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UPDATE: Our First Primary Free School Consultation Event on November 23rd, 2018

Nov 25, 2018 | General MEaP News

MEaP Consult

Introducing our Vision

Feedback

1stconsultation

Discussion

Teaching using Culture

Parents wanted to know more about how we would go about teaching in a culturally specific way. We explained how our curriculum will prioritise Mother Tongue and Cultural Heritage teaching as a core subject alongside English, Maths and Science and how it would be taught everyday with English and Maths. We explained how our overall ethos of Britishness as an Additional Culture worked, where Britishness would be treated as a culture alongside all the other domestic cultures of our children and would be taught as such. We also explained how we could for example use some ‘native’ agrarian cultures to teach enterprise, economics, mathematics, as practical examples – feeding into our Education for Global Citizenship curriculum.

Getting buy-in from Parents

We discussed how we could ‘sell’ our educational plans to other prospective parents as it was pointed out that until they were convinced about our ethos, they would most likely continue to send their children to other non culturally sensitive mainstream schools. We discussed the importance of making sure that our school was successful in terms of both wellbeing (a forthcoming new metric from OFSTED) and academic outcomes, which we believe will be increased as a result of strong wellbeing outcomes generated by culturally relevant curriculum teaching.

It was suggested that if we could provide an example of how we would embed culture in our curriculum teaching, this might help us to ‘sell’ the concept to parents who might be initially skeptical about our approach.

We have since taken that feedback on board, see here.

This linked to concerns around sustainability. Some parents were concerned about the prospect of funding being withdrawn from the school later down the line. We assured them that our initial funding contract was for 7 years within which time we would need to demonstrate sound financial management that produced our educational and wellbeing targets and outcomes. We emphasised to our prospective parents that if our school is well managed financially and is judged good or outstanding then funding is very unlikely to be withdrawn.

Homeschooling

Many of the attendees homeschool their children and wanted to know if our new school would be able to accommodate their children in some fashion. We discussed how these parents could first link into our supplementary school activities. We then discussed how they then could be involved in helping to shape our curriculum as well as taking advantages of the teacher training opportunities that we would be providing.

Admissions Criteria

We discussed how we would be able to shape our own admissions policies and how we could work in partnership with the community to do this but also how we would have to take into consideration potential requirements imposed upon us by our funding agreement with the DfE.

MEaPconsult

Please take our short survey, here.

Download our paper survey, here. Please feel to photocopy and distribute to your networks.