Pic: Evmaiden
Figures released to EastLondonLines today show that Hackney’s first free school is likely to be located in an area of the borough that already has the highest number of existing school places.
The steering committee of the Hackney New School has announced the name of their chosen head teacher, Lesley Falconer. They have yet to confirm a location but they have reported that they are looking at two buildings near London Fields in Dalston, near where the school’s founder, Andreas Weseman, lives.
According to figures supplied by the Hackney Learning Trust, south Hackney and the border with the City is the area of Hackney with the lowest number of children failing to get into a chosen school last year. Whereas in the north and west of the borough far more children were turned away from their chosen schools.
Handy for Shoreditch, Dalston and Hoxton the ‘E8’ district had 8 parents living there last year who did not get their secondary school children into any of the schools on their preference list. This is compared to 35 who missed out in the Springfield park area and 29 in the Victoria Park area, suggesting that these areas are the most pressured for school places.
When asked if she thought the new free school was being put in the right area, Katie Hanson a councillor for the Victoria ward said: “Well no, that’s what parents are telling me. The feeling is that it won’t be in a place where schools are actually really needed. Free schools are outside local authority control, if they were being looked at by the LEA we could plan the provision, we would look borough-wide.”
She added: “Parents are also worried that the process of getting students in to the school will be selective.”
The school will be run by a steering committee including a former investment banker, a professional musician and a management consultant. The school will specialise in music, and 10 per cent of intake will be based on pupil’s musical ability. Classes will be no bigger than 25 but Latin and Greek, which were to be offered, seem to have been dropped from the curriculum.
The school’s committee and aims are reflective of a demographic change and a new education focus in the south Hackney area.
Meg Hillier, MP for Hackney South and Shoreditch has asked the department of Education about the school’s budget: ‘’I am concerned about the cost of the school, and we need to know because it is being paid for by tax payers.”
Last year Mark Lushington, from the National Union of Teachers told local blog loving Dalston: “It is a free school for the Hackney middle class. It’s Hogwarts by any other means, a Michael Gove wet dream.”
Andreas Weseman, said, in an interview with EastLondonLines last year: “We want to create an outstanding school in a deprived area.”
The Hackney New School is one of three free schools that have been given the green light by the department of education this year. A STEM academy is to be developed in the ‘Silicon Roundabout’ area of Shoreditch (also in the south of the borough), and the third to open in 2013 will be The Olive, which will be a Muslim Faith school.
The STEM school will focus on technical education and will rival the University Technical College, a 14-19 university pathway school that opened its doors this September and is located close by on the border of Hackney and the City.
By Helen Lock
This really is quite sloppy journalism.
Victoria is no more than 1KM away from Dalston. The article makes Hackney seem like some vast impassable wilderness. Which clearly it is not, with a state of the art train service and regular busses. God forbid, some students may even walk for ten minutes to get there.
If you take a look on the Learning Trust website, at the location of pupil’s houses, relative to their school, you will see that often pupils travel from across the borough to attend a school and also parents often chose to go outside of the borough, as they feel that the education provision they require will be better catered for. We would all like a great school on our doorstep but Hackney is one of the most densely built up areas in London and I imagine finding a site, is no easy task.
The borough as a whole does not have sufficient school places for the number of children contained within it. When the writer mentions the lowest number of children managing to get into their chosen school, this is misleading, as parents have to make six choices, in order of preference. I would have thought that any parent that does not get one of their first 2/3 choices, will be mighty upset. Quite apart from this, there are only 12 secondary schools in the entirety of Hackney and roughly 14 boroughs. Thus, it is inevitable that some children will have to travel out of their notional ward boundary, to attend school.
Hackney New School’s website advertises that 700 parents have signed up for the school. This seems to contradict what Councillor Hanson has to say. The website also stipulates in the FAQ’s. “The school will not be selective.” Councillor Hudson might be well advised to do some research before commenting to journalists.
The committee also has an architect and a deputy head on it. All perfectly accessible from the school’s website. Maybe the writer of this article could comment on why they think these people are “hipsters” whatever that might be…..
It is also worth noting that Hackney Council had the write to provide education provision taken away from them ten years ago, because they were by far the lowest performing council in the country. In the proceeding ten years, a private company called the Learning Trust, tendered for and won the right to manage the education provision, for the borough. This contract has come to an end recently but many of the schools in the borough are now academies and are answerable to central government, not the local council. (In just the same way as a free school is) Presumably this was insisted upon by the previous Labour government, to prevent the education provision in the borough being driven back into the 17th century.
We certainly don’t agree that this is ‘sloppy’. It is clear that there is a shortage of school places in the North of the borough. This means families are less likely to find themselves in the catchment area of a popular school. This school is unlikely to improve that situation for them. If there is to be a new school it should be where most children need it.
Victoria is in the south of the borough!
So are you prepared to publish my comments, or are you continuing with your “sloppy journalism” in order to facilitate a completely inaccurate story. Clearly Victoria is in the south of the borough.
Yes, the figures show that areas with the highest number of parents whose children did not get in to ‘any on their preference list’ is in the north and west of the borough as stated in the article. For clarification, this means all the schools they listed as preferences.
The distance for many is longer than a 10 minute walk. But regardless I think the point is that the distance between the existing technical academy, UTC and two of the new free schools proposed, is very short. As in, there are lots of new schools springing up in one small area. Perhaps this is because there are no appropriate buildings elsewhere, but this does not change the fact that at least one of these new schools is more needed in other parts of Hackney.
I think you mean south, not west of the borough. Victoria is definitely in the south of the borough.
UTC stands for university technical college. They are not secondary schools and only take students from age 14 (maybe a little older), when a parent has opted their child out of an existing secondary school.
Shall we spell it out very clearly Andrew. The places where the most children failed to get school places were in the Victoria Park area and the Springfield Park area. If you already have 700 interested parents it is likely that you will end up with a minute catchment area – just like Mossbourne. That means people who have no neighbourhood school will be sitting on waiting lists for schools that are not close by – while others will be rather better served. That is the point we are making. Do you understand it now?