civilservant

DulwichBorn&Bred Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Just to put you out of your misery On the 23rd > January 2015, Chris Wormald, the permanent > secretary for the department of education visited > Heber Primary School. he's only a civil servant for heaven's sake! they go home on the bus or tube like ordinary people! he might have been driven to Heber in a car if he was on an official visit, but he wouldn't have had a police escort. That sort of thing is reserved for royals. Like Prince Andrew. Or prisoners. Although the latter are generally in some sort of van.

another agreement re garden chemicals a couple of years ago, we decided to stop using any chemicals in the garden (except for a bit of glyphosate to see off some Japanese knotweed) although we used to have a real slug/snail problem. we've been seeing lots more thrushes, blackbirds, bluetits, sparrows and robins in our garden since, and interestingly the slug/snail population has been lower than when we used pellets to control them - although we've admittedly grown savvier in our planting as well, and stopped planting stuff which snails might enjoy munching on the real annoyance is seeing the bloody local cats that come and prowl around and maraud up and down our garden and scare off the birds - it's not as if they NEED to eat them to survive.

apparently not according to Dermot it's someone called Ronnie Woods

my niece went to Battersea with a friend who was looking to rehome a dog they came away upset because so many of the dogs were clearly begging to be taken home Mustard's suggestion is a good one, or perhaps you could check out https://www.borrowmydoggy.com/

I saw there was a response to this some days ago - but did admin pull it? Is animal welfare less important than giving people a place to vent bcause they didn't get a seat on the bus? ETA the dog will need help, admin, because as fm, fg666 and others have pointed out, the fireworks season - halloween, 5 nov and diwali - are all upon us now

aren't they based in the mews on North X Road behind Pretty's? good on them, an ED success story like Hope and Greenwood and Lush Designs

Just to say that Renata was very helpful to friends of mine about a recent application from a developer that would have caused severe loss of amenity to its neighbours. Her advice and help were crucial to getting it scaled down to be more in keeping with the immediate local area.

I never suggested the solution would be an extra two forms per ward - a bit disingenuous to presume that, don't you think? and of course funding follows the child - the onus is on the council to get its forecast right to minimise the pain to individual schools. I also should have mentioned that the figures i quoted above were for secondary places, which should be easier to forecast than primary school places in true geek fashion, i look forward to seeing more details of how these forecasts are arrived at.

thanks for the link, Loz but I see that "The Government does not intend that genuine hospitality or similar business expenditure that is reasonable and proportionate be caught by the Act, so you can continue to provide bona fide hospitality, promotional or other business expenditure. In any case where it was thought the hospitality was really a cover for bribing someone, the authorities would look at such things as the level of hospitality offered, the way in which it was provided and the level of influence the person receiving it had on the business decision in question. But, as a general proposition, hospitality or promotional expenditure which is proportionate and reasonable given the sort of business you do is very unlikely to engage the Act. So you can continue to provide tickets to sporting events, take clients to dinner, offer gifts to clients as a reflection of your good relations, or pay for reasonable travel expenses in order to demonstrate your goods or services to clients if that is reasonable and proportionate for your business" I expect that all such stuff would have to be declared - does anyone know where Southwark Council's register is?

... altho i could be crediting Southwark with more sense and forward thinking than it has displayed in recent years

it is mentioned somewhere in the document that the figures come from a GLA demographic model. But no info available about the accuracy of the projections. In the whole document, only a single point of comparison is possible - the 2013 forecast of 2444 places (table 3) versus actual demand (in table 4) for 2500 places. so the model underpredicted demand by nearly 2 forms' worth of children. the reason there wasn't a crisis in 2013 was because 2636 places were actually available. No comparison is available for previous years or for 2014. it looks like the apparent over-supply of primary school places in ED is intended to manage GLA under-estimation of the true demand for school places.

any update on this?

Jigsaw have opened in the Village where is considerably less footfall than on LL. the current LL women's clothing offer - White Stuff, charity shops, Oliver Bonas, a couple of indies - isn't enough to meet the needs of all the demographic, so CK should do quite well.

when talking about income, could you clarify, please - do you mean median income or mean income, net or gross, household or personal? but what most of us are agreeing on is that even the top 10% of earners would find it difficult to "put their children through privates". I think that puts the whole notion of private schooling in context - unless of course the poor child (pun intended) is in receipt of one of these mythical bursaries, which will entitle it to rub along with the other ... 5%? 2.5%? 1%?

I like penguin68's point about relative returns on investment overall, we have good primary schools in Dulwich, but that's because there is little real private-sector competition for them and most people send their kids there. The problem arises when people opt out of the state secondary schools, so that too many of the bright kids, the better-off kids and the kids with the kind of pushy parents who keep schools on their toes are removed from the catchment. Southwark has allowed this situation to develop unchecked, as one can see just by looking at the quality of the secondary offer in Lewisham compared to that in Southwark. Also, there's been a lot of talk on this thread about how the private Dulwich schools subsidise the rest of the community, but all reports seem to be of the 'I heard that such and such a kid had a x% scholarship'. Until someone fesses up to direct experience of charity for their kid from Alleyns/Dulwich College/JAGS, I'll maintain my extreme scepticism on this subject.

edhistory, I think Londonmix was talking about Heber. interesting to see so much ignorance about the problems faced by schools like Heber - which were also built to educate the children of the poor, but haven't had the benefit of the kind of benign philanthrophy that funded the charitable endowments that Alleyn's can call on. I am sure that Edward Alleyn would be spinning in his grave if he could see the way that his original intentions have evolved. Anyway, if as Keane says, Heber have been asking in vain to share Alleyn's facilities, that is a real shame and should be more widely known. I would certainly back a campaign for more and better sharing.

The problem is that whatever system we adopt, there will be winners and losers. Because bright kids do best in the company of other bright kids, but if you put bright kids in a mixed-ability class, their performance suffers while that of the not-so-bright kids improves. A sort of regression to the mean effect. The same with mixed-sex classes - girls on their own do better than boys on their own. Mix them up and boys' performance improves while girls' goes down... So what to do? send your daughter to a girls' school and your son to a mixed school?

lazy writing. lazy analysis. and in the Indy, did you say? Otta Wrote: > > The survey of 602 teachers in primary schools and 561 teachers in secondary schools found that > pupils as old as 15 were not toilet trained, despite having no medical conditions or developmental issues. > So all you can really say was that the oldest kid who wasn't toilet trained was 15. We aren't told if there was more than one nappy wearer of that age > > Nine per cent - almost one in 10 head teachers and > senior staff - said that a child aged between five > and seven had come to school wearing a nappy in > the past year. > So this could have been a single kid per school per year in 9% of the sampled schools? > > The figure was five per cent for classroom teachers. > what rahrahrah said! > If the figure is representative of schools across England, it could mean that up to 1,600 of the > 16,000 primary schools in the country have at least one pupil over the age of five still wearing > a nappy. > > so... 1,600 5-7 year olds still in nappies, out of around 2 million 5-7 year-olds in England that's hardly an epidemic!

I like Dirty Dancing and Jackie Brown. The Piano on the other hand was "utter pewk". And I can't stand Woody Allen.

going back to the voting rights of Scottish MPS in Westminster (west Lothian question), the issue becomes a lot simpler and even a non-issue. one consequence of Scotland leaving the UK would be that the 59 Scottish seats at Westminster will disappear or be subsumed into the Scottish Parliament. Its only a question of when that happens

numbers Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > what about that hedge fund manager who dodged > paying fares for about 5 years. he had a good > innings. > http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/britains-worst-fare-dodger-revealed-3958165

actually, I've come to appreciate slugs and snails. Because they eat the fox poo, I don't have to clear it out of the garden! They eat weeds and plant cuttings too, so I don't have to work hard to bag garden waste up and then hope that the council takes it away. I've found that if they've got a decent supply of decaying vegetation, they'll generally leave live plants alone.

LondonMix Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > I was reading an article that made an interesting > point that has been glossed over in all of this. This is the 'West Lothian question' - first posed by the late lamented Tam Dalyell in 1977 The antique table story, although it's a rubbish parable, does make a valid point - why can't England (and Wales) also have a say in whether Scotland stays or goes. But frankly I'm finding it difficult to get excited about it all

from my own experience at age 10, I know that the best way to get your child to read a book is to tell them not to! also from my own experience, I know that if one's not old enough to 'get' it, then one won't 'get' it (having read Lady Chatterley's Lover at a very unsuitable age and then finding a very different book when I returned to it some years later...) One of my problems with Twilight is the passive female role-models, but I have to confess that I haven't read them properly because I find them so impossibly crap. The Hunger Games on the other hand offers girls a template for a positive self-image, besides lessons about friendship, trust, redemption and other good stuff. The violence is designed to reel them in and keeps them wanting more!

see this thread as well http://www.eastdulwichforum.co.uk/forum/read.php?29,1002932,1004168#msg-1004168