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| . | p11 LEARNING DIFFICULTIESFreelance journalist, Melanie McFadyean, has lived in Stoke Newington for six years and her son Rory attends Grazebrook. This is a personal piece from Melanie. N16 recognises there is a wide diversity of local opinion on the controversial issue of education. We hope to start a debate on these pages. Parents, please tell us where you stand. It used to be that you’d get a group of people hanging out of an evening and the talk would be of a variety of things - a bit of rock and roll, politics, gossip, who’s doing what to who, and what with whom so to speak and then we grew up and put away childish things and had children. The first few years we talked about how tired we were and whether little so and so slept or not, the full paraphernalia of toddler malarkey. Then the children got older and went off to nursery and primary school, and still we talked of this and that until they got to about seven or eight. Then we’d sit round of an evening and without fail, if there were more than three parents in the room, the talk would turn to secondary schools, and more often than not the dilemma for those faced with the freedom of choice would surface; the choice being whether to cram your kids at vast expense and put them in for entrance exams to the direct grant and grant maintained sector where they’d get a ‘good’ academic education for free, or whether to cram them and put them through entrance exams for private fee paying schools. The latter was an option almost exclusive to the privileged bourgeoisie or those with brilliant children headed for scholarships. I always felt open minded towards those who agonised and chose to mortgage themselves to the hilt to get their kids into the private schools whilst also seeing the point of view of others who remained adamant and hard line in their condemnation. I didn’t want to be sacrificing my child’s education on the altar of my principles if faced with sending him to some of Hackney’s less appealing secondary schools. But nor did I want to send him to the kind of schools I myself was sent to (five fee paying schools, the last two of which, the secondaries, I was expelled from. But that’s another story.) I thought about it privately and dreaded the moment when the conversation was raised as it regularly was, and longed for the old days of drunken gossiping and late night sessions about love, god and war fuelled by a variety of mind enhancing substances. My partner and I could get the funds for private tutoring for our son, and we could get the funds to send him to a fee paying school if he didn’t make it into a grant maintained school. So why don’t we? Because we have a basic trust in the idea of the local community, in him going to a school he can walk to, with friends he’s known since nursery. His friends are wonderfully diverse, dark skinned, light skinned, moneyed, unmoneyed, from one parent or two parent families - reflecting London’s diversities. They get along, they look out for each other, protect one another, squabble for sure, have a laugh, fall out, fall in but above all they’re mates and they’re local and they’re probably in Stokey for the duration of their educations. They can go to secondary school together, look out for one another, go on squabbling, laugh, continue to be mates. And in the end, after the agonising, it seems more important in a number of significant ways to espouse the notion of what the welfare state really means, and to stay within its beleaguered institutions, hoping for the best and prepared to fight its corner. He can learn Latin, Greek, philosophy and cricket and three modern languages at any time in his life with a bit of effort. And of course I’d wish for him to have a fine and stimulating academic education with all the creative input a school could muster. But if he goes the private fee paying route, it’ll be an education that wouldn’t help him to rub along with the diversity of kids in London schools, and in the future the diversity of society at large. We live near the local comprehensive, Stoke Newington School, about which I have heard both good and bad - art’s good, music’s good, kids get on, it’s on the up - and bad - tales of fighting, classes without teachers, rumours of all sorts that scare the mother of a ten year old out of her wits. And when it comes to it I’ll jitter as he goes off to school without me strolling along by his side, as I do now when I leave him at the gates of Grazebrook with his packed lunch and the sense that he is safe at school and learning the basics. And of course the conversations will go on, the adjustments we make, the justifications, the fears, the defensiveness, the anxiety, the wish that everyone would just send their kids to the local schools, lobby for more public government funding and abolish those private schools. That would sort the whole thing out and then we could go back to discussing rock and roll, who’s doing what to who, all the really important stuff of life.
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