Tendring Topics……on line
The Coastal Academy
Last summer, as all Clactonians know, Colbayns High School and Bishops Park College were transformed into The Coastal Academy, which opened with the new school year in September 2009. The outward and visible sign of this was the appearance on our streets of lots of eleven-to-eighteen year olds wearing the blazer and tie of the new academy. All the pupils, both new and existing, of the former schools were supplied with a free school uniform and free sports gear. This new academy was clearly going to be better funded than either of the two schools from which it sprang! If money had anything to do with it, it would surely do very well indeed.
Has it? The Academy blazers are still in evidence, some as pristine as they were in September, others looking distinctly weather-beaten or battle-worn.
We should have a preliminary idea of the Academy’s academic achievements in a few months’ time when the school-leaving exam results are known. It will be a couple of years though before it will be possible to make a balanced assessment of the academy’s progress. An indication of the steepness of the road ahead is indicated by the recently published ‘truancy league tables’ showing the percentages of truancies (unauthorised absences from school) in 31 Essex secondary schools. The figures relate to the 2008/2009 academic year, the last before the advent of the Coastal Academy.
This is, of course, one of those league tables where the worst are at the top and the very best at the bottom. Leading, and far ahead of every other school in Essex, is Clacton’s former Bishops’ Park College with a truancy rate of 6 percent. Well behind Bishops’ Park but still ahead of every other school, is Colbayns High School with 2.7 percent truancy. Next down the table is Maltings Academy, Witham, with 2.5 percent and so on down to Colchester Royal Grammar School, at the bottom with no truancy at all.
The presence of Witham’s Maltings Academy in the ‘top three’ makes it clear that Academy status doesn’t provide a magic remedy for truancy. Why should it? I am sure that the causes of truancy lie in the home and the out-of-school environment and that it is there that it needs to be tackled. A close friend of mine assures me that the great divide in British society isn’t between the well off and the hard-up, the North and the South, the aristocracy and the rest of us, but between the parents or guardians who believe in the value of education for their child - and those who don’t. There can be no greater handicap for potentially gifted children than parents who take no interest in their education, put other considerations before giving them space and time for their homework, and let them know that the sooner they ‘get away from all that book learning’ and start bringing in some money, the better.
I can’t really see what even the most supportive school or academy can do about such a parental attitude but I am sure that the staff of the Coastal Academy are doing their best. I wish them all success.
A Soup Kitchen for Jaywick?
Just before the end of February, the local Daily Gazette’s front page bore the bold headline SCHOOL SOUP KITCHEN PLAN. The school concerned was the Frobisher School in Jaywick and the news story below the headline revealed that teachers there are so concerned about poor nutrition affecting children’s schoolwork that they have decided to do something about it.
Tracey Caffull, one of the school’s two head teachers was reported as saying that diet was a serious issue for the school as it had a massive effect on pupils’ learning. She said that the children were living ‘in massive deprivation’ and that she had been talking to the Salvation Army about setting up a soup kitchen on the lines of ‘the ones that the Salvation Army runs for homeless and hard-up people in poor areas’. I think she may have been referring to the Soup Run provided in Clacton’s town centre by Churches Together in Clacton, with which the Salvation Army plays an important part. If this charity were to be unable to help, she said that the school would set up its own kitchen.
Keith Bodsworth, the school’s business manager confirmed that, ‘The aim is to improve the nutritional standard of the food our children are getting, but we will not close the door to other people. We are really targeting the community as a whole, and it will be there to support people if they need it. We are a community school and if we can help those around, then we will'. He added that the kitchen would probably not be based in the school in Frobisher Drive but somewhere in the Brooklands area of Jaywick, where many of the pupils live.
I think that there is a big difference between providing soup or whatever for homeless people and those in squats or bed-sits with no cooking facilities as Churches Together does at present, and providing it for a community in which where there are cooking facilities, however basic, and the problem is that its members lack the money, or the skills, or the inclination, to use them.
I am not one of those who claim that ‘there is no poverty in England today’. I know that there is. I don’t believe though that there is any family in our area so poor that its child members are inevitably reduced to ‘massive deprivation’ and semi-starvation. I believe that in the Brooklands area of Jaywick and possibly other areas, there is a need for child-care social workers to investigate thoroughly, to advise, to support, to cajole and – if no other remedy is successful – to take whatever legal action may be available to prevent child neglect.
I can see great opportunities for the Tabloid Press here! Either there could be headlines about a tragic case of child neglect that could have been averted ‘if only the Health Visitors and/or Social Workers had done their job properly’ or equally bold headlines denouncing ‘Council snoopers who invade the privacy of Englishmen’s homes, probably to enforce some pettifogging regulation dreamed up by a bureaucrat in Brussels!’
They might even manage both!
Farewell ‘Readers Digest’
So the Readers Digest has proved to be one of the victims of the great recession and is no more! What on earth, I wonder, will doctors, dentists, solicitors and the like find to put on the magazine racks of their waiting rooms?
Those, I have to say, are the only places in which I ever read a copy. They were ideal for that purpose; filled with brief, always ‘wholesome’ articles, usually shortened and well written, culled from other publications. They were perfect for whiling away the time while waiting to have a tooth filled or blood-pressure taken, though rarely so gripping that there was a pang of regret at putting them down when your name was called by the receptionist.
I found them a little too ‘homespun and American’ for my personal taste, a little too ‘heart-warming’ in fact. What’s more, during the period of the Cold War (I don’t think I have actually seen a copy since) there was never an issue that didn’t contain a ‘reds under the bed’ attack on anything that could be considered to bear the taint of socialism. I did quite a lot of work for them in the 1970s and ‘80s and would tease the very friendly sub editor to whom I sent my work by suggesting that she was, of course, a CIA agent. She took it in good part and wanted to know whether my pay rates with the KGB were better!
The work that I did for them? I never contributed to the magazine, but I did make substantial contributions to some of the manuals that were, I suppose, spin-offs from the magazine sales. On my bookshelves as I write, I can see the ‘Readers Digest Complete DIY Manual’, ‘The Readers Digest, How to Fix Just About Anything’ and the ‘Readers Digest, Know your Rights’. To the first two of these I contributed the very substantial sections on domestic hot and cold water supply and drainage and to the third, a popular manual about the law as it affects the householder and the individual, I contributed a short section about the law relating to ‘combined drains and private sewers’ – not really the most fascinating of subjects! There were one or two earlier manuals that I have lost and the names of which I have forgotten, but for which I wrote the ‘plumbing’ contents.
They paid generously but always bought the copyright of the material outright. With Readers Digest’s mammoth advertising campaigns and pushy (to say the least!) sales techniques, we authors would have done even better had our payment been a share of the royalties!
Commenting on Readers Digest’s demise in the Guardian, a columnist criticises the magazine for much the same reasons that I have, but has a word of praise for their manuals, conceding that ‘I’d never have tried to fix a tap without the guidance of the Readers Digest Book of Household Maintenance’. I think that the writer may have remembered wrongly the title of the manual but I have no doubt at all that the guidance had been mine!
Money well spent!
In September 1980, six months after I had retired from the Council’s service, and after I had assured myself of an adequate income from freelance writing, Heather and I spent a wonderful fortnight touring the then peaceful and united country of Jugoslavia in our motor-caravan.
The next year we decided to forego an overseas holiday and to dip into our savings to bring our bungalow up to late-twentieth century standards. We had an extension built at the rear, to house a fridge, freezer and spin-dryer and to provide some badly needed extra cupboard and storage space. It cost as much to build as it had to buy the bungalow thirty years earlier! We had already had our cavity walls infilled (by Rentokil) and I had installed fibreglass blanket insulation in the roof space. Now we disposed of the two Courtier solid fuel stoves (one with back boiler) sometimes supplemented by oil-filled electric radiators, that had been our means of space and water heating. We had gas fired central heating installed, thus eliminating the chilly ‘no go’ areas of the bungalow during every winter. We got rid of our old and dated bathroom suite and had a new suite installed. We had our windows double-glazed and wall-to-wall carpets fitted in our sitting room and hall.
Had we waited a few years we might well have obtained government or council grants towards much of that work. However, we had done it when we could afford to, for our own comfort and convenience, without any thought of ‘saving the planet’. We certainly never regretted what we did and when we did it.
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Fixing my solar panels. March 2009
Last year (nearly thirty years later!) I decided to have solar panels fitted on my roof as part of a solar water heating system to supplement my existing gas boiler. It was expensive and I certainly won’t live long enough for its savings to equal the cost of installation. I was confident though that the savings it would make would be greater than the interest the money was earning in my savings account - and that it would add to the value of my home. There have been ‘teething problems’ but the system has fulfilled my expectations. I pay my combined gas and electricity bill by direct debit. A year ago this amounted to £125 a month (£1,500 a year). It is now £70 a month (£840 a year), a tax-free saving well worth having. What is more, my meters were read in mid-January and revealed that, despite December and early January’s bitter weather; I was £140 in credit. Possibly my monthly payments will be further reduced.
Let no one tell me that the call to insulate our homes and to supplement our present energy sources with wind and solar power, is all a big confidence trick. I have demonstrated that, as the tv adverts claim in quite another context, ‘It works for me!’
The Coastal Academy
Last summer, as all Clactonians know, Colbayns High School and Bishops Park College were transformed into The Coastal Academy, which opened with the new school year in September 2009. The outward and visible sign of this was the appearance on our streets of lots of eleven-to-eighteen year olds wearing the blazer and tie of the new academy. All the pupils, both new and existing, of the former schools were supplied with a free school uniform and free sports gear. This new academy was clearly going to be better funded than either of the two schools from which it sprang! If money had anything to do with it, it would surely do very well indeed.
Has it? The Academy blazers are still in evidence, some as pristine as they were in September, others looking distinctly weather-beaten or battle-worn.
We should have a preliminary idea of the Academy’s academic achievements in a few months’ time when the school-leaving exam results are known. It will be a couple of years though before it will be possible to make a balanced assessment of the academy’s progress. An indication of the steepness of the road ahead is indicated by the recently published ‘truancy league tables’ showing the percentages of truancies (unauthorised absences from school) in 31 Essex secondary schools. The figures relate to the 2008/2009 academic year, the last before the advent of the Coastal Academy.
This is, of course, one of those league tables where the worst are at the top and the very best at the bottom. Leading, and far ahead of every other school in Essex, is Clacton’s former Bishops’ Park College with a truancy rate of 6 percent. Well behind Bishops’ Park but still ahead of every other school, is Colbayns High School with 2.7 percent truancy. Next down the table is Maltings Academy, Witham, with 2.5 percent and so on down to Colchester Royal Grammar School, at the bottom with no truancy at all.
The presence of Witham’s Maltings Academy in the ‘top three’ makes it clear that Academy status doesn’t provide a magic remedy for truancy. Why should it? I am sure that the causes of truancy lie in the home and the out-of-school environment and that it is there that it needs to be tackled. A close friend of mine assures me that the great divide in British society isn’t between the well off and the hard-up, the North and the South, the aristocracy and the rest of us, but between the parents or guardians who believe in the value of education for their child - and those who don’t. There can be no greater handicap for potentially gifted children than parents who take no interest in their education, put other considerations before giving them space and time for their homework, and let them know that the sooner they ‘get away from all that book learning’ and start bringing in some money, the better.
I can’t really see what even the most supportive school or academy can do about such a parental attitude but I am sure that the staff of the Coastal Academy are doing their best. I wish them all success.
A Soup Kitchen for Jaywick?
Just before the end of February, the local Daily Gazette’s front page bore the bold headline SCHOOL SOUP KITCHEN PLAN. The school concerned was the Frobisher School in Jaywick and the news story below the headline revealed that teachers there are so concerned about poor nutrition affecting children’s schoolwork that they have decided to do something about it.
Tracey Caffull, one of the school’s two head teachers was reported as saying that diet was a serious issue for the school as it had a massive effect on pupils’ learning. She said that the children were living ‘in massive deprivation’ and that she had been talking to the Salvation Army about setting up a soup kitchen on the lines of ‘the ones that the Salvation Army runs for homeless and hard-up people in poor areas’. I think she may have been referring to the Soup Run provided in Clacton’s town centre by Churches Together in Clacton, with which the Salvation Army plays an important part. If this charity were to be unable to help, she said that the school would set up its own kitchen.
Keith Bodsworth, the school’s business manager confirmed that, ‘The aim is to improve the nutritional standard of the food our children are getting, but we will not close the door to other people. We are really targeting the community as a whole, and it will be there to support people if they need it. We are a community school and if we can help those around, then we will'. He added that the kitchen would probably not be based in the school in Frobisher Drive but somewhere in the Brooklands area of Jaywick, where many of the pupils live.
I think that there is a big difference between providing soup or whatever for homeless people and those in squats or bed-sits with no cooking facilities as Churches Together does at present, and providing it for a community in which where there are cooking facilities, however basic, and the problem is that its members lack the money, or the skills, or the inclination, to use them.
I am not one of those who claim that ‘there is no poverty in England today’. I know that there is. I don’t believe though that there is any family in our area so poor that its child members are inevitably reduced to ‘massive deprivation’ and semi-starvation. I believe that in the Brooklands area of Jaywick and possibly other areas, there is a need for child-care social workers to investigate thoroughly, to advise, to support, to cajole and – if no other remedy is successful – to take whatever legal action may be available to prevent child neglect.
I can see great opportunities for the Tabloid Press here! Either there could be headlines about a tragic case of child neglect that could have been averted ‘if only the Health Visitors and/or Social Workers had done their job properly’ or equally bold headlines denouncing ‘Council snoopers who invade the privacy of Englishmen’s homes, probably to enforce some pettifogging regulation dreamed up by a bureaucrat in Brussels!’
They might even manage both!
Farewell ‘Readers Digest’
So the Readers Digest has proved to be one of the victims of the great recession and is no more! What on earth, I wonder, will doctors, dentists, solicitors and the like find to put on the magazine racks of their waiting rooms?
Those, I have to say, are the only places in which I ever read a copy. They were ideal for that purpose; filled with brief, always ‘wholesome’ articles, usually shortened and well written, culled from other publications. They were perfect for whiling away the time while waiting to have a tooth filled or blood-pressure taken, though rarely so gripping that there was a pang of regret at putting them down when your name was called by the receptionist.
I found them a little too ‘homespun and American’ for my personal taste, a little too ‘heart-warming’ in fact. What’s more, during the period of the Cold War (I don’t think I have actually seen a copy since) there was never an issue that didn’t contain a ‘reds under the bed’ attack on anything that could be considered to bear the taint of socialism. I did quite a lot of work for them in the 1970s and ‘80s and would tease the very friendly sub editor to whom I sent my work by suggesting that she was, of course, a CIA agent. She took it in good part and wanted to know whether my pay rates with the KGB were better!
The work that I did for them? I never contributed to the magazine, but I did make substantial contributions to some of the manuals that were, I suppose, spin-offs from the magazine sales. On my bookshelves as I write, I can see the ‘Readers Digest Complete DIY Manual’, ‘The Readers Digest, How to Fix Just About Anything’ and the ‘Readers Digest, Know your Rights’. To the first two of these I contributed the very substantial sections on domestic hot and cold water supply and drainage and to the third, a popular manual about the law as it affects the householder and the individual, I contributed a short section about the law relating to ‘combined drains and private sewers’ – not really the most fascinating of subjects! There were one or two earlier manuals that I have lost and the names of which I have forgotten, but for which I wrote the ‘plumbing’ contents.
They paid generously but always bought the copyright of the material outright. With Readers Digest’s mammoth advertising campaigns and pushy (to say the least!) sales techniques, we authors would have done even better had our payment been a share of the royalties!
Commenting on Readers Digest’s demise in the Guardian, a columnist criticises the magazine for much the same reasons that I have, but has a word of praise for their manuals, conceding that ‘I’d never have tried to fix a tap without the guidance of the Readers Digest Book of Household Maintenance’. I think that the writer may have remembered wrongly the title of the manual but I have no doubt at all that the guidance had been mine!
Money well spent!
In September 1980, six months after I had retired from the Council’s service, and after I had assured myself of an adequate income from freelance writing, Heather and I spent a wonderful fortnight touring the then peaceful and united country of Jugoslavia in our motor-caravan.
The next year we decided to forego an overseas holiday and to dip into our savings to bring our bungalow up to late-twentieth century standards. We had an extension built at the rear, to house a fridge, freezer and spin-dryer and to provide some badly needed extra cupboard and storage space. It cost as much to build as it had to buy the bungalow thirty years earlier! We had already had our cavity walls infilled (by Rentokil) and I had installed fibreglass blanket insulation in the roof space. Now we disposed of the two Courtier solid fuel stoves (one with back boiler) sometimes supplemented by oil-filled electric radiators, that had been our means of space and water heating. We had gas fired central heating installed, thus eliminating the chilly ‘no go’ areas of the bungalow during every winter. We got rid of our old and dated bathroom suite and had a new suite installed. We had our windows double-glazed and wall-to-wall carpets fitted in our sitting room and hall.
Had we waited a few years we might well have obtained government or council grants towards much of that work. However, we had done it when we could afford to, for our own comfort and convenience, without any thought of ‘saving the planet’. We certainly never regretted what we did and when we did it.
Fixing my solar panels. March 2009
Last year (nearly thirty years later!) I decided to have solar panels fitted on my roof as part of a solar water heating system to supplement my existing gas boiler. It was expensive and I certainly won’t live long enough for its savings to equal the cost of installation. I was confident though that the savings it would make would be greater than the interest the money was earning in my savings account - and that it would add to the value of my home. There have been ‘teething problems’ but the system has fulfilled my expectations. I pay my combined gas and electricity bill by direct debit. A year ago this amounted to £125 a month (£1,500 a year). It is now £70 a month (£840 a year), a tax-free saving well worth having. What is more, my meters were read in mid-January and revealed that, despite December and early January’s bitter weather; I was £140 in credit. Possibly my monthly payments will be further reduced.
Let no one tell me that the call to insulate our homes and to supplement our present energy sources with wind and solar power, is all a big confidence trick. I have demonstrated that, as the tv adverts claim in quite another context, ‘It works for me!’
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