Showing posts with label school. Show all posts
Showing posts with label school. Show all posts

Sunday 29 December 2019

The pedagogical industrial complex


In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.    Friedrich Nietzsche

That light blue K (the Special K?) is a common sight in these parts as pupils (let us use the proper term, pupils are forced to go to school to learn, students go to university or college to study, in theory) seem to be obliged to wear a uniform with a distinctive if somewhat dull K-badge upon it. Freddy Nietzsche's comment about being mediocre applies to Kelvin Hall school as it is rated  "average" in the Government's school performance results.

Kelvin Hall takes the young impressionable souls from the age of 11 and spits them out at the age of 16. At that point you might think a person would be free to go do what they like: eleven years of state education and you'd be set up for whatever the world could throw at you. Well you might think that and I couldn't comment but in England you'd be breaking the law. For in England's green and pleasant you have to (now let me quote this right for I find it a bit unbelievable) "do one of the following until you’re 18:
  • stay in full-time education, for example at a college
  • start an apprenticeship or traineeship
  • spend 20 hours or more a week working or volunteering, while in part-time education or training"
Note if you live in Wales, Scotland or beautiful Northern Ireland you can go run in the fields or whatever at 16 but in England you must not, ever be a NEETS (that's Not in Education, Employment, or Training, in case you were wondering).  

So then you might, at 16, and I think you'd be wise so to do, you might choose to go to Wyke 6th form college which is conveniently next door to alma mater to study for your A levels or your BTechs or whatever collection of letters they are using these days. Wyke college, from what I gather is a bright spot of learning (I guess you've got to want to be there and so want to study) and boasts really good exam results. I won't be  a  grudge and say that exams are easier these days, I passed mine forty five or more years ago and things change and there were fewer, far fewer staying on after 16 back then and hardly anybody went on to University despite full grants and free tuition. I'm just going to put it down to having smaller kitchens, I guess.

...

In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards. Mark Twain

Until a few years ago schools in Hull, as in most places, were run by the local authority. Hull City Council, in my own personal experience, is not fit to pick up the litter off the streets let alone be entrusted with the education of its young people. Hull's education record as perennially bottom-of-the-league was scandalous. Recently most schools have become "academies", that is not-for-profit charities funded directly by central government and independent of the local authority. This supposedly gives freedom of curriculum and allows for more tailored practices and hopefully an improvement in education standards (well they couldn't get any worse).


Thursday 2 March 2017

The Primary School


This is just the local primary school down the road designed by someone who thought (rightly) that a box topped by a pyramid makes for a nice shape. However, nice buildings do not a successful school make and this place is currently under special measures for "failing to give its pupils an acceptable standard of education". "Must try harder" I suppose is the note on this school's report card.

Wednesday 4 May 2016

Going to the inevitable


If you have a slightly better memory than me you may faintly recall a post about the old Blundell Street school and its predicament, (here it is). It's had its share of vandalism over the years. The Council is at loggerheads with the owner over a new development, there had been talk of compulsory purchase and well, it's all so sadly familiar. So it was really no great surprise to wake up on Sunday morning to news that this place had been ravaged by a huge fire, no surprise at all; what took them so long?. 



There's some neat drone footage from Octovision Media.:

Blundell School Fire 30/4/16 from Octovision Media on Vimeo.

Monday 17 November 2014

Gross Value

Inglemire Lane, Hull

Some time ago I posted an odd picture of trees in nets and mentioned that this was due to impending development of the site. Here you can see the fruits of all that. It's a school in case you were wondering. No sorry scrub that, this is no mere school, this is a Catholic international sports college, with "world class thinking" and "world class achieving"; so there. Hmm, no matter, the trees are gone along with the fashion of calling a spade a spade.