As regular readers of this blog will know, my wife and I are currently in a search for a half decent, primary education for our son, Laughing Boy. Our first visit to a school, one run by a local authority, brought us into contact with a headteacher who seemed to be a walking talking parody of a left wing head teacher. She banged on about how she was a fan of ‘diversity’ and was proud of the number of second languages spoken at the school. She also was a bit obstructive when we requested that Laughing Boy be excused from Religious Education and insisted on asking for our reasons for asking to exercise this right. She was also none too pleased when I said that we don’t want Laughing Boy exposed to nutcase ‘paediatric gender transition’ promoters such as the Mermaids group and therefore requested selective exemption from Relationship and Sex Education lessons. As you can imagine, this politically correct school environment, one where our very reasonable requests may be refused by the school, is not what we will choose for Laughing Boy. Therefore we are putting this school at the very bottom of the list of our school choices.

However the next school, an Academy and therefore one step removed from the influence of the local authority, was far and away a much better school. Educationally there is a massive emphasis put on literacy and numeracy with stress put on English grammar and building up number skills. The children who acted as guides for prospective parents were well turned out, polite, well educated and helpful when asked questions. The IT side was excellent and used intelligently to back up learning across the curriculum, the children are also encouraged to learn to code in a very basic way, which sold me on the IT curriculum. There is some cross curricular learning but this doesn’t seem to be as ubiquitous and regimented as in the last school we looked at. There is much more emphasis put on individual discrete lessons but cross curricular work is used only when it is beneficial to learning. I can understand this as some children may not be able to deal with maths in the abstract but may be more able to learn mathematical laws if they apply them to something practical. I was impressed by the standards that the school has with regards attainment and impressed that the school expected pupils to work hard to meet these standards. The school does not punish parents or children for any prior learning such as with regards reading, something I’ve heard of happening in the past and the staff made Laughing Boy very welcome and even complimented him on his appearance in his neat three piece suit. This is a school where I am convinced would be educationally good for Laughing Boy.

I was pleased with security at the school and being the parent of a child who could reasonably be described as ‘a one boy junior Escape Committee’, this is something I do worry. Although the security levels are not as high as one would find for example on a Jewish Primary School in London (there’s no bomb deflecting features on fences for a start), I didn’t see any obvious ways that Laughing Boy could get out of the school apart from tunnelling out ‘Wooden Horse’ style

I was especially pleased with the reaction of the Headmaster when we asked if Laughing Boy could be excused from RE. I was expecting some sort of questions about our reasons for doing so but this did not happen. Unlike the previous Head we had spoken to, there was no attempt to ‘sell’ RE to us, he just said: ‘That’s fine, just put your request in writing’. This is treating us the parents like proper customers and was gratifying to experience. I also asked about excusing Laughing Boy from the more controversial aspects of Relationships and Sex Ed and the headmaster said ‘we don’t teach that stuff here. We teach biological stuff around ten or eleven but that’s it’. I ventured another question about the trans lunatics of Mermaids who are muscling their way into primary schools and he added that he would not entertain such groups at his school. All in all this was a much better response than we got from the previous, politically correct headteacher.

I think that we would have very few worries for Laughing Boy’s morals by sending him to this school and it was a pleasure to see and meet teachers who really did care more about their pupil’s educational achievement than pushing leftist dogma onto children.

There was I noticed a stark difference between the hidebound political correctness of the local authority school and the much more reasonable way that this Academy has dealt with us and how it has answered our queries. Maybe there is something in what the late educationalist Chris Woodhead said about local council education authorities which is that they are more of a hindrance to increasing the quality of our schools than any positive asset.

We’ve got a Church of England school to look at next, this school has not fared so well in Ofsted inspections but then not all the things that Ofsted may call good things, such as diversity obsessions by staff, are what we would call positives. I get the impression that the more traditionalist approach that this Church school seems to have may be more vigorous than the less traditionalist approach favoured by Ofsted. We will take a look at this Church school and see if it meets both our intellectual standards and whether they are willing to accommodate our request that Laughing Boy is kept away from less than honest RE lessons and various LGB and T lunatics. If Laughing Boy goes there at least they will have a genuine Jewish boy to play the baby Jesus or a Shepherd at the Nativity play (I don’t want him to play Joseph the Jewish husband as I want him to have a speaking part LOL). It’s been fascinating to compare just a few examples of schools of different types both those closely associated with the State and those at one remove from the State and I’ll keep people posted about how things go in our Primary Education Quest.