The Old Alma Mater

Remember Windscale? It was a nuclear power station that had a bit of a meltdown and subsequently got a bad name.

The marketing people solved the problem by renaming it Sellafield and everyone thought it was a different, new, improved nuclear power station and the threat went away.

Apparently, renaming a failing institution is the best way to improve things and by far the cheapest, so it's win-win!

The proof of this is in our education system. In fact the Shoebox's old school Herbert Carter Secondary Modern, which was always a bit crap, was renamed Carter Community School (specialising in SPORT, so don't worry about Maths and English, everyone's going for gold!), and is now only the TENTH worse school in Britain! Hoorah!

Mind you, our old rivals Kemp Welch have been renamed TWICE! First as Rossmore Community College and now as St Aldhelm's, and THEY'VE just been the awarded the worst school in Britain award, so I don't know what happened there?

According to the local Echo:

Just three per cent of pupils leaving St Aldhelm’s Academy last summer scored the benchmark five A* - C GCSE grades, including English and maths.

That’s a drop of 11 places in a year for the former Rossmore Community College, taken over by sponsors the Diocese of Salisbury and Bournemouth University in September 2010 in a bid to raise standards.

Today the Borough of Poole has demanded urgent improvements at the school and action from the sponsors. It has also offered to help the school.

Carter Community School in Poole has also fared badly in league tables published today.

It is ranked as the 10th worst in the country with just 21 per cent reaching the benchmark standard.

Yes, one town has two schools in the worst ten!

Is it social deprivation? Well no, it's quite an affluent area without the unemployment desolation of the North East or the inner-urban blight of our major cities. It's not even racial, as most of these kids are white, and in fact it's the sort of area that white supremacists move to. (Most of the racism I heard as a kid came from the emigres from London and the Midlands).

No, it's actually all about the success of the local Grammar Schools. Poole never tolerated the move to Comprehensives, and stuck to the old two-tier education system, where the children of the middle-classes and the brightest of the lower orders were prioritised into the Grammar schools for a proper education, whilst the rest of us were basically abandoned.

The Grammar schools are very good at what they do, and are able to compete with private schools in their effectiveness.

However, the price of this success is the bargain basement approach that is the secondary modern system, (now rebranded as Community Colleges), where children are put on hold until they're old enough to work for fast food outlets, go onto the building sites or enter the prison system. And until it's recognised as a problem derived from SOCIAL attitudes towards working class children, the problem will persist unchallenged.

In short, it will remain a Conservative paradise!