He managed to come home looking pretty much how he went, unlike Electro-Kevin’s offspring- before and after. (Last one possibly NSFW).

I tried it out with shool uniforms and was slightly taken aback to find some that certainly weren’t what I was looking for!  Anyway, this Japanese Korean one will do for now).

There is an old saying that when you have a baby, you might as well empty your wallet onto the counter at Boots, then later at Mothercare (who go up to Ten, as their adverts used to say).

When they get to 11, you then need to do the same thing at the school outfitters. Today we spent some time in Morley visiting what used to be known as Khalid Fashions, now called the Uniform Centre. The guys are very helpful there and they know their stuff. Our trip today cost us more than £73 and that excludes the craft apron (coming Monday) as well as various shirts and trousers that we have been getting from M&S and ASDA in anticipation of David starting at Woodkirk High in September. (We are holding off on footwear as his feet are already huge and growing rapidly).

Now interestingly, many High Schools have set up their own Uniform shops in recent years and some have been using “Stagecoach tactics” to squeeze out the little guys like the Khalids. It has now been frowned on as a fundraiser by the Government though and the little guys are fighting back. I was pleased to see The Uniform shop van parked opposite the entrance on the year 7 intake briefing night and we spotted it again outside Morley High for one of theirs.

These days there are great efforts made to make the transition into High School as painless as possible for youngsters which is a far cry from mine forty years ago.

I can clearly remember my school placement letter arriving and with it was the list of things I needed. It was foolscap sized, duplicated and double sided. It specified all of the clothes items of course, along with geometry items like set squares and a pair of compasses. (When I went up to 6th Form, a slide rule was recommended, along with something called French Curves which sounded rather exotic but turned out to be some plastic wiggly things for drawing graphs. The green lead centred flexible curves that one or two kids had were impressive though.)

My mum took me to a uniform shop in Newcastle (possibly in Grey Street, I was impressed with the extent of their stock) and we duly returned laden with provisions.

For carrying stuff to school, a briefcase or a haversack was recommended. What the list didn’t tell you was that only swots used a briefcase and the only two in our class were myself and Gavin Atkinson. (I rapidly transitioned to a Haversack which whilst having two straps was only to be worn over one shoulder otherwise you were categorised as a Puff or a Spaka. Sadly, Gavin’s Dad was a teacher at Kenton and he had to keep the swot-bag but he was called those things anyway).

Anyway, all these years on, the one thing that sticks in my mind from that list for Kenton School in 1969 was that girl Pupils were obliged to wear navy blue knickers. I don’t recall it being prescriptive for boys but there again, we didn’t have to wear skirts…

The reason for her call was that their old High School was celebrating it’s 80th birthday and they were inviting as many former pupils as possible.

Now Karen’s old school is surprisingly famous. No, it isn’t Eton, or Harrow, or even Rodean. It is Levenshume High School, otherwise known as Weatherfield Comp as it is regularly used by Granada TV for filming as part of Britain’s longest running Soap opera, Coronation Street. (Karen comments that the Wikipedia entry is spherically, plurally, incorrect, although the other school mentioned may have been the case some time back).

Karen keenly follows Corry and as I generally surf with a laptop on my lap in the lounge (or more accurately with a laptop on my belly) I am peripherally exposed to the Soap. Being a Mancunian by upbringing, she would regularly point out any OB scene that she recognised. The shots of the school intregued me as it looked somewhat like a grand old 19th century Arts and Crafts Country House.

Anyway, David and I came along to keep her company. She had told us a bit about the school- how it was an E shaped building with classrooms in the wings and the hall in the central strut along with Gyms beyond. She told us it had a posh entrance down the end of a long driveway that the pupils weren’t allowed to use. She recounted her three years there in the 3rd, 4th and 5th forms, pranks that had gone on and punishments, including her class being banished to a corridor for form registration for the entire 5th year. There had been a lower school in another building further down the road, now long gone.

On arrival at the school, marshalls directed us down the elegant tree lined drive and along the front of the building, past the dining hall onto the tennis courts. (“Hah! These were the netball courts”, interjected Karen.) The school is indeed still “E” shaped, but with much tweaking and extending so that there are various lumps and bumps on the structure, including some low grade 50s buildings and a brand new energy efficient community use sports facility called the Energy Box. (I christened it the sweat box).

When we arrived, we went into the main hall, where there were various displays about the school history and the future. There were extensive archive photographs as well as some old documents through the ages. (Apparently most of this was pulled together for the 75th anniversary celebrations five years ago so it was comparatively easy to restage).

Now a school that has no direct memories for me is relatively academic for interest so I was more attentive to the spatial arrangements and how it had evolved over the years. It turned out that this school had been built in 1928, officially opening in 1929. It had always been a Girls school and indeed had been a selective Grammar school until such time as the Trotskyists in the LEA abolished such elitism in the pursuit of mediocracy.

The building was light and spacious (apart from the basement), but not overly disabled friendly, being on three main levels (with a lift) and a few rooms on landings due to some of the quirky extensions built over the years. The original Gym block looked as though it had been built in the 60s with exposed concrete columns and window walls whilst the main building style was not too far removed from Victorian. The dining hall also looked like it dated from the 60s with exposed ceiling zig zag steel trusses and weetabix ceilings, all now painted shocking shades of green and yellow.

The main entrance area near the hall was smartly painted with extensive wall and floor tiling, although most other areas were rather utilitarian, with the original staircase blocks looking like their brickwork had been simply glossed over. I didn’t even see any of that local authority surface mainstay, speckled texture paint.

One striking thing in the main hall was the light fittings- very large and deep circular shades with translucent infills and sides in school green. Smaller matching shades were also found in the entrance hall and vestibule, whilst everywhere else florry lights (or CFL fittings) were the norm. The hall also had some additional decorative lighting- aircraft-like PAR fittings lit the bases of the ceiling beams as well with some wall up/downlighters on the stage proscenium. A neat little lighting controller at the back of the hall integrated the tungsten and discharge lighting for assembly and performance use.

Looking at the older photographs, they had quite a few whole-school panorama shots, some outside, some inside. The indoor ones were in the hall and I noticed that the original lighting fittings were large open bottomed circular frosted glass shades, one of which was missing, exposing the 500 Watt GES (Goliath Edison Screw)  GLS (General Lighting Service) clear lamp to view. A later photo showed that the original open bottom shades had been replaced with large spherical shades and yet again there was one missing. (My own school had flying saucer shades and two were missing in the main hall, an occupational hazard of either allowing sports in the hall, or possibly the precarious practice of relamping on large wobbly wooden ladders by the caretakers).

Whilst Karen enjoyed looking around, she felt that the event had not been as successful as my recent school trip, mainly because we were left to ourselves and there wasn’t any obvious programme. However, we were excellently fed with a huge buffet in the dining hall and many of the pupils acting as ambassadors kept bringing  trays into the main building.   There may have been speeches towards the end but we only stayed for the first couple of hours. The children were putting on various forms of entertainment on the stage but nobody was introduced or anything like that.

As for the uniform, we assumed it was still bottle green but most of the kids had a white T shirt on with some form of stylised picture, possibly of the school. We did see an old lady with a school scarf though, impressive that she saved it for forty years or so since she attended. (I still have my school prefect tie but I retained it more for fancy dress purposes, it has to be said).

One other comment Karen had (and her sister also made on seeing the pictures)- the buildings looked rather run down and tired. A new build is on the horizon though and a large set of complex plans were also on display, although I struggled to get a chance to study them, as ambassadors kept offering me sandwiches, vol-au-vents and samosas.

It was also reassuring to see that Karen’s memory is just as fallible as mine. She showed us three successive classroom doors that she recalls had been booby-trapped with a bucket to trick the teacher, each successive door she changed her mind and assured us it was this one. The last was a cupboard!

David dressed up as a Keeper and there was a blatant clue with his hat that said Dudley Zoological Gardens. That still didn’t stop several people guessing that he was a gardener though, including one of the teachers.

I’m not sure that monkeys feature as horticultural tools though…

David doesn’t show any inclination to want to go and work in the mobile Telecommunications business, so O2 weren’t overly persuasive. 

I have no recollection as to what I wanted to be when I was at Primary school. Certainly once I became stage-struck in my early teens it was technical theatre that I wanted to do which became refined towards a Degree in Lighting (Engineering, not Theatre) which it was possible to do at South Bank Poly. However, when I went there as part of the milk round, I was stunned to find out that they had dumped the course, despite still being in the prospectus. 

My Dad was quite keen for me to consider the Navy and I did enquire down at the careers office about Officer Cadetships. However when I looked more closely into it, I was barred by nature of my myopia. I am hugely short-sighted after getting German Measles as an infant, with my uncorrected focal distance being about 3″-6″. Being a hormonal teenager, I also found it rather prurient that another possible reason for being barred was Fissure of Anus. 

I stumbled over the video below which is also rather prurient, hat tip Obnoxio for pointing me to the site and hat tip Canucklehead for the video buried deep within the motivational style pictures.

(Not very safe for work or family)

I can put a personal view on looking after your kidneys, though, from the frouhjt experiences of my old man, Neil Grey.

When he was young, my Dad was an indentured apprentice at Parsons, a huge engineering concern in the north east. He was a turbine engineer and started travelling around, building Power Stations. He was working on one down near grays in essex, when he had an industrial accident. I don’t know the details, but he fell off some scaffolding and injured his back. He was in traction in hospital for a long time, but eventually made what was assumed to be a full recovery.

However, many years later, in the course of an investigation for something else, it was found that one of his kidneys was no longer functioning, but that the other had become a super-kidney, taking on the full workload. As he progressed into his fifties, he initially found that his tolerance of a full bladder dropped to the point where he was likely to become incontinent within a few minutes of feeling the urge to go. (The consultant gave him some special cards he was advised to show whenever he was caught short, advising the recepient that the bearer had a medical condition and should be granted access to any facilites due to being in dire need).

Attempts to control the incontinence via medication actually had a detrimental effect- he would not need to go to the loo for days on end. The unintended consequences of this was a back-pressure from the bladder onto the working kidney. The tiny little muscle that relaxes in order to empty the bladder was eventually diagnosed as no longer detecting the signals properly so he was fitted with a catheter and a urine collecting bag. Unfortunately, however, his renal efficiency was now down to a very small percentage and he was permanently tired from all of the toxins in his bloodstream.

At this point, he was introduced to CAPD, Continuous Ambulatory Peritoneal Dialysis, a sort of half-way-house to full blood dialysis. The peritoneum is a layer surrounding most of the internal organs in the abdomen and there is actually a small space within. If you fill that layer with a saline fluid of the right concentration, then the fluid will absorb toxins from the body through the process of osmosis. In practical terms, it is necessary to drain off and replenish the fluid four or five times a day and there is a strict regime of having a bag ready in a warmer so that it is at body temperature when required. It tethers the patient for about twenty minutes as it takes half the time to drain the last solution out and then the new bag is connected to the plumbing and hung on a drip stand. You also have a short pipe sticking out of your tummy and need to ensure a sterile regime for connector cleanliness & replacement.

Now when Neil was on CAPD, he was working in a shop and living above, so fitting a regime around the need to change bags wasn’t overly onerous on him, but if he had worked somewhere else it would have been a lot more difficult with having to have stock and equipment at his workplace (or taking it with him). His previous job as a night mini-cab driver for a Company with no driver facilities whatsoever would have been untenable.

Something we didn’t appreciate when he first started doing CAPD was the quantity of consumables that the NHS would deliver to him and the amount of room it took up. A day’s supply of CAPD bags is about the size (and weight) of the boxes of A4 photocopy paper you see in offices and he would get deliveries of at least twenty of these every couple of weeks.

Now CAPD is only partially effective and as the kidneys continue to deteriorate, there comes the point where it is not quite enough. Eventually, he started to go for an occasional haemo dialysis, for which he was fitted with a substantial canula on one of his arms. Kiyney dialysis machines at the time were quite large but much of the mechanism was to do with pumping the blood smoothly through the machine and returning it to the body. The bit in the middle was the filter unit, where the toxins were trapped and seperated.

Neil would actually return from these sessions invigorated. After feeling like death warmed up beforehand, he would be full of the joys of spring for the rest of the day.

Eventually, Neil went onto full haemo-dialysis. By this time he had given up work due to ill health and was living in sheltered housing with my Mum (who was effectively his full time carer). He gradually developed additional conditions, like Diabetes. Someone with renal failure has to massively curtail their intake of fluids and eat a strict controlled diet. Much of the time he was just too tired and shagged out to do anything at all, even eat.

His post-dialysis day was the best, he felt human again. The day after, he felt ropey. The day after that, he felt seriously rough. So it went, week in, week out.

Eventually, he died in his sleep. The death certificate said heart failure, but at the end of the day nearly everybody dies of heart failure. It was his kidneys that killed him, a long, slow, tedious, monotonous death by chronic illness.

His one piece of advice to me? If you need to go, go, don’t hold it in. When the doctor asks if the waterworks are OK, tell him straight.

The official advice is a bit more wide ranging… (pdf)

The good news, however, is that he has been offered his second choice school- Woodkirk High, home of Morley Community Radio. So we will accept that and plan for him to go there but in the meantime he might get lucky and get offered a place at Grammar school.

This is how we thought the system worked. Indeed, this is how the BBC thinks it works.

What can we do if we do not get our favourite school?

You can accept the place offered but ask to be put on a waiting list for the school you most want. Not everyone will take up their places and you may be offered one. Be prepared to wait though. Some shuffling of places goes on right up to and even after the start of the autumn term.

Then we looked at the offer letter.

If you feel you do not want to accept the offer, your child’s place at the above school will be withdrawn and offered to the next child on the waiting list. Please remember that there is no guarantee that your appeals for higher preference schools will be successful. You must also be aware that once you have rejected your offer at the above school it may not be possible to offer it to you again if you change your mind.

Meanwhile, small businesses in Leeds who are feeling the pinch get short shrift if they are late paying their business rates. A trader showed me a faux “Summons” where the Council had added £90 onto the bill, £60 of it as Magistrates Court fees. However, when he did some digging, he actually discovered that the actual Magistrates fees are actually £3, the rest is “costs”. I’m in awe of the Council having the front to do this. (Apparently the Councils all agree what the fee will be with the courts but wether this is a nice cozy arrangement will become apparent after he hits them with some freedom of information requests.)

My biggest shock and awe, however, is reserved for the bare faced cheek of Parliament who have decided to exempt themselves from the FOI act and not publish their expenses.

They really are living in an us and them dream world divorced from reality. 

If you don’t agree with this, than you can do something about it.  If you do agree with it, then I’d like to know why.

*Free the Westminster 646- from public scrutiny

“Our schools are very safe places to be already and by working even closer together we can ensure that both our schools and the local communities within the Morley NPT area become even safer”.

That slightly contradicts with “tackling onsite problems”, but never mind.

(The Obtiser article is here)

I think there might be one or two difficulties with this in the actual implementation. Morley Town Council funded a full time Police Officer dedicated to the Town centre.  This was a partial success, though, as it had one or two unintended consequences.

• As he could only concentrate on the Town Centre, this didn’t actually lead to increased policing there, just an opportunity for over-stretched sergeants to spread the pain more widely
• If he actually arrested some scratter for something like shoplifting, he’d be off the streets for the rest of the day going through that long winded palarver known as custody booking in procedure
• If he was off on training or off sick, that was it, he wasn’t available. He wasn’t actually backfilled or anything

(The Town Council now fund Plastic Plod, otherwise known as Blunketts Bobbies).

Another slightly disturbing comment is from one of the Heads- 

a great asset to the school – another pair of eyes and ears.

I would have thought that the mouth would be the biggest asset, after all, they have security cameras already. My biggest concern is scope creep, where all the citizenship stuff gradually takes a back seat to DNA collection. All it takes is the allegation of a threatening SMS text these days to be off down the station and having your mouth scraped.

Now, a year on, it mostly doesn’t bother me but I occasionally get random aches in the leg and kneeling sometimes hurts. I had been warned to expect gyp in the knee area for eighteen months, after all, the butchers were hacking around in there with scary looking tools.

Anyway, ever since the accident, I have always walked up and down stairs holding the handrail and whilst I don’t actually need to and can do without if I set my mind to it, I feel uncomfortable. At home, I will frequently come down the stairs one at a time. Thinking back, however, I have been doing that for a very long time indeed, ever since I broke my leg in Florida at Disney Studios. (That happened in 1996BD, i.e. “Before David”.) Ever since 1996, I have shied away from climbing over Stiles, up onto short walls or even over low barriers. I never have a skip in my step and shuffle around hyper-carefully on any slippery conditions.

Show me a ladder that leads up to a theatre stagehouse grid though, and all the aches and pains disappear!

There are something like 3,000 Falkland Islanders and the soldiers regarded them as somewhat unsophisticated, being presumably like the Isle of Man but without the offshore banking sector. Anyway, the soldiers started to refer to the local men as Bennys, the derivation being a character from the soap opera Crossroads. Benny was characterised as being rather thick and always wearing a woolly hat. This photo from Wikipedia shows some islanders and the hat certainly fits…

Anyway, after a while, the soldiers were ordered to stop calling the locals Bennys and they duly obliged. Instead they called them Stills. Why was that? Because, the soldiers explained, they are still f***ing Bennys…

I was reminded of his after reading of the school that decided to stop calling itself a school due to the negative connotations of the word school.  (Story here).

I look forward to some other places with negative associations getting more positive new names. How about:-

Leeds bulk scheduled peoples taxi hall

Gum luxury peoples department store

Recreation centre for those with extended leisure time

Leeds non-optional halls of residence

I’ll refrain from illustrating the article, but it seems that you can get special dressings that contain the larvae discreetly in meshed pouches. The larvae are sterile in both senses of the word and eat dead tissue for breakfast… It goes by the innocuous sounding brand name of BioFOAM or you can get them free range.

Yecch. Yes, I am a bit squeamish…

The baby flies are best bred Welsh ones though.

That night, on Look North, we saw about fifteen seconds of someone handing out leaflets to scratty looking Kentonians whilst Mike Neville spun something about spontaneous strike action by pupils.

The following afternoon, a tight lipped Senior Management Team (Mrs. Innes, Mr. Madison, Mr. Morton) addressed the various year groups in the school hall. Mrs. Innes read out a statement which explained that during afternoon break yesterday, a car containing a camera crew and pupil X, a political agitator, pulled up outside the school gates and started filming. Pupils spilled out onto the road to see what was going on. The camera crew filmed the pupils spilling out and the leaflets being handed out for a short time, then got back in the car and sped off to another school. As Kenton was an open campus rather than gated, the cameras managed to obtain the best visual images at our school when pupils went to look.

It was certainly one version of what happened but it was far from being the truth and we all knew it. This was my first real experience of news management but over the last thirty-five years I have seen so many more in the workplace, in organisations and from politicians.

It is with increasing bemusement that I watch our Government spin black being white and throwing more good money after bad in what can only be described as blinkered deranged desperation.

I despair that our Prime Mentalist is living up to his derogatory nickname and that he is indeed, as Old Holborn suggests,  Dagenham. (Three stops past Barking).

(Sorry, but any comments previously left on this blogpost have been lost)

Once we visited the Grammar school and realised that David stood a fair chance of getting a place, we looked into how we could up the ante’. We bought the example test papers and found that David was OK at Maths but had some knowledge gaps and no concept of rote learning multiplication tables. As a consequence, he mostly understood the principles but made silly mistakes. In Verbal Reasoning he was a star, consistently getting upper quartile results. The Grammar school use Maths to assess the pupil achievement and the Verbal Reasoning to identify future potential so this is a very positive.

We looked around for tutors concentrating on coaching and after a couple of blind alleys we found that the local Kip McGrath centre was doing a course. (It didn’t help that their website phone and email details were out of date!) Consequently David has spent eight weeks visiting their centre on Sunday mornings and looked forward to it as they made learning fun.

We bought a number of 11+ structured workbooks from WH Smith (including a Parents survival guide) and Karen developed a informal coaching programme around this. We were careful, however, to make sure he still had plenty of normal time for the stuff he loves doing, including making a snowman yesterday! (In case you are wondering why I wasn’t heavily involved, I have a more lassez faire approach to life  and also I tend to shout at him more than Karen when he gives silly answers because he isn’t paying attention!)

Now, at last, the day is on us. He will sit the two tests tomorrow morning, then he wants a slap up meal- at McDonalds and the weekend is his (weather permitting). He then has a very easy time of it and he will probably find his year 6 SATS a breeze in the Spring.

Meanwhile, the waiting starts. By the end of January, the school will advise us if David has met the attainment level required for entrance into the school (i.e. he has reached 11+ standards). The results are normalised for age which will actually cost him a couple of points as he has an early birthday during the academic year. 

Now if we lived in the catchment area of the school, this would almost certainly mean that he would be offered a place. However, what actually happens is that places are allocated for out of area children purely on results, so the better he does, the higher the chance of an offer. We find that out on March 1st, when we receive the school allocation details from our LEA.

It is interesting to observe the reactions of others to us putting David through all this. His own school wasn’t particularly helpful officially as Leeds is not a selective school area but informally a couple of the staff were extremely  positive indeed. The reaction of the Chair of Governors was to inform us that Morley had three excellent high schools but we beg to differ, as does the school inspectorate Ofsted (they use words like good and satisfactory but not outstanding). A relative in education suggested that David might not like it as Grammar schools push the children to get good results which is of course exactly what comprehensives do with the more able anyway, albeit less so in academia sometimes.

David may not get in at the Grammar School (or even attain the standard) but whether he does or not, he has had the opportunity to do so and it is up to him to make the most of it, whatever the outcome.

There is still a lot of class hatred about selective education, particularly by champagne socialist MPs who put their own children through private schools. Karen took (and failed) the 11+ and indeed left school at sixteen, but went on to shine academically, being sponsored through her Degree. I only found out a couple of months ago that my Parents wanted me to apply for a scholarship (or bursary) for  a private school in Newcastle but that my Year 5 teacher (with the shiny jacket complete with elbow patches) scuppered that in favour of another child who “who was more deserving because he would work hard for it whilst Ian would breeze it” 

I never took the 11+ and didn’t know I’d been passed over, but Karen did. Her views on the mantra mouthed by our Minister for kiddywinkies that Grammar schools condemn many children to failure in these all shall have prizes times are that it is a load of Ed Balls.

There is only one fair form of discrimination and that is by merit.

There was a severe weather warning in Yorkshire late yesterday and a letter home from school warning that they may be short staffed.

We woke up this morning to an inch or so of snow and very slippery roads. Now normally getting out of our estate is tricky but the main roads get gritted and ploughed. Not this morning though. I passed numerous stationary cars kerbed with their hazards going, the AA attending to one of them on Magpie Lane. As I got up to the edge of town a lorry was blocking the road in but the road out looked clear, apart from a Transit van parked up and flashing. I got past the van OK but I gradually lost momentum and traction, finding myself immobile as well. That particular road (Bridge Street) was like glass and I kerbed myself in then got out. Where I had been stuck and skidding, I could see tarmac but no sign of grit on the icy mirror surface. 

We had a bit of a conflab and a few motorists helped push me up the short hill that was impeding me. One out, but a lot more pushing required for others. I had no intention of stopping again though!

I trundled out onto the main road which was icy slush, still no sign of ploughing. Surveying the horizon, I could see a number of trucks struggling to get up the rise leading towards the motorway roundabout and gridlock the other way.

At that point I took the decision to head home and went onto the short cut back (Glen Road) at a very cautious 5mph as it was ABS conditions. This road is fairly flat and then it is downhill back to home. There was a line of a dozen cars stuck facing uphill on Magpie Lane going nowhere and I carefully slid past them going back downhill as home beckoned.

Not too many made it in to work and our remote home working solution was well hammered.

David’s school was determined to stay open but appealed to Parents to keep their children home if possible as they would inevitably be short-staffed. 

That is more than can be said for Womble on tour, who has documented the bad weather conditions in his neck of the woods.

(Stories like this don’t help…)

Well, let me tell you another unintended consequence of righteous rule making.

12,000 lives turned upside down through Government Agency incompetence

25% of the adult population to go through these checks, & more intrusive ones

The Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA) has been created to help prevent unsuitable people from working with children and vulnerable adults.

We will do this by working in partnership with the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB), which will gather relevant information on every person who wants to work or volunteer with vulnerable people.

Good old Samizdata put it succincty

And people wonder why there is sometimes a shortage of volunteers for things like youth clubs and the like. The destruction of civil society, of the bonds of trust that are vital to such an organic, grass-roots cluster of non-state institutions, is remorseless and deliberate. This government, in its totalitarian way – I use that word quite deliberately – wants to make all human interactions subject to its tests. The consequences for the long term health of civil society, and of the ability of people to grow up normally, are ignored.

Well, I’ve had enough. I’ve had three CRB checks for volunteering with children but there won’t be a fourth. The school where I used to be a parent governor was happy with list 99 checks in my time but now want an enhanced disclosure. If I’d still been there I would have resigned on principle as it is entirely disproportionate to the risk and the system is seriously flawed anyway (as well as being yet another way of raising money, just ask Thunderdragon).

So, I’m quietly going to drop out of the reading scheme when it is up for CRB renewal. The community radio will also get forced down the registration route and the decision is to either only accept adults or to struggle to find people willing to go through the grief. It won’t be my decision though.

Do tou know a third unintended consequence?  Fine buildings not currently in use are being demolished because it isn’t viable to let them stand empty now that the business rate relief has been abolished. Perhaps that is why the Morley Pavilion is back on the market. Yours for £2k a week or so (plus £400 rates) if you don’t have a Million or two to spare to just buy it.

(You can’t knock it down I’m afraid, it is in a conservation area).

It wasn’t totally wasted, as it gave him the opportunity to do it under exam conditions whilst we did the shopping. We nearly spoilt it all by giving him beans on toast made on mouldy bread (he had a dicky tummy earlier in the week and we suspect it was some past its best Weetabix).

We then nipped into Morley for the big book swap, an advance literacy festival event. (We will be going to three shows during the week).

For the afternoon, we visited a Circus who had set up their tent in nearby Tingley. Circus Mondao is in its third year and brings back animals to the big top- horses, shetland ponies, camels, llamas, goats, zebras, doves, a dog and a very furry rabbit. This went down very well with the children and the 50p visit to the stables afterwards was very popular. The show was rather good although the generator tripped at one point during the show.

Having animals in the Circus upsets the righteous (indeed Blackpool Tower and Yarmouth gave up animal acts under pressure many years ago) but they seemed to be well looked after in the ring and well cared for behind the scenes (& DEFRA seem to agree).

If you’ve ever wanted to watch a big top being erected in three minutes, here is their video.

A few snaps from the day.

Anyway, we were out last  night looking around Woodkirk High School, the second closest school to our house. I found this particularly interesting as I know the school through their generous hosting of Morley Community Radio but I have only been in a few bits of it, where we have happened to hold meetings.

By contrast with Heckmondwike and Morley High, the Head Teacher, Jonathan White, managed to condense his talk into fifteen minutes. It was topped and tailed by musical performances and their award winning kitchen was open.

This was slightly better organised than Morley High in that maps and pupil tour guides were available, although parking was something of a zoo. Morley High seemed to have more freebies and nibbles around the building and more kids dressed up in interesting costumes. Their campus is extensive but the buildings interlock in unusual ways and we completely missed the art department first time round as one of the new blocks had a basement area but the upstairs looked like the downstairs.

Something had been bugging me about Morley High and a student there has confirmed my fears. If you want to go to the toilet you need to “be prepared” because there is no toilet roll in the cubicles, just available from a giant roll dispenser out in the room. This harks back to children blocking the loos and possibly even setting fire to them.

This is a very authoritarian approach:- it basically gives the message “we don’t trust you” and reminds me a little of the story of the monkey and the ladder.

So, with a certain amount of trepidation, I entered the boy’s toilets, (Year 7 & 8 only). What a revelation! These toilets were smarter than the ones we have at work. Modern, clean and bright, with smart furniture and toilet paper in the cubicles. This enthusiasm was dampened somewhat later in the evening, though, when I returned with David and noticed a CCTV camera at ceiling level above the urinals. (Karen checked the Girls and it was the same). I also had a quick look in the Year 9 & 10 ones and they were as good, other than smelling a bit rough.

So, what message do the Woodkirk toilets give? “We don’t trust you- but we won’t humiliate you”.

Well, we have made our preference choice and returned the form (in a virtual sense, as we did it online). We will find out on March 1st where David is going.

(OFI- an old BT Engineer term, the polite version being “Operator Found Ignorant”).

So, first impressions? Very much how the head described it to me a few years back, “earthy“. It doesn’t have pretensions but it is proud of how well it does.

Since John Townsley was reputedly parachuted in as a “Superhead” in 2003, he has turned the school around, from borderline failing to excelling in its results, particularly by getting rid of dead wood staff. Well, this is what he told us, although the 1999 and 2006 Ofsted reports don’t paint that extreme a contrast. Similar to the Woodkirk inspection reports, much is satisfactory with some areas down as good. The trouble is that Ofsted school reports are full of arcane educational language that lacks clarity for the typical parent and even as a former school Governor, I’ve had to ask teachers to translate some what they say to what they actually mean.

So, how does a parent judge? So far, we can only compare Morley High with Heckmondwike (a Grammar school with something of a different ethos) and my old school, Kenton School, although this was a closing day rather than an open evening so it wasn’t full of teachers extolling the benefits of the school in quite the same way. We will be visiting Woodkirk next week for their open evening before expressing our preferences on the all important form (or in our case, electronically online).

The biggest contrast between Hecky and Morley High is in the vocational aspects: most Grammar School children are more likely to go on into higher education, whereas in a non-selective school, many will leave at 16 or 18 going into jobs or further education instead. Consequently, there is also the feel of a vocational college here, much like I recall of Coventry Technical College in the 70s. There is a hairdressing salon, there are rooms for particular trades and there was even a public service room, for Police, Fire Brigade and Forces.

(For overseas readers, Our Government has a target of 50% of pupils to go to University and by the time David wants to leave school, he will more-or-less have to stay on until 18 anyway, something us libertarian types refer to as educational conscription. The Government has never actually explained where the 50% figure comes from or attempted to justify it beyond woolly stuff about us needing high calibre graduates for the 21st century digital networked economy. 

Personally, I regard this as a mixture of smoke & mirrors and all shall have prizes, (or at least 50% of them shall). The reality in my opinion, is that there aren’t too many jobs for the unskilled and semi-skilled young people as our white heat of british industry is now the hot air of the service industry. We hardly make anything any more as a post-industrial Nation and our all-stifling compliance costs throttle the faint gasps of entrepreneurship for anyone with a bright idea wanting to start a business. Instead, what we have is a medioracy of easy credit, easy benefits and easy escapisim, a dependency culture that suits our leaders well. Forcing children to stay on at school doesn’t really help that situation very much, let alone going to University and being saddled with massive debt).

Back to high schools, the other noticable difference between the two schools is the Campus. Heckmondwike site is a collection of mostly older buildings all on top of each other, with a modern sports hall. Morley site is a collection of buildings spanning the last fourty years (along with the original Victorian block in the middle), with a modern assembly hall and dining room. The modern hall is due to the old (late 60s) one being burnt down by arsonists a number of years back. Morley feels mostly surrounded by playing fields, whilst Hecky’s are a short walk away as the school is in the main Street.

On the open evening, Heckmondwike provided maps of the school layout, along with willing guides to show us around. At Morley, we were left more to ourselves (without maps), although a couple of girls from the School Council did offer to show us round some of the areas we hadn’t been to yet. (They were year 8, remembered David from Primary school and were shocked to see that David towered over them).

In the science labs, there were numerous practical experiments going on. There was a subtle difference though- at Heckmondwike it was the pupils doing the demonstrations, whilst at Morley, it was mostly the teachers. We did ask the children whether they got to do practicals though, and they said yes, it was rather hands on (Karen had heard stories of pupils at open days lamenting they never got to do any of this stuff normally). Heckmondwike staff had told us that whilst they still had to do risk assessments on everything practical, the nature of the top 25% academic streaming was that the pupils were a lot less likely to mess about in lessons, putting themselves or others at risk.

John Townsley had previously told me that the original Grammar School Block was not fit for purpose and he would love to knock it down. On seeing inside, I realised what he meant- cramped corridors and narrow staircases, even to the point that there was a one way system for up and down. It also had a curious cast iron construction to the stairs and supporting columns reminiscent of a Victorian correctional facility. (The classrooms seemed fine though).

Another contrast was in the children themselves- Heckmondwike uniform is slightly old fashioned with a blazer/tie combination and the pupils looked smart, well turned out and attentive. The Morley uniform, by contrast, is a jumper/tie and the kids were generally more interested in each other than the visitors. Even the smart looking children are able to end up looking like Catherine Tate with huge tie knots more reminiscent of a cravat. On asking two girls about lunch times, at Heckmondwike we received a complex explanation of how the various year boys and girls go at their appointed time indicated by various bells. At Morley, she spent more time explaining the subtleties of the fingerprint based cashless system then saying you just go and join the queue.

Something a bit more subtle was the rules system. There was very little signage about behavioural stuff at Heckmondwike, although I did clock a couple of posters about bullying. By contrast, at Morley, practically every room had three laminated colour A4 posters showing truncated pyramid diagrams. These explained the rewards and discipline process, including the various sanctions for various types of infractions. They called this the positive discipline and behaviour scheme and it features heavily on their website

Parents and carers have the right to know that their child is safe, happy and enjoying school. Children who are happy do well in school. At Morley High School enormous emphasis is placed on promoting positive behaviour and attitudes to learning. Such is the success of our Positive Discipline system with its heavy emphasis on clarity, consistency and the persistent rewarding of excellence, over twenty high schools have now been trained by is in Positive Discipline. Parents and carers play a key role in supporting the school in this most important area of our work.

It is a sad reflection of our times that it is necessary to reinforce what to me is the blindingly obvious in such a blunt fashion. Having said that, I can recall numerous lads in my own school who would “try to bend not break the rules”.

I want to digress slightly now, and that is about the toilets. School toilets have a bad reputation, as places where new boys get shown the “Blue Goldfish” and they are generally unpleasant in their state of cleanliness & air quality. Now last night, I had cause to want to use the toilet so I went in a Mens room in one of the blocks. I did wonder if it was a staff or pupils toilet but later on realised that the staff ones had door codes on them. It was clean and free from graffiti and was being used by another father. Whilst we were making use of the facilities (as men do, studiously ignoring each other) we were joined by a third Dad.

Having completed the formalities, I washed my hands and looked round for the drying equipment. At first I thought there wasn’t any as I couldn’t see any paper towel receptacles, then noticed that behind me on the opposite wall was a paper dispenser and a hand dryer. The paper dispenser was of the large roll type, mounted sideways on with an opening at the bottom and more commonly seen as a giant toilet tissue dispenser in actual cubicles. Feeling inside, I couldn’t readily find the edge of the roll, so I simply used the hand dryer instead.

As I finished, another dad came to dry his hands but the dryer wouldn’t start for him so he fiddled about inside the paper dispenser. Suddenly, I made a connection about there being no paper towel bin. What if this was the actual toilet tissue dispenser? I wandered over to the three cublicles and glanced in. None of them had any toilet roll, or even a cardboard tube, just empty roll hooks.

So, I wonder what the story is here? Was it simply a hygiene malfunction where the toilet had not been replenished with rolls by the cleaners, or is this a response to an ongoing problem of children deliberately blocking toilets with yards and yards of loo roll?

If the latter, I’d be rather humiliated as a pupil, having to tear off a suitable length of paper before going to a cubicle.

This has been bothering me slightly as it does suggest a certain amount of indignity involved in going to the toilet and a lack of trust in the children, or at least the boys. Obviously, it is difficult to police a lavatory, although they could always create a “Dob in a blocker” culture. Now it might be that this toilet was a one-off and I am possibly jumping to wrong conclusions on flimsy evidence. What I have done is to contact one of the Governors (who knew nothing of school toilet policy) and they will make enquiries before getting back to me.

In the meantime, I’ll let Madness play us out…

The idea, of course, is to boost their self-confidence in reading out loud on a one to one basis. It seems that many children don’t get any opportunity to read outside of the school environment, generally through inability or indifference by their parents (or carers). Sometimes it is benign, as in them not being able to speak English or perhaps just a chaotic lifestyle.

Anyway, I’m now into my third year at the same school in a well ordered, supportive routine. (Earlier schemes were much more chaotic, with random children being offered to us each week and scrabbling round for rooms & books). I’ve had the same boy reader from year three up to year five, but I’ve had three different girl readers though, as the first two moved away and left the school.

Another fringe benefit of slightly older children is more interesting books for them to read, they have migrated from the Biff, Chip & Floppy Kipper stuff.

We received an appreciative letter from the school the other day, telling us how our readers have progressed. My boy reader had moved up from 1C to 2A, apparently a jump of six points. (It is a big scale though and he still has a fair way to go). When he started he used his finger to follow the words and would make up or ignore words he couldn’t read. Now he reads with confidence, but the interest peters out as time goes on. I didn’t really feel that my efforts added too much to his big improvement  as he was frequently off school sick, or occasionally on special behaviour management classes. It also didn’t help me being laid up for two months with a broken leg!

David (Grey) has started reading out loud to us as part of homework. He is a challenging reader though, as he asks for definitions of words he doesn’t know (& sometimes we don’t know them either, dictionary.com is our friend). Like all children, they often read out what they guess it to say rather than what is written down and it is when the punctuation doesn’t quite fit that they realise it is not quite right.

I’m a compulsive bookworm, I always have something nearby to read if I’m not offline. I’ve spent time at the school reading some of their books if one of the children is off sick (I’ve even been invited along to the hall to participate in line dancing and Bhangra). I can recall something in the front of one of my own childhood books, but can’t place what it was.

“In books lie knowledge… In knowledge lies wisdom”

I don’t think it was a Beano Annual, either.

Today, I took my lunch break over the space of about ninety minutes, as I was intermittently doing some remote access testing for some colleagues off-site as well as answering the phone. Towards the end by the time I got down to my Muller lite yogurt I had a quick look here and noticed that Womble and Marty had commented about schools choice.

Deciding to look at the Heckmondwike Grammar site again we noticed that this evening was the second of two open evenings. After a quick conflab with Karen and a re-check on the admissions policy we decided it was definitely worth a look.

What did we find? the same as Ofsted, an outstanding school. Last year about 700 children sat the entrance exam for 150 places. About two hundred of them reached the standard. From these, about 50 were in the catchment area and 25 qualified under siblings rules so there were 75 places available to out of area children, allocated to the other applicants in order of attainment. About thirty or so apply to go on the waiting list and some parents end up not taking up the places (as it isn’t their first choice) so roughly half of them end up with a place.

They look like good odds to me. If David is clever enough, he stands a good chance. If he isn’t, then the Morley Schools will servr him well. I did worry about the stress it might cause him having to sit an entrance exam, but the Head Teacher said that they are fairly relaxed affairs in small groups with soft drinks in between the two tests and they tend to be much more stressful for the Parents sitting outside in their cars worrying!

Thanks for the advice, commentarians, I’ll report more on what I saw and heard when I have contrasted it with the non-selective schools over the next couple of weeks.