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Back to Schooldays
Rowson's Comment
Around the Block
News in Brief
Stop the War
Mini-march
Lysistrata Day
Fringe Festival
Straight to the Point
Time to Finnish
Day in the Nick
Starting Over
Readers Letters
Herbal Cleansing
Local Music
Tripping Out
Tippling at the Tup
Property
Housing Matters
Very Testi
Art Happenings
Vietnamese Food
Entertainment
Gardening
Marathon Man
Surfing N16
Man in North Bank
Xword
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In our last issue Sue Heal commented on Stoke Newington School which unleashed a storm of protest (see Straight to the Point, page 11, and Letters, page 16). She went to tour the school and talk to head Mark Emmerson to find out how the school, now called Stoke Newington Media Arts College, is meeting its challenges.
From the outside it’s a lumpen, anonymous brick building surrounded by fences and locked gates. Pretty much like any other Inner London comprehensive. There’s a young female teacher with a video camera and a small gaggle of kids in the playground. The visitor reception is open and bright, smart school brochures litter the low tables and a phalanx of admin staff are on the phones, one rounding up absent pupils missing an important exam. Stoke Newington School Media Arts College is a big place, housing 1200 students from wildly differing backgrounds.
For almost three years
41- year-old Geordie Mark Emmerson has been guiding the tiller. ‘I’m not going
to sit here and say this school has no problems. In many ways the school reflects the
wider community in Stoke Newington. It’s a complex mix with those expected to achieve
highly and many disadvantaged kids’, he says, ‘but it’s a vibrant,
succeeding environment. The kind of school I wish I’d gone to and want for my own
kids. We’re improving delivery all the time. We currently have 570 applications for
240 places.
Emmerson strikes me immediately as a steely realist. He’s had a fairly rapid rise up the education career ladder and I suspect won’t collect his carriage clock in Stoke Newington. Sandy haired, short, although not as short as he thinks he is, suit, tie, a mite prone to management speak, there’s lots of ‘delivery outcomes’ and ‘managing down’. Yet Emmerson knows full well he straddles that old line between Stokey’s dafter middle-class parents, who see authoritarianism behind every rule, and kids with home lives so wild and chaotic they’d reduce the place to rubble if they weren’t reined in.
‘I’d known the school for some time before I came here and in my opinion it was too liberal. And I do call myself a liberal, although some of the parents might disagree with that’, he says with the hint of wry smile. ‘I’m a firm believer that children need boundaries. I immediately saw my major priority as sorting out behaviour, and that’s still true.’
The kids obviously know where they stand with him. The place is knee deep in contracts, sanctions and codes of conduct all based on mutual respect. An anti-bullying policy has just been introduced. GCSE grades are undoubtedly on the up and half-a-dozen of the leavers will eventually end up at Cambridge. There is absolutely no doubt that this is a vastly improved school.
Art exhibitions, touring theatre companies, dance evenings, field trips, acres of after school clubs, young writers’ workshops, cabaret nights - the place is a dizzying round of events, most with a heavy media slant. But why Media Arts College ? Why not, oh I don’t know ... just ... School ?
Emmerson begins to wax exceeding lyrical on this one. ‘Children who might be inclined to switch off from learning can be stimulated via the use of media arts. It’s an innovative means of making curriculum subjects more relevant to them. For instance you could teach about the planets by standing at the front of the class and talking at them about the universe. Or you can involve them in creating an animated website’, says Emmerson.
The school has video-editing suites, a sound-recording suite, a theatre/TV studio seating 220, a drama studio and digital cameras galore, although all looked a little careworn. There is a rather gloomy, dark air about much of the place. I told Emmerson that, out of his £5 million budget, a few pots of paint wouldn’t go amiss. ‘Well 80 per cent of that budget goes on staff salaries. And we’ve been re-equipping, for example the science labs. This school is a work in progress.’
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