent book ‘School Wars: The battle for Britain's Education’. Other great speakers will be announced shortly.

We’ll also be publishing a discussion document in the form of a draft Charter for our Schools to help kick off the debate.

More details very soon. Watch this space!

Can you help us leaflet and promote this meeting? If you’re prepared to help us by joining a leafleting team or leafleting your street to help promote this meeting, please email wfdefendstateschools@gmail.com and let us know.

An open letter to the governors of St Mary’s and St Saviour’s schools

Our Community, Our Schools is taking the step of publishing an open letter to you for two reasons. 

Firstly, we have been contacted by a number of concerned parents from St Mary’s school asking for our advice on the ramifications of Academy Conversion. We have now published this advice here.
 

Secondly, we are publishing this advice because we believe that the proposal to convert these schools to being part of a Multi-Academy Trust is one that affects all of us in Waltham Forest.

 

As you are well aware, the issue of the freedoms of Free Schools and Academy schools is very rarely out of the news at the moment. Their academic performance is being questioned, academy chains are coming under tremendous fire and academy and free school governing bodies are being scrutinised for mismanagement, high senior staff salaries and allegations of cronyism.

 

Our research leads us to believe that one of the most important reasons for this is the structural weaknesses of both Academies and Free Schools - legally the same thing.

 

If St Mary’s and St Saviour’s schools do decide to become academies we believe they will be taking a major gamble and the effects of failure will be felt not only by the school’s children, but by all the whole community and all our schools.

 

For these reasons, at the very least, we believe it is absolutely vital that the school governors consult widely and meaningfully with the whole range of stakeholders in the community and to reflect in an open transparent way on the responses they receive.

 

Please feel free to contact us if you want more information.

Our Community, Our Schools

Download our briefing here.

 

The truth about Waltham Forest’s schools

Every parent wants to know that their child will have access to a good school and that the people running those schools take their job seriously. This is the common-sense anxiety on which the current government has mercilessly and shamelessly played in order to stoke up demand for ‘Free Schools’.

This is not to say that nothing about our school system needs improvement – of course it does, but the drive to create demand for Free Schools depended on establishing that there was something fundamentally rotten about comprehensive schools. If current trends are anything to go by, the truth appears to be almost the reverse. As proportionately more Free Schools are falling foul of Ofsted, it appears that there is something fundamentally wrong with the new kids on the block.

Tackling the legacy of this fear-mongering is difficult because there are huge problems in our education system, many of which are nothing to do with our schools. For example, can any form of school offset the effects of 30 years in which social and economic inequality has got worse? But as the unfolding policy disaster that is the Free Schools project shows, fear-mongering only worsens the situation.

It's disappointing then, to find a recent local Liberal Democrat party election leaflet making some deeply unfair claims about the performance of our schools based on distorted statistics. The leaflet claimed that Waltham Forest’s schools have the lowest percentage of pupils passing 5 GCSE’s at A-C grade including English and Maths in London and that  in Key Stage 2 exams (11 tests of 11 year olds), Waltham Forest is the lowest performing borough in London. This is, they claim, a damning indictment of our schools under the current council. “It’s a competitive world out there” one Lib Dem Councillor is quoted as saying, while another claims to “see no reason why our children can’t be the best in London”.  Both quotes are in fact fairly meaningless but they seem calculated to play on anxieties that our schools are failing.

So what is the truth about Waltham Forest schools?

Firstly, we went back to the same statistics used by the Liberal Democrats to see what they told us. We looked at the most recent statistical reports on educational performance in Waltham Forest by the Council officers to the Children and Young People Overview and Scrutiny sub-committee (see the documents under item 45 in particular). What they show us, perhaps predictably, is that the truth is more complicated but it’s also much more encouraging. For example: 

• Our schools are meeting their improvement targets for Key Stage 1 reading and writing,
• While it’s true that Waltham Forest’s schools are currently running fairly consistently below the London average on most indices, the gap seems to be narrowing on most measures.
• At Key Stage 1 Reading, Writing and Maths our schools are meeting their improvement targets and the gap between them and the London average is almost non-existent.
• Waltham Forest’s schools are meeting their targets to reduce the gap between the levels of educational attainment of pupil premium pupils and their peers at Key Stages 2 and 4. 
• At Key Stage 2, Waltham Forest is below the London average but only by 4% and is equal to the National Average.
• At Key Stage 4, the percentage of pupils reaching 5 or more GCSEs with grades A to C is below the London average and the National Average but only by 2% and the gap is narrowing.
• Indeed, what’s most striking from the statistics is that the rate of improvement of Waltham Forest Schools over the last three years in particular is comparable with the London average in general,  often outstrips the rate of improvement of the National Average and sometimes outstrips the rate of improvement of the London average. At Key Stage 1 the rate of improvement is quite dramatic and is still impressive at Key Stage 2.

In short, Waltham Forest’s schools are still behind the London average but they are on a good trajectory, improving steadily across most measures and rapidly on many others. Certainly not the disaster narrative being fed by the local Liberal Democrats’ leaflet.

It’s also worth bearing in mind, that this isn’t some abstract race. Waltham Forest is one of the most deprived boroughs in the capital and the country as a whole. By the Council’s chosen index, Waltham Forest is the 6^th most deprived borough in London, while London’s Poverty Profile identifies Waltham Forest as one of the four most impoverished boroughs in the capital. Comparison of schools performance that are crudely indexed against Kensington and Chelsea, Wandsworth and Westminster are not going to tell us that much. When the borough’s deprivation is taken into account the rate of improvement in Waltham Forest’s schools is more impressive.

Statistics should be used with great care. If you really wanted to know what was happening in Waltham Forest’s schools and wanted to draw meaningful comparisons, you would have to compare schools in boroughs with comparable socio-economic profiles and similar resources. And you’d have to agree in advance what the measure of a good school actually is.

The statistics show that our schools have room to improve in simple raw academic performance indicators but that’s not the only measure of a good school. The statistics also show that even measured on their simple academic performance, our schools are improving impressively in spite of the borough’s socio-economic profile and resource issues.

Our schools are doing well and they deserve – and need - our support.

Just what is the real problem with Free Schools?

The revelation that Michael Gove has been raiding the budget for primary schools of £400 million to fund his free schools shows once again that the current government’s real objective is not about building new schools or fulfilling its duty to provide children with school places. It’s not even really about choice. It’s about using its time in government to cause the maximum possible damage to the comprehensive school system.

Gove has done everything possible to provide a sheltered environment for his new schools. He’s used legislation to ensure that no one can build any other kind of new school. He’s provided Free Schools with privileged funding and raided other budgets to support them. He’s allowed them to overrun their projected capital start-up costs. Perhaps more importantly, he’s been frantically busy inside the DfE reallocating resources to try to hide their desperate shortcomings. As the evidence grows of a disproportionate failure rate, it also emerged that Free schools,are getting extra support and resources to help them survive, resources that are unavailable for other struggling schools.

As well as revealing the nakedly ideological project underpinning the Free Schools policy, what this has also shown is that the Department knows there is something very wrong with Free Schools. Even the government has had to admit this with the Schools Minister John Nash recently quoted as saying ‘Experience has shown us that free schools in their first years of operation are different from other open academies and face problems that are not educational in origin.’

We think that parents and all those who are thinking about getting involved with these schools deserve to know what it is that’s so problematic about this school. That’s why we have published this briefing note on Free Schools. Our briefing focuses on what we think are fundamental structural flaws that stem from the way these schools have been set up in law and outside the local authority system. We argue that far from representing a few bad apples, the recent scandals that have engulfed several Free Schools tell us something very important about them, something that the Department for Education does not want you to know.

Our message is, if you’re thinking about signing your child up for a Free School, about getting involved in governing a Free School, or even  about setting one up, read this briefing - and think again.