Looking at the keywords people are using to hit my blog, I see that affordable education is at the fore of most of their minds. Not surprising given the number of parents who have taken their children out of independent schools already in response to the credit crunch and the anticipated exodus from those schools at the beginning of the next academic year once the credit crunch has had longer to make lives more miserable. I’ve already discussed some affordable options earlier this month and last month, but today I have another for you.
You’re in luck if your child is high ability scholarship material (although full or even sizeable scholarships are few and far between), or you’re so poor as to qualify your child (of even average ability) for a full bursary at the local prep or public school. You’re really lucky, though, if you don’t have to worry about the price tag and can send your child to any school in the country. The one group left out of all of this is that of middle class parents of non-scholarship level children. What options do they have? GEMS and Cognita, the private companies I looked at on Sunday in Would you like fries with your education? professed to be focused on providing affordable no-frills schools targeted at just this group. But as we discovered, many of those schools charge fees that rival those at the top of the fee bracket, and certainly none in London was anywhere near more affordable than the average fee-paying school that made no pretension of being affordable.
The New Model School Company may fill part of the gap in this market. Created by social think tank, Civitas, it aims to provide another choice for parents who feel the state system is not providing the education that it should. Its model is based on three premises: providing a top quality education, keeping fees as low as possible (fees in 2009 will be £5,250 per year, under half of the fees charged by most London day schools) while providing that top quality education, and establishing a model that can be replicated elsewhere.
The first New Model School, Maple Walk, was established in Kensal Green, Northwest London in 2004. Its facilities aren’t fancy: it is principally housed in a church hall, although new premises have been bought near Roundwood Park in Brent a few miles away. The school will relocate in September 2009. It had two pupils in 2004 and currently has almost 100; there are over 100 pupils registered for entry in each of 2010 and 2011.
I attended the launch in Docklands this week of the New Model School Company’s second school, Faraday School, which will serve the Docklands, North Greenwich and the East London neighbourhoods. (This school will be located on Trinity Buoy Wharf, next to the free ferry that goes to North Greenwich.)
Faraday School is expected to follow a curriculum very similar to that of Maple Walk: a strong emphasis on the basics (numeracy and literacy) with science, French, Latin (in the higher primary years), PE, PSHE, history, geography and the other usual suspects all included. The head teacher at Maple Walk, Sarah Knollys, addressed parents at the Faraday launch. Some of the points which caught my attention were the use by the school of a phonics reading system (rather than whole language which disappointed a whole generation) and the teaching of history in a chronological order. (It seems obvious, but you’d be surprised how many schools like to teach in “themes”, something that drives me bonkers and inevitably produces a cohort of kids who don’t know that the Pyramids preceded the Protestant Reformation.) Specialist teachers are brought in where needed. Despite the absence of fancy facilities, Maple Walk participates in what I would call many “rich” activities: song, dance and poetry reading competitions, yoga (as part of PE), and Latin. Maple Walk’s head said she is open to any enriching experiences that are affordable. One immediately thinks that English Speaking Union speech and debate or maths competitions could easily be integrated into the curriculum, for example.
We’ll have to see how the kids from Maple Walk stack up when they participate in standardised tests and/or apply to competitive secondary schools. But on the surface, Maple Walk and Faraday seem to be two schools worth keeping tabs on. And of course, if the New Model School opens a school in South London, I may be among the first to fill out a free registration form…
For more information on the New Model Schools, see http://www.newmodelschool.co.uk/
Snowdon on Schools 