Inside the school where 98% of the pupils are travellers.

Inside the school where 98% of the pupils are travellers.

Take a look at this interesting article by Laurence Cawley for the BBC. I won’t elaborate on the article to much but instead encourage you to take a look yourself. The children of Travellers are not always educated to what other communities might consider the usual level but this article paints a fascinating picture of the challenges faced by teachers, schools and communities to put the best interests of the children first. However, the local community will not discuss the school in any way which asks further questions about equality in modern Britain.

The article describes a unique primary school on the edge of an Essex village, in fact it is the only example in the country. Cawley explains “only a handful of its children will ever go on to secondary school and some of the pupils will disappear for weeks or months at a time. Yet hardly anybody wants to talk about it. Why?”

But, as Cawley elaborates, “then came Dale Farm, which grew to become Europe’s largest traveller site. Increasing numbers of children from the site – some of it legally developed, some of it illegally – joined the school. The shifting pupil mix came to a head in 2004, when the then head teacher and 10 members of the governing body quit amid concerns at falling pupil numbers and how the school would fare in the future.”

Interestingly, the local community’s reaction to this influx of Traveller children was, at best, controversial, as the author describes “it was also the year children from settled families evaporated. Completely.”

Have a read, interesting stuff.

JD