The Collective Futures Free School in Hackney, which will
open its doors in September, is set to enable smug-faced, over-paid Guardian reading
professionals to send their children to the kind of schools they themselves
went to without having to feel guilty about it.
Wealthy lefties living in inner-city areas have long faced
an overwhelming quandary, as Becca Hobbs, freelance travel journalist and mum,
explains. ‘People kept asking me, ‘why don’t you just send Otto and Jerry to a private
school?’ But I would never do that. It
just totally isn't me. I buy my haemorrhoid cream from an organic women’s
co-operative in Palestine. I've been to fucking Tibet. I can’t send my kids to
private school. The trouble is that the local comp is full of ridiculously poor
children. Don’t get me wrong, I like poor people. They’re great. It’s just that
the ones round here take it a bit too far. Well, much too far, actually.’
Becca goes on, ‘Basically, we realised that we had a choice:
move to Kent, or set up our own school. You don’t get pop-up galleries or Eritrean
film festivals in Kent. It was a no-brainer.’
Becca asked around and found a large number of parents in
her local community who were facing the same dilemma. After a series of
meetings they came together, agreeing to found the Collective Futures Free School.
At present, free schools are forbidden from actively
selecting students on the basis of parental income. This would mean that, in
theory, poor children would be able to attend the school. However, Becca is
confident that Collective Futures has found a fail-safe way round this: the
school will be registered as a special school. ‘We realised that, actually, our
children all share a specific Special Educational Need.’ explains Becca, ‘That
is, they are Gifted and Talented. When he was four, Otto asked me to stop
reading him excerpts from Polly Toynbee’s columns because he found the syntax
somewhat jarring. You can’t expect kids like him to be educated alongside normal
children. It would be absurd.’
The governing body invites applications from anyone who can
prove that their child is Gifted and Talented. To be deemed Gifted and
Talented, children will need to demonstrate exceptional intelligence, ability or a
particularly precocious grasp of how to use systems to accumulate wealth and
power.
More information and application forms are available at the Collective Futures
website www.twatsinbrightlycolouredchinos.com
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| After weeks of debate, parents have finally agreed on the Collective Futures school uniform |
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