Matsikula

Hussein and team have just done a lovely job painting 2 different rooms for us. They were competitively priced, responsive and very pleasant to deal with - recommended.

Recently used John for the second time and I can thoroughly recommend him. He’s responsive and reliable and did great work on a really fiddly job, including filling in a dozen holes where we removed spotlights. You can contact him on 07905 044 912.

John came and did some plastering for us in Herne Hill recently. He was very responsive, gave us sensible advice, turned up when he said he would, did a great job and cleaned up afterwards. Brilliant!

Squiggles - you might have missed my point earlier that the school is absolutely not campaigning against planning permission. Parents and locals are, as indeed they are entitled to do. The Dulwich Estate clearly saw the denial of planning permission as a distinct possibility. As I understand it the contract gives them a 5 year window to get permission. Personally I think the access issue is a massive problem. Apparently the only way they could get vehicle access to the site is by putting an entrance in right after the bend / junction in Half Moon Lane. If you ever use that stretch of road at school run time when the traffic is busiest, you'd see that that is a crazy idea.

legalalien, I think you need some informing over the facts. As a JKPS parent I can assure you that the school was absolutely clear about the status of the field. Moreover it is NOT getting involved in the planning process in any way. Parents, local residents and other interested parties are perfectly entitled to lobby the council against granting planning permission. There are numerous reasons why the Council should not grant it, not solely relating to the school's use of the field. As for the trustees, the law allows them to decide that a certain course of action, while it may be financially advantageous, does not 'fit with the ethos of the charity'.

I am a Reception parent and I just thought I'd add my perspective. No, the school is not fully bilingual, but in every class either the teacher or the teaching assistant is a native German speaker, and there is a lot of German spoken informally; at registration, in the playground etc. I speak decent German but am not a native German speaker, and I'm quite pleased with my son's progress - in a few months he's gone from speaking 5 words of German to understanding quite a bit of basic stuff, and even attempting the odd sentence. It's not immersion, but I'd say it is streets ahead of the language teaching in practically every state or private primary school in the country with a couple of exceptions like the Lycee and Ecole de Wix. I also know that some parents whose children are bilingual are really pleased because the extra contact with German speaking adults is encouraging them to speak German at home. In terms of academics, my son joined knowing all the basic phonic letter sounds, but we couldn't teach him the concept of blending. They got him over that in about a week and although we aren't rushing him, it's amazing to see his progress. I don't think it's correct that only one teacher is left from last year, and it's certainly not the case with the teaching assistants (who you can see from the website are often also pretty highly qualified). There is no permanent playground (more of a yard and a very muddy field), partly because they are still in the middle of the build and need vehicle access etc. Next year they will have a lot more space, and some of the facilities that are lacking at the moment. They've also just won some extra funding from the council to make the outside space more usable. I think part of the reason for some parents' disappointment is that the Government had us believe that it was possible to get a school up and running in a year, in any old building, and on a shoestring. This was just nonsense - I imagine it is extremely difficult and highly stressful, especially when you consider the additional scrutiny that free schools have been put under after a couple of the first batch turned out so disastrously. I think with JKPS you have to be prepared to take the rough with the smooth in this early stage of the school's life; and that's obviously easier if your child is only in Reception. There is a critical mass of parents, staff and govenors who are determined to make the school work and I guess you should choose the school if you want to be part of that project: not a perfect school today; but a very good school in the near future.