Mark Dodds

I left the house today and woman xxx, a friend from when she was a normal human being without children, was pushing one of those double buggies where one child sits in front and slightly on top of the other - you know? And I said 'Hi woman XXX' and she said 'Hi you', and reversed up with the buggy (for twas passed beyond the hedge and I could not see) and pulled a sling aside from on front of her body and said 'Look I've got another one!'. This was profoundly astonishing because I thought she'd only just had, well quite recently anyway, the second; and this was most definitely a third. 'My god HOW on earth did you do that?' I said. 'I didn't' she said. 'It wasn't me. I'm just pretending to do it'. And proceeded to push the double decker buggy up the street. Now that woman xxx is someone to admire.

@CityMum - really good explanation of what's happening about Peckham Academy. Sounds dangerously like some good solid joined up for the long term thinking is going on there. @Gubodge; thank you for that. My understanding has moved on a bit. The next question is? Does it mean more subjects for longer and less specialisation than the traditional 3 A levels?

Not at all, I'm not ultra anxious about anything zeban. That was everyone's experience at that school. It was normal. I didn't like it much, I brought it up for the opposite purpose really - to illustrate that I know something of rough experiences. I've heard horror stories about bad behaviour in schools around here and they just remind me of my own time. I don't think the school I went to provided a bad education, it was just in a really tough part of town. My father taught at MUCH harder schools than mine. The battles on the common were something to behold. Like Braveheart on mogadon.

Sorry eliza can you elucidate please? As far as I can find EBAC is a brand of dehumidifier. Clearly I failed to get a rounded education and now am on the knowledge scrap heap! Which is exactly what I'm on about. By the way - I was at primary and junior at a school in a Newcastle suburb where carrying flick knives and smoking were commonplace among 8 year olds and organised gang warfare took place at weekends on the common. The daily walk to and from school was a mental ordeal, never knowing if some band of brawling bullies (they were called hooligans then) would be waiting round a corner on the off chance some posh poof like me would be caught unawares. Most of us lived in justifiable fear from morning to night. Happy days.

Forgive me if this question is silly because simply everyone knows except me. What's happening with the East Dulwich Hospital site? And round the back of Dulwich Hamlet football ground? Any other open spaces around here?

I wish I was in Texas right now: "Thank you for your recent email. Please be advised that the Department for Education aims to respond to all correspondence received within 15 working days where a response is required. However, currently we are receiving exceptionally high volumes of correspondence and it may take longer for a reply to be issued to you. We would like to thank you for your patience during this time. Department for Education http://www.education.gov.uk/"

No problem westof. WE hoped that our eldest boy would get into Kingsdale - along with friends of his from different schools in Camberwell... I came over all emotional when we visited, I was truly impressed by it. What do people think of Katharine Birbalsingh? She's planning a new secondary school in Lambeth, I'm not sure where yet but will know tomorrow when we meet.

Thanks to those of you who are showing an interest. It will be a big task but nothing is impossible, especially when there is such obvious need. I've been in touch with Toby Young for advice, he's replied already by the way, and have emailed Michael Gove. Will set up an email address for this topic and post back with an update soon. We need a 40,000sq ft building with land adjacent. OR a similar sized plot to accommodate a new build. Any ideas?

SO. Who's going to join me in writing to Michael Gove, Harriet Harman, Tessa Jowell, the local education authorities and Toby Young about this ludicrous affair? Notes on a postcard please... PS I've had two people send me private messages suggesting they would be interested

One last night cap! Maybe you're right but then the local authority is encouraging lots of new builds - Camberwell is awash with them, I can think of over three hundred new homes just built or nearing completion - and more people to move into the area - without coughing anything up to provide better services to meet increased demand for anything. Did you respond when I asked about kids? Maybe I missed it but in the absence of knowing I'll suggest that when you have kids about to go to a school you think is not up to their needs your perspective will narrow.

My concern is about the whole - my partner and I knew ten years ago we might be in this situation. There's not enough places at all let alone good enough really good schools. And there definitely needs to be another school somewhere close for Camberwell / East Dulwich. I do say there are far more good schools now than ten years ago - Labour did achieve that - the situation IS a lot better than it was. That reminds me. Someone above assumed there would be places at Peckham Academy. To reiterate - ALL Southwark schools are FULL - Forty Three Kids Were Officially NOT Offered a Place Anywhere in Southwark. That's a lot of not offered a place. Good night.

Zeban, all services, whether commercial, charitable, private or public incur costs of production and their value HAS to be measured to see if it provides acceptable value against cost because, one way or another, all services ARE products. If education is failing people then it is a poor product and it has to be complained about. If it's not changed to meet acceptable standards of delivery it is failing everyone from kids to teachers to society. Catering is the same - if I'm serving flat warm cloudy beer and grey chewy food I will go out of business as customers will abandon my pub because we're not delivering what they want or expect. If on the other hand we're doing a range of changing bright clear hand crafted cask ales that are kept to perfection served alongside grandma's best beef and dumplings with real pork scratchings and vegetarian root vegetable crisps for them vegans they will queue round the block to get it. With education it is the same - deliver great, inspirational teaching in good surroundings and before long everyone will want to have some; make kids bored, pissed off and feeling like learning is not for them and soon a school will fall apart at the seams and become a no go zone. Services should be delivered well whatever they are whether public or private or else there is no point in providing the service in the first place. A lot of private sector stuff is produced and delivered very badly just as much as a lot of public sector stuff is. The difference is the private sector covers up its tracks better than the public and gets away with it - because it's private. There isn't a private sector service which by and large couldn't in principle be done better by different means, including public ownership, as long as the strategic vision and the ambition to provide good service and good value is held by everyone involved in the organisation and they are trained well enough to be able to deliver that. By the way - We all step in the same dog poo and unless very well off we all suffer the same stuff when it comes to getting a good education for our kids. As for Tesco woman with five kids - that's me - although I only have two kids I earn less than the minimum wage and work more hours than anyone else I know. What does that mean? I'm working class or middle class or what? Or does it mean I just earn crap money because I own a tied pub and have to work longer and harder to make up the gap in earnings? I have a great background provided by highly educated parents and I have a fairly good education and on top of that I have worked at other forms of learning all my adult life. Even so I still earn a pittance. Fundamentally though I know my kids will be OK whatever they have to go through at school but fundamentally also I do not want their schooling to be hard and grim. That's not what education should be about neither for mine or for Tesco woman's children. The main difference between us is that by and large Tesco woman will feel she has less right to state her feelings as loudly as I do whereas I believe it is my democratic and civic duty to do so. After that we're in the same boat.

I'd be prepared to home educate but, ironically as my partner is a teacher, my partner is not prepared to go that route. Part of my motivation is that I own a pub and I could get the kids working long hours for next to nothing while they learned about life from all the customers. No, seriously. You have a good point - we do pay for education and too many people get a bad deal. The situation is a lot better than it was a decade ago but it's nowhere near good enough. One thing that doesn't work for education in the UK is that it's always been a political football. I believe it should be secular and state controlled - no private or faith schools allowed. But then, to stop the protests from people who WANT to segregate their children from the masses, what should be available instead of the ridiculous patchwork of different systems we've made here MUST be an excellent education from early years to as late as the individual wants to learn, for all. Then if parents faced with a great education for their kids really want to keep their children different and special, they can move abroad or do it themselves - with regular monitoring by the state of course. On the interesting question of would I want my boy/s to go to Dulwich College (or Eton for that matter) based on the proposition of being able to afford it, the answer is 'no' definitely not - just as vehemently as 'no, definitely not' is the way we feel about the place at a faith school. Anyhow we're going to see St Thomas the Apostle next week see what giveth with the body of Christ and the blood of the Holy Ghost at Secondary level. Did I get that bit right? Isn't there some spirit in there somewhere?

Go visit Peckham Academy and look at the mix of children, percentage of boys to girls and the overall feel of the place and the demographic mix too. It's probably not as bad as my first grammar school but I wouldn't want any child of mine to go through anything like that. It's definitely getting there but talk to the head about it too and see what you think then. Maybe in two or three years.

Seem to be having an invisible post happening here. Sorry if this makes it duplicate somehow. Maybe Iv'e been banned by mod for shouting, or because I live in Camberwell. Msgee, I have to say Kingsdale became an option not because perception changed but due to it changing, I assume through the focus and attention of a visionary leader in the head teacher who, I believe, was a math teacher there when it was a zoo. It really has changed beyond recognition. A decade ago it was a dangerous place, children were being held up at knife point by their classmates and nothing was being done about it by senior management. Now, immediately upon entering, it is the most impressive high school I've ever visited. It oozes good values. The community at the school is palpably exciting, the children alert, bright and genuinely engaged with the whole. I was moved there in a way that no other school has touched me. Of all the schools I've visited, about ten I suppose, it is the only one where the head is black. It is possible this is part of the reason the school is SO good.

I have a feeling that zeban and I could be friends if we were given the opportunity. I just get confused by the terms - secondary / high / comprehensive / grammar upper / lower I went to two grammar schools and most of my friends from junior went to secondary modern. The first grammar school I went to was an absolutely vile place, I really hated it. It was despicably awful for me. I performed terribly there in every subject other than art, English and sports at which I excelled. I would have been kept back in the first year had my parents not moved out of Newcastle to get me out of that miserable hole. Then I was in mid Northumberland at an all boys grammar - King Edward VI which was relatively brilliant. It joined the adjacent all girls grammar and became comprehensive when my year started O levels. That was weird, an all boys, an all girls and two co-ed secondary mods mixing together. A couple of the brightest people I'd ever met came up from the secondary mods - they'd failed their eleven pluses - along with all my friends in Newcastle - and been sent to do vocational learning in schools where O level wasn't even an option. Stupid system. Anyway a lot of my friends were from solid working class families and I loved them and still do and always will.

Triple post. SORRY for shouting.

OK. Distance in itself is no issue to me personally. I was a relatively long way from both my high schools and walked/cycled and enjoyed doing that. But in that case I was not walking past two, three or more other suitable schools en route to mine - and there were children who bussed in from twenty miles or more and, believe it or not back then, even some who boarded during the week because the catchement in Northumberland was so geographically huge. The overarching difficulty is that the whole education system needs to be made better for everyone. That way kids who don't really need the attention because they have the solid backing of solid parents will just get a first class education and the many kids who are not so fortunate to have so much behind them will have a fighting chance of reaching their true potential. Resources need to be poured into socialising children at nursery and primary so they are more than capable of being self propelled at learning by the time they are at high school age. Class sizes at early years should be much smaller than they are; 18 maximum and classes should have two adult support staff or trained parent volunteers alongside each teacher so that groups of six children are always in close contact with a good role model throughout their academic day. After that my proposition for high school would be to have sufficient places locally so that children would not need to travel long distances - and to keep them relatively local in schools whose demographic mix fairly matched their catchment area. This would be with the ideal of helping create competent local communities where everyone learns to appreciate each other. I suppose there inevitably has to be some form of social engineering where there's a large catchment of severe deprivation but then the early years approach ought to ameliorate the worst. The ideal would be to make state schools so good that rich people would not opt out of society and there would be no need for private education at all, apart from the desire of the rich to remain separate from the oiks.

Thanks. WE are aware of that. Which school, exactly, were you thinking of? We were considering applying to Lewisham schools - where there is room. Or maybe a comprehensive in Orkney. That would make about as much sense.

Embrace what you have been given? ARE YOU SERIOUS? A Roman Catholic all boys school? GET REAL MATEY. We are atheist and specifically asked for non faith co - ed on the application form - IF he didn't get a place at any of the six. And, besides given that outrage we ARE embracing the situation pragmatically so get off your high horse. That being said YOU are missing the point with your 'proposion'. I don't want a medal and certainly do not want, or need, YOUR sympathy; I'm not looking for oohs and aahhs and neither are other people in this situation. We want a better system for everyone including for the children at the schools we do not want our children to go to. You're not offering a solution, just a cop out that goes with the grain of the lottery system. I'm happy to speak openly and risk being smiped at by people like you because life is too short to keep shut when things aren't right. I want a situation that is rational and gives a good outcome for people everywhere. So. I'm naive and idealistic OK? What's wrong with that? By the way - how old are YOUR kids and which school are they going to?

Well zeban your take on it is really positive and you're jumping to arrogant conclusions yourself. I'm not hand wringing here - what's happening to our son - and to the children of what seems to be most of the other parents we know - has been on the cards for a long time. Since they were born. When our children were born we decided NOT to move out of London, along with a cohort of friends who all decided that we'd not run to the Home Counties or abroad and stay and work through the challenges of inner city living. None of us is unprepared for this - just NONE of us has got a place where we wanted or anywhere near to what we wanted. No we are just a little group out of the three hundred families or so to whom 'parental choice' means nothing whatsoever and a few of us have made a little noise on a local forum - and then we get people like you telling us we're arrogant, or have not done realistic research for our choices. Silly, ridiculous and completely useless observations altogether. What do YOU propose eh? Ann you are right too, and lottery is not a word that ought to be associated with education, or many other socially significant things in a 21 century advanced economy such as health provision but, unfortunately it is exactly the right term for the system. Finally to put it bluntly proposing setting up an additional school locally where there is none is just stating one bleeding obvious possibility.

Well. My answer is 'let's set up a school' but that will probaly fall on deaf ears. Innit.

Oh YEAH. That's a FAB, clear thinking overview Mrs Danvers. What you're saying is "don't apply to schools you haven't got a chance of getting into and do apply to schools that are not right for your children". The boy who did not get Walworth is on the special educational needs register, his S.E.N. coordinator made a strong case for his application to WA which received a verbal positive. The other boy is not S.E.N. but HEY I suppose there's another benign reason to excuse this rubbish situation. As far as our being realistic goes there is nowhere 'realistic' within reach of where we live. So I suppose we should be a lot richer than we are and we should not live where we do? As for getting to grips with how the system works - 'WE' are quite well informed as it happens and that is why I am particularly irritated by you. My partner is a teacher and chair of governors at a local school, I am a governor at a local school, my parents were teacher, head teacher and local authority education advisor, the other people I mention are highly informed about their choices also and have worked diligently to make the best possible outcomes for their children. We understand the system well - and it DOES NOT WORK. Your position implies only that we should all accept that we live in an educational black hole and just get on with allowing our children to go to schools that cannot serve their needs that will adversely affect their outlook on life for the rest of their natural. Just because it's reality that those schools we do not accept as being acceptable fail their pupils and the families they come from doesn't mean we should let our own children suffer their inadequacies along with their existing pupils. FACT is there is not enough provision at secondary and it is a damned LOTTERY that inevitably lets society down. It's a conversation that's been going on for decades and there's no reason other than complacency at all levels in our society which excuses it. So stop making excuses for a rubbish system that lets so many people down - or conversely gives them what they rightly deserve - just by chance.

Thanks Dorothy, let's see what happens in terms of take up over the next few days? I have three women friends whose children have not been given anything satisfactory: One boy was not offered a place at all. Anywhere. Kingsdale was his first choice. He says he feels that he has been singled out as a rejection from the system. Southwark say 43 children were not offered places this year. One boy placed Walworth Academy as first choice and has been offered a place at Peckham Academy. He lives closer to WA than another boy in his class who got a place at Walworth even though it was fourth on his list. My son has been offered a place at a Roman Catholic all boys, just to be clear; this is not one of his six school choices, and in fact we asked specifically for non faith secular and co-ed placement only. Several more have been been offered Peckham Academy. None had it on their list. The parents of one are seriously considering, and because of their fear that this worst case scenario may be the outcome because of where they live, they made the necessary pre application moves for private education, sending him to St Dunstan's ?14K. It will be their pension fund they eat into to do this. The others are just in serious disarray and concern and do not have strategies yet. Three other friends whose children are year five as yours, have been so shocked that their friends' brightest kids have all been thrown onto an education scrap heap have already put their homes on the market to move into catchment for Charter or Haberdashers etc. Word is that of course the Appeal process has to be entered into but to all intents and purposes it is a total waste of time. Southwark says just over 200 children have been offered places that were not on their priority list at all. Southwark says 51% of children got their first choice. Southwark say Kingsdale offered 63 places to children from Lewisham. Southwark says Lewisham schools have places empty and we should think about applying to these if we do not like what we're being offered. One friend has been on mumsnet too, was telling me about discussion there, I'll have a look, and is thinking about the suggestion of sharing information to make a representation outside of the small, fear ridden world of parents and children who've been served very badly, yet again, by a system that patently serves people very poorly.

Any parents here with experience of Admission Failure interested in pooling their observations and making an official FUSS? This has been happening for decades and parents just get divided and conquered every year. It wouldn't take a lot of time to make a focused representation to our MPs and to education departments to at least register dissatisfaction and at best make some change happen.