All Souls urged to bring their original spirit of enlightenment to Kensal Rise issue

Lindsey Davis, Chair of the Society of Authors, has written to the Warden of All Souls College, Oxford, about the situation at Kensal Rise Library.

Dear Warden,

Like many people I was horrified by the uncivilised scenes when Kensal Rise Library was recovered by Brent Council in the middle of the night.  I won't dwell on that. If nothing else, All Souls must be aware what a terrible PR disaster it was. I am writing to you both in my position as Chair of the Society of Authors and personally, as a concerned Oxford alumna. I remember that friends of mine who read Law were fortunate to use the wonderful Codrington Library in their studies.

I was ashamed to see an institution of my university, and a registered charity, involved in actions that were reported so luridly. There has long been a spirit that Oxford colleges, often unobtrusively, bring help and enlightenment to deprived areas (my own has a Settlement in a poor area of London, for instance) The same spirit would appear to be behind the original grant of the land at Kensal Rise under a restrictive covenant to the people of that area, the gift to stand as long as the building was used as a library.

I understand that the library doors are now locked and All Souls have put a security guard inside - a sad image. As I believe you are advertising for tenants, may I say on behalf of the Society, that we hope All Souls will bear in mind the importance of public libraries at a time when so many are threatened with closure. I wrote recently in The Bookseller about what libraries had meant to me , growing up in a depressed city environment and a home where money was tight, eventually allowing me to be one of the first in my family to go to university, and Oxford at that.

Of course you have financial responsibilities, though in this context I was interested to see recently that Lord Hodgson has suggested making it easier for charities to invest in social enterprises by scrapping the requirement that charities have to maximise profits. Perhaps this would help All Souls in their current predicament. Perhaps, since you have the original grant of land as a precedent, you might even anticipate the change.

Children's authors slam phonics tests

A item from the Guardian to give teachers heart over the holidays. Three cheers for our children's authors!

More than 90 of Britain's best-known children's authors and illustrators have called on the government to abandon its plans to introduce early-year reading tests, warning that they pose a threat to reading for pleasure in primary schools.

The former children's laureate Michael Rosen is leading the writers' charge against a phonics-intensive approach to teaching young children how to read.

A letter to the Guardian signed by 91 names including Meg Rosoff, Philip Ardagh and Alan Gibbons says millions is being spent on "systematic synthetic phonics programmes" even though there is "no evidence that such programmes help children understand what they are reading".

Rosen told the Guardian: "It does not produce reading for understanding, it produces people who can read phonically."

The letter calls on the government to abandon plans for reading tests, specifically the phonics screening check at the end of year one and the spelling, punctuation and grammar (Spag) test at the end of year six.
The former requires five- and six-year-olds to sound out the letters of a short word or nonsense word and blend them to make the word (for example: emp, sheb, shelf, splok, blow, pine).

Rosen claimed schools were coaching children through the process and at least half were still failing. Many were failing because they were trying to correct the nonsense words, he said, for example saying "strom" as "storm".

"It is incredibly baffling to most parents because it sounds as if they are being told that their child has failed at reading, which is not the case," he said.

The proposed Spag test is to be sat by children at the end of primary school as a way of addressing what the government sees as a lack of attention given to spelling and grammar in recent years.

Rosen said it would mean teachers spending months on a "drill, skill and kill" programme, "trying to get them to pass this thing. It's bad enough with Sats. Anyone who has a year six child will know that for the past six months up until the Sats test, our children have been drilled and drilled, doing paper after paper, when they could have been writing, reading and playing with language in all kinds of ways.

"They have no evidence that any of this stuff they've imposed will actually improve children's writing. If they produced it, perhaps we'd have to shut up, but they don't."

The letter highlights a recent Ofsted report, Moving English Forward, which recommended that the government should call on schools to develop policies on reading for enjoyment. "To date there has been no such move by government," it says.

Instead the government has concentrated on phonics programmes. "As a result, more school time will be devoted to reading as an academic, test-driven exercise; less time will be available for reading and writing enjoyment.

"We deplore this state of affairs and consider that the quality of children's school lives is about to be altered for the worse."

Real spirit of Olympics wins out over corporate hijack

Children, parents and teachers herald the Olympic Torch

Local people turned out in force today as the Olympic Torch came along Forty Lane.  The contradictions of the Olympics were much in evidence with the commercialisation competing with more traditional values of community and diversity.

Just before the Torch was due a Samsung vehicle drew up and in what at times was a potential mini-riot started distributing 'blow-up' Samsung flags on which Samsung's name was very large and the Olympic rings symbol very small. Samsung cheer leaders tried to get the crowd banging their Samsung advertising flags together to welcome the torch.



At first it looked as if  the hand-painted  banners made by school children with the Mahogany Carnival Arts workshop would be over-shadowed by corporate plastic  but as the photographs shows the beautiful banners won out.

The torch itself was preceded by sponsor vehicles from Samsung, Cocoa Cola and Lloyd's bank - the latter drew a shout of 'Give us back our money!'.

Nonetheless beneath the corporate shenanigans there was real enthusiasm and a sense of history being made from a typically diverse Brent crowd.

Local MPs should back zero waste EDM

With air pollution a constant concern in London, and particularly in Brent, readers may wish to ask our local members of parliament to sign Early Day Motion 383 on 'Zero waste strategies, recycling and incineration'. With possible incinerators at Brent Cross and Park Royal the quality of our air and its impact on the young, unwell and elderly is a vital local issue.

EDM 383

That this House notes the European Parliament's adoption by a large majority, on 24 May 2012, of a resolution on a Resource Efficient Europe, which commits to working towards a zero waste strategy and the Parliament's call on the Commission to bring forward legislative proposals, by the end of 2014, to ban both landfill and the incineration of recyclable and compostable waste in Europe, by 2020; further notes growing evidence of incinerator overcapacity in the UK by 2015, which seriously risks harming recycling performance, as has already happened in some European countries; further notes UK figures showing a steady and significant decline in residual waste since the middle of the last decade - even allowing for the economic recession - and rising recycling rates; acknowledges the impact that these developments will have on the economic case for, and environmental sustainability of, mass-burn incinerators in the UK within a decade; and calls on the Secretaries of State for the Environment, Energy and Climate Change, and Communities and Local Government, and the Financial Secretary to the Treasury to work together to examine how government policy can positively facilitate the pursuit of zero waste strategies, and to report to Parliament on their findings as a matter of urgency, as many local communities across the country are currently opposing their local waste authorities' costly, environmentally damaging and unsustainable plans to build mass-burn incineration plants.

Sixteen MPs including Labour, Liberal Democrat, Conservative, Democratic Unionist and Green have signed so far.Full list HERE