civilservant

so over to Southwark - many, if not most, of the local schools are academies, so Southwark will of course have no power to influence admissions policies, but Southwark CAN publish the number of places that were allocated to non-siblings. Will they? I suspect we'll find that the number of these who got their first preference will be closer to 20% than 60%.

newboots Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Harris Boys, Harris Girls, Sydenham School, Forest Hill School - many of the hundreds of East Dulwich > children who attend these schools don't get the automatic luxury of a sibling place! Where did you get that impression? Look at their admissions citeria. ALL of these schools prioritise looked-after children, SEN children and siblings above proximity to the school. And note that reverse sibling prioritisation is also allowed - so if your younger child gets a place in a popular school, your older child will have a priority right of transfer to that school! One way forward would be to ask schools to publish the number of non-sibling places that they expect to have available each year. That would allow families to be better informed about the amount of real choice available.

I think overall you are agreeing with me,landsberger, and it would be interesting to know what your horse is in this race I too would like to know why there's an absolute need for sibling priority in secondary allocation. In families i know where the siblings are at different grammar schools, there is no problem - if it is accepted in the selective system, why not in the state system? After all secondary kids get themselves to school, they don't need mum or dad or the au pair to take them there. re your other point, none of the kids I'm talking about applied for faith schools using faith criteria but one - it was his top choice and he got in...

I looked at the survey questionnaire and decided not to respond because it didn't address any of the issues which we have faced as parents of a child looking for a secondary school this September. The real problem is the illusion of choice created by the current allocation system and actively promoted by the council and many of the schools themselves. Our daughter, no sibling priority, not looked after, no 'medical' condition, has been told she's been allocated to the school that was her least favourite choice. She's also been told that she is number 100+ on the waiting list for the top three on her list. But even so, she's lucky compared to many of her classmates who were allocated to schools that weren't even on their lists. We're lucky enough to have several good schools around ED, so this shouldn't be a problem. It becomes a problem because of the unreal expectations generated by the lack of an honest discussion about the real chances that a child will get into any particular school. "Almost everyone gets into one of their top three choices" we are told. "Put school X at number 1 and you're sure to get in", we're told. Really? How do people separate out the myth from the truth? That's what the council should be asking itself (but isn't). The only gainers in this game are the popular schools, the ones that have done the marketing and built up the reputation, deserved or not. The children (and their parents) swallow whole the myth that they've got a decent chance of getting into one of their top three choice schools and end up feeling like losers even before they've started school.

Townley Road Dentist lost their computer to burglars. They seem to have entered after smashing in one of the glass panes on their front window - this was probably on Wednesday

I don't know about hamsters' needs but guinea pigs are social animals and needs the company of other guinea pig(s) to be happy. They are lovely creatures - but get a pair as a single one is probably going to be lonely and probably irritable.

yes, happypuppy, I agree that it is a personal decision, but I don't think that all schools, doctors etc are scaremongers and I'm very happy to have been vaccinated and I had my child vaccinated too. It would be very helpful to the rest of us if you could share the info on which vaccine it was that paralysed your friend? I too know a number of people who are paralysed from the hips down, but that was because their parents didn't get them vaccinated against polio.

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!