A recent communication from a Holcombe parents. Sadly this is similar to other parents with SEN children, whose experiences I have been sent.
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Shame that you have retired. I have a 14year old in Holcombe grammar school and I have now decided to remove him because of their constant negative behaviour policies. He has been isolated, excluded (sent to a different school) for this like throwing a pen or failing a report. I have tried to facilitate them and encouraged my child to just sit and be quiet (as it seems that's what they want). However, now I have to take my son out of this environment. I have applied for a few transfers but I am not sure if he will get through because they have smeared his character so much and treated him like a criminal when he is only just a boy. As a single-mom in a very demanding job I now have to look at the option of home schooling which will be very costly as I have to work in order for us to survive. So will need to tie him in with a Home Schooling College. And I wanted to shed some light on this - if other parents are experiencing the same please update us on here. Thanks |
As I have pointed out previously, the Council did not have the right to refuse places on the waiting list, as Holcombe Grammar School is the legal Admission Authority, and so able to make such decisions. By delegating operation of the waiting list to Medway it temporarily gave up that power. According to the letter, when Holcombe learned only yesterday that Medway was intransigent it decided to take back control of its waiting list and place the boys on it.
I have long maintained that all Medway schools should do the same, with academies able to as a right, and I hope this lesson will be learned by others.
I must confess on what I had seen previously, my assumption was that the sticking point was Holcombe Grammar School, because of the sequence of apparent events outlined in my previous articles, together with the extended silence from the school (awful public relations again).
The good news for at least some of these families is that it is likely most, if not all, of the 28 London boys awarded places on allocation will be looking for appropriate schools nearer their home as a preference and there will inevitably be some movement as a result. I know from enquiries I have received, asking about the school, that some boys who were allocated to the school have never visited Holcombe or even Chatham, or knew anything about it when they applied!
One has to ask why Medway Council have refused to budge, against the school‘s wishes, when it did not even have the legal right to do so. It certainly was not in the interests of local children, as so often in issues about Medway Council, and as described previously on this website.
Too often since its take over by Thinking Schools Academy Trust I have been highly critical of decision making at Holcombe Grammar. However, in this case my criticism is just that they have left the matter so late in the school year, rather than forcing it earlier. As a result places falling vacant before now will also have been taken up by London families, rather than those local boys who are now qualified.
