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Sat, 1 Sep 2007

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Doncaster's first city academy led the way by almost doubling their overall pass rate.

Students at Trinity Academy in Thorne, where the top performers were Martin Handley (6A*s, 3Bs, 1C) and Tanya Sullivan (6A*s, 4As, 1B), managed an overall pass rate of 63.2 per cent, compared to 33.94 per cent last year.

Doncaster Free Press

One of the top performing academies was Trinity Academy , in Doncaster , which opened in 2005. It recorded a 30 per cent leap in good passes to 63 per cent, while doubling its maths and English measure to 40 per cent.

The school is run by the Emmanuel Schools Foundation, a Christian organisation established by car dealer Sir Peter Vardy, which has been criticised for teaching creationism in its flagship school in Gateshead .

Sunday Telegraph

will you be publishing this or are you unwilling to accept reality?

Xxxx

Reply

Hi Xxxx,

Thanks for the info & yes I will be adding it to the BSgroup Furl where it will then appear on the Latest News page of the website. At some stage in the future, if may add further information about this to the website itself. I have a backlog of updates to add so it may be some time yet.

Using Google I have found the stories concerned: They are:

http://www.thestar.co.uk/doncaster/Thorne-Academy-proves-itself-to.3141390.jp

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/08/26/nedu226.xml

A third is here:

http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/exams?articleid=3120003

Quote from the Yorkshire Post: “The £25m Academy complex was built with the help of private funding under the controversial Government scheme. Last year it was criticised after GCSE results fell.”

But I notice you didn’t bother e-mailing me that one.

Anyway if you want the full story, see:

http://www.creationism.co.uk/index.php/Main/TrinityPressReports#passrate

Actually, I should also be complaining to the Daily Telegraph for its sloppy reporting, as I think it gives a misleading impression. It is wrong to call Trinity Academy one of the top performing academies when what the reporter really meant was it was probably the most improved. The good pass rate may have leapt 30% to 63% but what they neglected to say is that last year its good pass rate was only 34% (obviously there is a rounding discrepancy somewhere), down 1% on the, “failing school” it replaced! Now that is hardly top performing is it?

Even if we take the fairest way of assessing the Trinity Academy’s performance & averaged over the 2 years (of its existence) that average still only works out at 48%

By comparison, our local school in Goole, which is roughly 10 miles from Thorne, achieved 54% good passes last year & 68% this year making an average of 61%.

All this was achieved without rebuilding the school, denigrating the work of previous administrations, trumpet blowing, or handing the school over to Christian fundamentalists intent on forcing their absurd beliefs onto other people’s children & turning the school into a political & religious war zone.

Like Thorne, Goole is a small town & mainly a working class area. It has the docks, warehouses & an industrial past & is also described, as is repeatedly pointed out in various council reports, as being an area suffering from a high level of social depravation.

Furthermore, Goole’s main school is an old draughty Victorian building. For example, the students lost approximately 3 days schooling each when the roof leaked in the recent heavy downpours The student’s there don’t have the benefit of a brand new school filled with all singing all dancing high tech gadgets & gismos. They have had to make do with crumbling buildings & old equipment.

I fully accept that a total rebuild & fresh start must have some positive impact on performance, even if it is just a morale boosting one. However I will never accept that the academies program represented good value to the taxpayer & the enormous sums involved could have been better allocated.

Many of theses schools are being knocked down for what appear to me to be managerial weaknesses that could be rectified by concentrating on managerial issues rather than the structure of the school. After all, what businessperson would behave in this manner; who in their right mind would, for example, knock down & rebuild an entire factory complex, for no other reason than that the foreman or some of the workers were struggling to reach their targets?

Well hard luck Xxxx, but a good try nevertheless; I tell you what, have another go next year! And if the figures don’t quite add up I am sure the ESF will slice & dice them into shape for you. How does that old saying go – there are lies, damn lies & creationism.

Finally, if anyone needs to face up to reality it is the creationists. All the evidence, masses & masses of it, gathered from across a wide range of scientific disciplines, from astronomy, cosmology, geology, right the way through to palaeontology, zoology & microbiology (to name but a few) all point to the incontrovertible reality of an ancient earth populated with life forms, whose existence can be best be explained by the theory of evolution.

To deny this, to seek to exploit alleged weakness in the state educational system in order to inculcate impressionable & innocent children with such irrational beliefs, along with all the other creationist nonsense (frightening kids with hell-fire, vilifying homosexuals, etc; you know, all the usual stuff), is nothing less than a heinous abuse of authority.

Professor Richard Dawkins even went so far as calling it child abuse.

Hope this has helped you to see the light!

Best Wishes,

Alan.

PS

To save coming back to this issue, I have decided to upload this reply straight to the website. You will find it somewhere there in an hour or two.

1 Sept 07