Lambeth Secretary for Campaigns, Sara Tomlinson joins the
leafletting outside the school
Kings
Avenue
The birth of this new school has been uneasy. It is
not clear as to whether the new buildings will both be ready for use on
September 9th 2002. There is a problem of finance and timing for the old
Clapham Park building being available for Early Years. Will the nursery and
reception classes have to wait to start beyond September 9th?
We warned the LEA that their plans would destabilise
the school community. The new school is an amalgamation of Haselrigge and Kings
Acre - schools with a different catchment area. Whether they allowed for this
or not, the effect has been for the new school to be undersubscribed, hopefully
temporarily, because of parents moving their children not to travel the extra
distance.
Without checking year on year, the school found
itself £270,000 in deficit. Not a small sum for a school this size. It
wiould appear that panick set in, so instead of aiming to balance the books
over more than one year, redundancies were sought rapidly primarily among the
support staff. Not that we favour redundancies, but the usual practice is for
there to be a general trawl for volunteers, which hasn't happened. UNISON and
GMB quite rightly are locked in an industrial dispute. We fully support our
colleagues and the campaign they will take to the council.
All this shows we have to report sadly, is that the
changes to primary schools since the late 90s, is a shambles in public
relations by the LEA and the council. Also, the way that employees have been
treated is a disgrace.
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Parents furious at redundancies
As we have already commented over a four year period, the
primary re-organisation has bene ill thought out. Tragically, it is not Heather
du Quensay, former Education Director who first sold the plan to the local
community, but the children, teachers, parents and at present the support stff
who suffer.
FURIOUS parents protested after discovering teaching
assistants at Kings Avenue Primary School will lose their jobs .Lambeth Unison
says it could be as many as 11. It makes nonsense of the governenment plan to
increase the number of support staff into schools. Kings Avenue only opened in
September after Kings Acre, Haselrigge and Clapham Park Special School were all
merged.
Sara Tomlinson, co- secretary of Lambeth Teachers'
Associationa said: "The support staff should not be the ones to take the full
brunt of this disaster."
Kings Avenue chair of governors Dave Clark said the school
was given no extra cash to cope with the move and blamed the LEA's incompetence
and lack of project management which delayed the move to the new site by eight
months.
Lambeth's executive member for education, Councillor Anthony
Bottrall, said: "They were kept in an extremely unsuitable building for months
on end. "They were given a raw deal but it is the responsibility of the
school's governing body to manage its budget.".
In fairness to Councillor Bottrell, he had been critical of
the re-organisation plan from an early stage, but it has to be said that a
system that leaves more than one school in debt by £200,00 while other
schools have a surplus of over £400,000 says a great deal about how money
is poorly distributed so that a school that is established as an inclusion
school - it has a high percentage of children with special needs - cannot
function in order to assist the goal of providing equal opportunities.
Lambeth NUT will pursue all means of possible funding to
ensure that the lEA does meet its responsibilities and doesn't merely pretend
that its not their problem. |
