Hydration Allowed: There’s Posh For You

This story appals me to such an extent I’m pressed to wonder if there’s any way of challenging the denial of unstructured playtime under the UK’s Human Rights legislation. Probably not (I’m no lawyer). But the deprivation seems to me to be that basic.

Oh, and right now it looks like a multi-storey car park.

The local parents were not consulted as to whether they wanted their children to be sent to a playground-less school. Perhaps even more horrifyingly, they have no democratic way of changing this decision, (short of hoping that the Labour Government lose the election and the Tories change this particular policy) since the school is run by a private consortium answerable only to central government- not to the locally elected council.

On one level it’s just a crazy story about kids losing their childhood to a group of control freaks. It is also an excellent illustration of why all of us should be worried about the erosion of democratic government in the UK: mad policies like this are easier to implement and harder to reverse if there are no local electorates to answer to.

Big shame. It’s another reason why parents need to control the school, things like charter schools are a step away from that.

My kids’ school system has its kids run a timed mile twice a year. My 6-yr-old did it today in 15 minutes (obviously a run-walk-run-walk-run-walk-run time), but an improvement over his first time of 16 minutes. I’m certain the kids, parents, and teachers would all revolt if the playground or athletic fields were removed.

I don’t know about getting out of the business of schooling, but anybody who writes “hydrate during the learning experience” should not be in the business of teaching composition to the little darlings.

Well, this doesn’t sound like a school I’d want to send my kids to, but it’s not the case that there’ll be no opportunity for exercise or to play football:

“The academy’s timetable will be tightly structured and exercise for pupils will take place in PE classes and organised games on adjacent playing fields. ”

It’s just that there won’t be an opportunity during lunch to go play football without supervision. And there’s nothing, of course, to prevent after-school pick-up football, is there? That’s what my son has been doing for years (although the after-school pickup football is usually the American variety).

The responses so far make me want to play devil’s advocate. Are we all *really* that keen on unorganized play by large groups of kids? Haven’t we all read enough boarding school novels/memoirs, and don’t they pretty much all contain utterly predictable sadism when students are outside adult supervision? Is surviving this kind of thing an essential lesson in growing up? And does unsupervised play have to take place during school lunches?

Or is it just that this is one of Blair’s public-private partnerships and, therefore, must be evil?

When I posted on this I got a comment from D2 of this parish.

“2,200 pupils is in no way unmanageable. It’s not even uncommon in rural areas. I think there were more like 2,500 pupils in my school.”

Explains something but not sure what.

There are more than 2,000 at my daughter’s comprehensive and it mostly works OK.

The hugeness of American public schools has been a pet peeve of mine ever since my son first became an inmate in one some years ago.

This varies a lot depending on the U.S. state. Some urban districts have very large high-schools (as many as 3-5,000). But for schools containing lower grades, 2000 would be very odd (it wouldn’t surprise me if there were no elementary or middle schools in the entire country that large).

In Michigan, the largest high school in the state is here in Ann Arbor (2900 students), but it is well over design capacity and a new high will be opening soon that will knock all the high schools in the district back below 2000. And the middle and elementary schools are much smaller (all under 1000).

In general, after decades of a trend toward consolidation and large comprehensive high-schools there has been a reverse movement toward smaller schools. See, for example:

http://www.smallschools.org/

As it happens, this is one of the causes supported by the Bill Gates foundation:

http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/19_04/gate194.shtml

The responses so far make me want to play devil’s advocate. Are we all really that keen on unorganized play by large groups of kids?

Speaking as a thoroughly unathletic, nerdy type: yes.

I attended a boys-only Catholic school from grades 4 through 8. Daily recess consisted of a semi-organized kickball game that you could participate in, or not, as you saw fit. For those of us who weren’t drawn to sports, we could hang out and yak about Tolkien or whatever.

Gym class (PE), on the other hand, was a horror. For every “boarding school novel” about sadistic kids out there, slocum, I could introduce you to someone who remembers gym class as a singularly humiliating theatre of cruelty.

It was only in my mid-20s that I discovered the pleasures of regular physical activity. The schools I attended couldn’t have done a better job of turning me off to the very notion of “exercise” if they’d consciously set out to do so.

“I don’t know about getting out of the business of schooling, but anybody who writes “hydrate during the learning experience” should not be in the business of teaching composition to the little darlings.”

Posted by kharris

They drink a 20-oz. bottle of water in each class. Then they do sprints to the bathroom between each and every class. That’ll give them plenty of exercise, and keep them tired out.

yes, 11-18. Thinking about it, it was actually two schools under one roof; a Welsh-language one with about 90 pupils/year and an English-language one with about 120 pupils/year

See, I’m some kind of weird employee, perhaps because I don’t have a professional degree. (I do speak two languages and garble a third, though) If I get my head well down and work and work and work all day with no breaks, I go home and snap at people and collapse uselessly, or maybe go into a frenzy of martyred housework. If, on the other hand, I lollygag about a bit at work, maybe take a little walk at lunch, well, I get a lot more done and manage to stay awake though the evening. It’s difficult for me to understand how kids are supposed to benefit from an essentially break-less day.

Of course, what will really happen is that they will appear to be paying attention while learning nothing.

slocum—can you source the Michigan info? I’m surprised by it (not doubting you, just eager to get the details).

Here you can find a description of Ann Arbor Pioneer as the largest school in the state at 2900:

http://www.answers.com/topic/pioneer-high-school

I can’t find a single table of the largest high schools in the state, but the other Ann Arbor high school (Huron) is something like the 9th largest at 2200 students, so that gives you an idea. These schools are all 9-12th grades, so you can also get a sense of the graduating class sizes.

That said, there is one district in the state that has located all three of its high schools on one campus, and students are allowed to take classes in the other buildings, so in some respects it’s really one huge school:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plymouth-Canton_Educational_Park

But that’s one of a kind.

adromeda: But you can have play that is thoroughly supervised, in the sense that adults are present and enforcing certain standards of behavior, but unorganized, in the sense that the kids are deciding what games to play and what their rules are and so forth.

The problem here is that supervising kids during lunch hour is not in the union contract, so lunch hour recess is supervised by…well…whoever they can get to come by for $11/hr at lunch time (or parent volunteers when they’re desperate). So the adult-student ratio is not what it is when students are in class, and the lunch supervisors don’t always show up for work, and they don’t know the students well, and the grounds are big enough that students can find places where they can’t be observed too closely, and …

Could lunch recess be made a priority where teachers were paid to stay and supervise (but not organize) their charges? Sure — but there are a lot of competing priorities.

Kvetch: Gym class (PE), on the other hand, was a horror. For every “boarding school novel” about sadistic kids out there, slocum, I could introduce you to someone who remembers gym class as a singularly humiliating theatre of cruelty.

It was only in my mid-20s that I discovered the pleasures of regular physical activity.

There’s been a reform movement there, too, to emphasize ‘lifetime sports’ (and learning about nutrition) rather than doing competitive sports in PE classes. For example:

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/s_394018.html

But the problem with that is basketball and volleyball (and tennis and soccer) are excellent lifetime sports for the athletically adept (and a hell of a lot more fun than running laps around the gym wearing a heart-rate monitor).

Education does seem doomed to a permanent state of reformation and counter-reformation.

Slocum, I found that article you linked to very encouraging.

But the problem with that is basketball and volleyball (and tennis and soccer) are excellent lifetime sports for the athletically adept (and a hell of a lot more fun than running laps around the gym wearing a heart-rate monitor).

And those kids should have the option of playing those sports, if they so choose, in an extracurricular context. I would never suggest otherwise.

But I’d be glad to see us finally abandon the notion that there’s something character-building about forcing kids into competitive sports they aren’t good at and have no interest in.

Surely getting beaten up in the playground at break is an important part of the education experience? How else are our kids to know their place in the pecking order?

It’s just that there won’t be an opportunity during lunch to go play football without supervision.

‘Just’? I’m going to throw up my hands here. Like uncle kvetch, I despised PE, but was happy to join in the inpromptu 32-a-side match that started before morning bell, ran through break and lunch, and finished after final bell.

And for the record, my secondary school had 1,500 pupils.

Education isn’t our forte in Middlesbrough; if it was I’d’ve worked out how to get an e-acute in “forte”.

Oh, I dunno about that. It probably helps if you’re a left-footer, though, especially now they’ve shut down St Anthony’s.

Slocum: the article you linked to sounds encouraging; I think the basic problem is being watched by your unforgiving peers while being made to perform things you aren’t good at (which introduces competition, even if you’re not doing a ‘competitive sport’- anyone who’s been in a gymnastics class knows what I’m talking about). The individual exercise thing sounds like it gets around this, but I don’t know that it does: much still depends on setup, supervision, and the qualities of the teachers involved. I could say “if a school can afford this, it can afford to find a solution to playground supervision,” but I know funding doesn’t work that way.

Dsquared: In my personal, anecdotal experience, gifted teachers were the only reason (apart from physical force) that I went to school and saw or heard anything while I was there. This bucket would have had a very small capacity without them, very likely regardless of the innate beauty and fitness of the curriculum: presentation should not be underestimated.

More generally: Children are, in fact, buckets to be filled with useful information, not candles to be lit.
This is possible, though I’d like to see your data. Also, they may not be waiting to be lit, but they can certainly be snuffed out.

“mom”
– this is the best use of scare quotes I’ve seen to date.

I share your concerns, but for some (myself included) PE wasn’t about getting along, it was about ritualised humiliation. This can be more effectively achieved with a dunk tank.
Actually, if everyone had to go through the ritual of being dunked by their peers, maybe that would form a bonding, socialising experience…

Alternatively, since we don’t operate in a society now, maybe we should take a careful look at some places where people still do, and see how they achieve it, rather than projecting our sense of loss onto our children.

This is not education it is schooling – where the school is nothing more than a factory production line & the young human beings who have to suffer their formative years in this philistine system are mere tins of peas to be processed in such a way as to produce an object of production satisfactory to the needs of the owners of production rather than as human citizens in a free society.
Most adults in paid employment have a legal right to regular breaks & there is sufficient research material available demonstrating that human performance and concentration levels deteriorates after a certain amount of time when involved in work activity. Even Frederick Taylor, of Scientific management infamy, built in regular breaks.
Yet too many seem to be quite content to subject physical & mental demands on children / young people that they would not dream of considering for adults. Even from the point of view of bottom line philistine efficiency this idea is criminally lunatic. Why not go the whole hog and install the management clone chips into people at birth?

Thanks for the post. I fill buckets ( hah) at a small school and we are quite amused (appalled really) at the notion of no unstructured playtime. Perhaps some ideas are so dumb only academic/private partnerships will believe them.

By the way, everybody, I just walked past University College London, and I could not help but notice that it had no climbing frame or hopscotch court; it was lunchtime but there was no evidence of informal 32-a-side football games going on. There is clearly some cut-off age at which forty minutes of carefree gambolling a day ceases to be essential to the educative process; I’d really rather like to see some evidence rather than assertion that this age is 18 (or rather, 16; I don’t think that it would be particularly weird to build a sixth-form college without a playground either).

“By the way, everybody, I just walked past University College London, and I could not help but notice that it had no climbing frame or hopscotch court; it was lunchtime but there was no evidence of informal 32-a-side football games going on. There is clearly some cut-off age at which forty minutes of carefree gambolling a day ceases to be essential to the educative process;”

Shock horror. Hold the front page. New research reveals that 18 year olds who ten years earlier has been heavily into Power Rangers no longer have any time for them. they’ve stopped watching Blue
Peter and, gasp, have started to become interested in the opposite sex and hanging around in the street or the shopping centre near their college chillin, listening to their I-pods, discussing football/rugby/girls/boys etc.

I believe its called growing up – where individual and group personal tastes change as human beings mature.

You might as well argue that you want to see some evidence of a cut off age in which it suddenly becomes OK for human beings to vote, have sex, buy alcohol, smoke tobacco, or stop out until two in the morning.

Just to establish the facts here the school we are talking about is not an establishment that caters in the main for the 16-18 + age group. The age group is from 11-16 whose needs and capacities are different to that older more mature human beings.

The fact that University College does not have a “playground” with a hopscotch corner and a climbing frame is about as daft an argument as anyone could come up with. The space that is the “playground” where unstructured unwinding can take place is just a means of dealing with the needs of young people at that age. University College (as have all colleges) has a similar space with a similar purpose – its just that its called something else and it has different facilities so that those who use the college can achieve the same ends.

My workplace has a similar space. Its called the welfare facility where you can go to have a break or your lunch, make a drink, read a book, chat to other colleagues about non-work related issues and generally unwind without some bloody overseer or butty master hovering over you supervising every minute of your existence.

One thing that is clear is that d2 has proved his earlier assertion that he a Stalinist when it comes to facts. Facts on their own are useless without a context. Which is why Stalinism is extinct as a social system of organisation and why d2 cannot obviously cope with the difference in context between schools and colleges or teenagers and kids just out of primary school to the extent that he puts this sorry excuse of an argument up as a serious contribution.

It’s really very depressing. I actually went to this school way back when it was just ‘Deacon’s’. It was actually a very good school (one of the best around, despite having a significant fraction of pupils who didn’t speak English as a first language at home), but it was always trying to be at the forefront of whatever the current government’s radical new policy on edukashun was that week (when I started we were just a normal Comprehensive, and we went through ‘Grant Maintained Technology College’ and ‘Beacon school’ (whatever that was) while I was there). At one point we had a Chief Executive, as well as a headmaster. The two other schools that it’s now being combined with were two of the poorest-performing in the area.

At least we don’t have the rabid fundamentalists taking over, as happened in Middlesbrough – Perkins Engines are one of the sponsors. They’ve traditionally been one of the biggest employers in the city. Hopefully this will give some of the students a leg-up into science and engineering, although I have no idea whether they’re providing any sort of scholarships in addition to the fancy (yuck) new buildings.

Dsquared says:’I’m an anarchist about political issues and a Stalinist about facts.’

Really? So which aspect of the Stalinist approach to facts is most appealing to you? The basing of policy on mythical ‘facts’ which were touted by someone who had won the support of the political leadership? Or the determined, nay murderous efforts to cover up every and any inconvenient piece of true data?

Further Dsquared bluster: ‘Obviously people are allowed to vote for whatever damn fool bloody public services model they want and even to make me pay for it out of general taxation…’

The point that I made was that the parents of the children who will attend this academy were not asked beforehand if they wanted their children to have a school without a playground, and now cannot vote for or against someone offering to give them a school with a playground. You can’t sneer at the parents in this case for having made a wrong choice because they weren’t allowed to make any choices.

Btw, could we have some kind of voluntary pact to improve the level of historical analogies here? I recommend that any damn fool who firstly introduces Hitler or Stalin into a conversation and then displays a complete ignorance of the gentlemen in question should refrain from posting for at least another week. That would considerably reduce the volume of Dsquared’s effusions, and it would silence Ophelia Benson for good.

University College (as have all colleges) has a similar space with a similar purpose – its just that its called something else and it has different facilities

I think the word you’re looking for is “pub.”

The university comparison is, I think, false partly because of the social power and autonomy of the people involved: university students are caught in webs of power, they have commitments to do work at particular times, they are dependent on the institution for approval, but they are voluntary inmates; they have the very real option of leaving, or defering their degrees (even if we are often persuaded they don’t: I’ve known people from different social classes who have done things like this), of negotiating some of the rules. The kids by and large have none of this: they don’t really understand why they’re there, they’re forced to jump through hoops they never chose and remember drivel they don’t value, when many of them want nothing more than to chat, bitch, run around and establish hierarchy.

The fact that one group chose to be there, on some level sees value in being there, strikes me as important.

Also: what Dave Hansell said about different age groups having different needs: 20 year olds seem less inclined to run and climb than 12 year olds.

The point that I made was that the parents of the children who will attend this academy were not asked beforehand if they wanted their children to have a school without a playground, and now cannot vote for or against someone offering to give them a school with a playground. You can’t sneer at the parents in this case for having made a wrong choice because they weren’t allowed to make any choices.

the view that parents are the consumers of education is a surprisingly persistent one. The consumers of education have never been given a choice in the matter, though I would be in favour of an experiment where they were allowed to try.

Richard, you’re making a category error. You’re citing relevant facts about the legal status of children and democratic control over the spending of public money. Dsquared, having been mocked for his ignorance of modern history and his tediously ‘contrarian’ advocacy of a bunch of damnfool ideas, is sticking his bottom lip out while stamping his foot. You want a discussion, he’s having a tantrum.

“I would be in favour of an experiment where they were allowed to try.”

Given the embarassingly abysmal level of argument provided perhaps a more useful experiment would be to send d2 back to school at say Year 7 level.

He could then spend the wasted time outside the classroom regaling the kids playing 32 a side football and British Bulldog with playground level speeches on how the activities they are engaging in are as a result of a false consciousness brought about by non-adherence to Stalinist facts and pointing out to them that the 18 year olds up the road at the University College don’t need a playground.

But local outrage wouldn’t work, Danno. It’s one of Tony’s superduper city academies, which answers only to DFES and the private-sector sponsor who put up a whole £2m of the £46m costs but gets 51 per cent of the governing body for it.

I wasn’t aware the planning process was meant to be the appropriate forum for the governance of education.

>>> I would be in favour of an experiment where they were allowed to try

Do you mean something like Summerhill? Or do you have something else in mind?

It’s a remarkable document in managerialist crapspeak however you cut it

It’s not? It’s just a little newsletter telling people what’s going on with the Academy project. It’s not wonderfully well written but how many newsletters are? I have to say that the “managerialism” concept rather jumped the shark for me when it was applied in the same week to a) Adam Smith’s example of the pin factory and b) the secret ballot.

ajay — but doesn’t that just prove that education wasn’t their forte?

“and they might have if they’d received a lot of objections, but they didn’t and they didn’t.”

Pope found to be Catholic shock!

Bears shit in woods sensation!

Local Councils make decisions without adequate consultation surprise!

It seems I need to revise my earlier comment. It would clearly be cruel and inhuman to subject someone who has led such a sheltered life like d2 to the jungle of the school playground.

Social Services should be contacted immediatly to obtain an emergency protection order for d2’s own physical, emotional and mental safety before he comes into contact with the real world.

Oh. And someone should nip down to the local chemists to get d2 a tube of gorm as he’s clearly lacking in it.

Local Councils make decisions without adequate consultation surprise!

Saying that this consultation process wasn’t adequate doesn’t actually make it so. You seem to be embarrassingly short on actual local opposition to this school you know.