admin March 3rd, 2008
On 28th February solicitors representing parents from Wynstones school wrote to DCSF in reply to their response to the initial letter from Wynstones school seeking full settings-wide exemptions for Steiner Waldorf schools.
The text of our letter is available here.
Also, the campaign work has been in the news again. Armando Ianucci had a great comment on the EYFS situation in The Observer (Sunday March 2 2008). There was also coverage in the Times Education Supplement (TES) only available in paper form.
Graham Kennish also spoke excellently for the Open Eye campaign on Radio 4 on The Learning Curve on 25th Feb.
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admin February 11th, 2008
The DCSF’s response to the Wynstones School letter (see You Can Help section & previous news) finally arrived on Thursday 7th Feb, after almost two months - well outside the DCSF’s published fifteen day timescale for reply.
After such a long wait, we were hoping for something of substance. However, if you read the Wynstones letter and supporting documents, and compare it with the DCSF response, you will see that the government has completely failed to properly address any of the issues or questions raised. We have drawn up a document highlighting the problems with the proposed solution of exemptions for individual children.
The Wynstones parents campaign group is now looking into the option of challenging the government’s consultation process, and to this effect has instructed a lawyer, Kate Harrison, who successfully challenged a Government consultation on nuclear power on behalf of Greenpeace in 2007.
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admin February 1st, 2008
No response from DCSF
On 10th December 2007 Wynstones School sent a letter to the DCSF, requesting "a formal response… within the DCSF published timescale of 15 days."
As of 1st February 2008 (nearly two months later) there has been no response other than a two-line email thanking the school for its patience. Even if the DCSF published timescale refers to working days, the failure of the Department to respond adequately within more than twice its own published timescale is a cause for concern. The Wynstones kindergarten parents’ campaign team will be meeting shortly to discuss our next steps.
If you are a parent at a Steiner early years setting and have not yet contacted us, please do so at team@savesteinerschools.org and we’ll keep you up to date with the plan.
TES article
This Friday’s Times Educational Supplement includes a feature on the Wynstones campaign, and the possible effects of the EYFS on Steiner kindergartens on page 14 and an interesting article on unstructured play and brain development on page 36 of the accompanying TES Magazine.
Open EYE Petition
One of the Wynstones kindergarten parents was involved in drafting and posting a petition on the 10 Downing St website on behalf of the campaigning group Open EYE, asking for the learning and development requirements of the EYFS to be downgraded from statutory requirement to professional guidelines.
Already, out of over 8,000 petitions on the site, the Open EYE petition is the 45th most-signed. If you have not already done so, please sign it online here - it only takes a minute - and forward the link on to your friends. The more people who sign, the more difficult the issue will be to ignore!
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admin January 22nd, 2008
Somebody with too much time on their hands hacked our website and deleted the new posts. We will be looking at our backups soon to see what if anything we will re-instate
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