3.7.10 UPDATE: A School that Fits
A new brochure has been published and distributed titled “A School that Fits.” It can be downloaded here.
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The Initiative is publishing a community newsletter to galvanise debate amongst the people of Larkhall, Bath, as their secondary school (St. Mark’s) faces closure. You can download the paper here by clicking on the image below Please feel free to leave comments.
BaNES has organised a formal meeting to discuss their proposals at St Mark’s at 7pm on the 12th May. We will hold a public meeting to set out our alternative proposal at the New Oriel Hall on Saturday the 22nd May, and will have circulated this document to as many homes as possible before that date.
Design by Chesapeake, illustrations by Rob Hunter
UPDATE: 18th May, 2010
Considerable interest has been expressed in Swedish and Finnish education. We append here documents from our files here in the office which you may find of interest (Download as a zipped folder):
Education in Sweden and Finland ~ 21learn.org
A number of people in Larkhall have asked for information about how this case is being presented in British Columbia, a high-ranking Authority in any case, but determined to move much further forward. It is a place that Larkhall could be linked with in the future. For an explanation, you can download a document we put together for British Columbia titled Schools in the Future:
I have just received this through the letter box and I am both relieved and excited. Since hearing John Abbott and reading his book, I have been thinking over what to do when my children reach secondary school age. I have started looking into alternatives, from home education to setting up a community school, to something in between – all on my lonesome.
To suddenly discover that a group in Larkhall has also been thinking about this and are far, far ahead of me, is just wonderful. I look forward to the meeting on 22nd May – in the meantime I just want to say thank you for alerting me to it and I hope you have a strong, unified response from the community. Oh, and if there is anything I can do to help please let me know.
As one of the oldies who helped create and still run the St Marks School pupils ‘Gardening Club’ I do admit to having a vested interest in saving Larkhalls Secondary School. Many of us retiree’s have worked very hard and spent many hundreds of pounds of our own money to provide this important community facility, with the reward being the enthusiastic response from both the teachers and students.
The school is no less important to our community than the church, post office, or doctors and dentists surgeries. It is certainly far more important than say a Bath Spa, park & rides, and a £60 million traffic scheme. It represents our future. Closing St Marks will inevitably create far more traffic congestion as parents drive their children to a rumoured new site on Lansdown.
In the early 1970′s Bath Council decreed it necessary to demolish a perfectly sound terrace of twenty nine artisan cottages, Worcester Buildings, to enlarge the playing fields of St Marks. Over the past 36 years this facility has yet to be used. It would seem to me we are now about to suffer from the same lack of bureaucratic joined up thinking.
This nonsense plan must be fought and overturned, and I and my partner Val Skinner offer whatever help we can to ensure this ludicrous proposal be condemned to a compost bin.
Observation by John Abbott (14th May 2010)
The meeting at St Mark’s was very well attended, and there was ample proof that there really is a strong, latent support for maintaining a secondary presence on the St Mark’s site. What remains obvious (at least to me) is that the very strong loyalty of many of the current parents for the kind of school which St Mark’s has become – a small 11-16 school of 300 pupils and falling – will never be enough to justify keeping St Mark’s going without very many more parents opting to send their children there in the foreseeable future.
I have every sympathy with the problems created by what many of us see as a negative history and know that this is incredibly difficult to change without a line being drawn in the sand, and a new start being made.
What is difficult is helping a very large number of the public to understand exactly what an All-Through School would be all about, and showing them that the benefits that would steadily accrue would more than compensate for a lengthy period of adjustment as the infants, juniors and the present 11-16 St Mark’s come together. That there could now be a special arrangement to provide for children from such a Larkhall school at the age of 16 for their Sixth Form study at St Gregory’s is a great benefit.
I did think that Tony Parker reiterated that the Authority really would be interested in receiving proposals alternative to what might be seen as their present plan.
It will be our job at the meeting in the New Oriel Hall at 7:30 on Saturday 22nd to explain this most carefully.
Should people like Caroline and Dave want copies of the poster to put up, they can be collected from the 21st Century Learning Initiative office at 15 Argyle Street between 9am and 5pm, Monday to Friday.
I attended the meeting and thought the positive attitude of parents who do have children at St Marks (if not those who don’t have children at St Marks) was quite inspirational.
I also think that changing St Marks from 11-16 to 11-18 will help address the lack of numbers at the school as will the ending of a long period of uncertainty. I think the large attendance of parents with children at St Saviours Juniors and Infants, St Stephens and Swainswick Schools supported this. The presence of the heads of these schools at the meeting and the work they have put into making real links, cooperation and mutual support between the valley schools and St Marks also supports the idea that numbers will rise once there is a commitment from the council to St Marks, especially if it is as strong as the commitment that has been shown by the head and staff of St Marks.
Your pamphlet was quite interesting but the insistence on the school being only for 11-16 year olds with college and distance learning as the 16-18 year old option did not strike me as addressing the needs of local children, equality and diversity, the community or the environment in quite the same way.