As you will have read from the consultative document you will see that people are encouraged to make their own proposals for the future provision of secondary schools in Bath. That is our democratic responsibility, and that is what the group supporting the idea of an all-through school are doing. These ideas are based on a Synthesis of the emerging research from a variety of cognitive and biologic disciplines which are set out in my recent book Overschooled but Undereducated. That study is based on some fifteen years work started in conjunction with a large number of researchers from many lands including the National Academy of Sciences in the United States and the London Institute of Education.

If you go to other parts of the Initiative’s website you can find many a Review of this book written from a number of perspectives. Perhaps the most significant is that from Prof Sir Gus Nossal, Fellow of the Royal Society, former President of the World Immunology Association and of the Australian Academy of Sciences. “This remarkable work, so individualistic and peppered with fascinating reminiscences and asides, deserves the widest possible readership. It is at the same time profoundly scholarly and eminently accessible. It is nothing less than a tour de force, and it is a privilege to recommend it unreservedly.”

Nearer to home a teacher from Wiltshire wrote “This may well be the most important and significant book that young people and those involved in education will read. It could be, quite literally, life-changing and indeed life-saving! There is a deceptive simplicity in the telling of this narrative; a complex and urgent message is told in eloquent, lucid and engaging prose.”

The BANES Review made it abundantly clear that whatever schools emerge (on the two sites rather than the current three sites) would be new schools, not just a continuation of the present school. So, as far as we can understand it the concern of Larkhall has to be to save the site (which looks as if this has now been achieved) and to ensure that the people of the community will be so enthusiastic of the kind of school to replace St Mark’s that they would easily fill all the available places (rather than, as of the present, being half full). That the future well-being of a secondary presence on the St Mark’s site is entwined with the well-being of the Infant and Junior school has to be obvious to anybody familiar with the problems of funding and staffing schools.

So far from being opportunistic in pushing these ideas, we are responding in what we consider to be the most responsible way to this particular challenge. This is not new. I have been saying this in this part of the world for a very long time; at the Somerset Association of Secondary Heads in 1998, at the Somerset Association of Primary Heads’ Conference in 1995, at the BANES Primary Heads’ Conference the following year; at a Staff In-service Conference at St Mark’s School in 2006; to the BANES Head Teachers’ Conference in 2008, and at book launches across the whole country (and in the Bath area in February and March of this year). We do not trivialise the problem of ‘transition’ (the movement between schools) as this is a national as well as a local problem. I would refer you to the Report on Transition recently prepared by the Bristol University Graduate School of Education, and in a lighter vein to the article in last week’s TES supplement entitled Transition Schools; easy does it, being a staging post between primary and secondary education.

It is not that the material/research is not there, it is part of the English disease that we are better at talking about it and arguing about it, rather than working out what we could actually use from it.

At a time when the most far-reaching and perceptive questions need to be asked about what the country is offering its young people, just to limit this enquiry to secondary education restricts its potential value – especially in Larkhall where (a) the particular geography of the community makes it virtually impossible to build a conventional 11-18 school and (b) where large sectors of the community, as of past years, have not seen fit to send their children to St Mark’s. The strongest case that Larkhall can make is one which turns its limitations into unique possibilities – an all-through 5 (3+) to 16 school nestled neatly into its community, and widely supported by all its members, offers all the opportunities that some of the country’s best teachers would relish the opportunity of teaching within.

In the hope that by also putting up on this site my own personal response to the BANES Enquiry you may understand my motives better, I’m now publishing this.

If you, Colin Pantall (or anyone else) would like to meet with me to discuss this in a more open environment I would be happy to do so. Please respond to my personal email address being jabbott@rmplc.co.uk. These issues are too important to be trivialised by attributing to other people motives which really are not correct.

But in reality who supports this? Does the council support it? The Diocese? What part has 21Learn played in the local consultation process, has it had any contact with the staff at St Marks, or St Saviours? Do the staff at those schools support this idea?

St Mark’s already has close links both with St Saviours Infants/Juniors and other valley schools. These links do not need to be formalised into a through school that ignores the need for local sixth form education.

I want my daughter to be educated locally, ideally at St Marks and ideally through to the sixth form. I want her to be educated by teaching professionals (not “English and American businessmen”)who are committed to the community of which they are part and promote ideals that are equitable, fair, far-sighted and competent. I would also like those teaching professionals to be rewarded for their efforts with contracts that do not reduce their pay and increase their working hours.

There have been many examples of half-baked opportunism during this consultation, but this one is perhaps the most half-baked and perhaps the most opportunistic. No perhaps not the latter. Kim Sparling of Oldfield School wins that award.

Well, yes, maybe that is a problem. It is not, however, the issue currently at stake here. The attempt to solve something as culturally embedded as subject specific teaching in secondary schools is a matter for national consideration, not really something for the sovereign state of Larkhall to opt out of (unless of course the school being suggested would not be bothering with the national curriculum or GCSE syllabuses or A level/University preparation?) In any event, the expectation is that the LEA will both fund and run this school. Abbott may well be right in his broad diagnosis, but that does not mean this is the solution. Furthermore, I would not want to take his synthesis of the cognitive and other research on his say so, I would like to see all relevant (peer reviewed, refereed) research being given full consideration by an independent educational advisory committee. The prospect that “the community” has only to support this polemic and partisan view in order to engineer a radical overhaul of education is not just a delusion, it is positively dangerous.

In the meantime I have to say that as a parent I would have absolutely no faith in a 5 – 16 through school (as a child I would have hated the idea as much as my daughter does). Children vary socially (as do their minds) and if they are not to be locked for ever in the claustrophobic embrace of their local community there have to be junctions when they are able to leave, arrive, regroup, form new friendships. For such moments and choices to be meaningful they have to coincide with junctions experienced by children elsewhere (at eleven maybe….). The ability of any school to deliver lies not just in its philosophy but in the abilities of its staff and, crucially, its leadership. Parents who are presently dissatisfied with the only junior school that is available to them in this area, might well fear being locked into an even longer haul with no remission in sight.