SOS - Save Our Schools!

Following up from our previous article on Independent - Letters: We Need Small Schools in our Towns and Cities, Wendy has sent in a letter and had it published on their website and in the Education & Careers section of today’s The Independent (3rd April).

Threat Remains

Mervyn Benford (Letters, EDUCATION & CAREERS, 27 March) highlights the countrywide crisis facing small schools. To update the Isle of Wight story, the council voted on 19 March to close its 16 middle schools, reorganise to a two-tier system, and to close “fewer” primary schools than originally threatened.

But as at least 25 of the island’s 46 primaries were on the initial hit list, “fewer” could still mean a large number. We won’t know the final tally until the summer.

The Isle of Wight council is driving through this reorganisation with no evidence that it will improve standards; and many successful schools remain threatened. National government has given councils the power to make local decisions about school organisation, and argues that councils are democratically accountable for those decisions when they come up for election. The next local elections on the Isle of Wight are in 2009, but by then our Tory council (which won by a landslide last time on a promise of retaining the three-tier system and protecting rural schools) will have begun a very expensive series of changes.

Wendy Varley, Newport, Isle of Wight

Mervyn Benford highlights the importance of the Isle of Wight’s small schools as an antidote to the “toxic childhood”. These same small schools are often far more conducive to children making connections with their local natural and built environment.

To promote this, we are calling on the Government to put the environment at the heart of the national curriculum by introducing environmental education as a cross-curricular theme; and by raising awareness of environmental education as a vital dimension of the Sustainable Schools strategy. Readers are invited to sign the petition at: http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/env-ed/

Henricus Peters, Executive board, National Association for Environmental Education

Send letters to: The Editor, Education, ‘The Independent’, Independent House, 191 Marsh Wall, London E14 9RS (with a daytime phone number); fax to: 020-7005 2143; email to: education@independent.co.uk; letters may be edited for length and clarity

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