Building Dreams

EldestGirl is due to start school in September. She is lucky enough to be going to a brand new school where she will be within the very first cohort of children. The school is so brand new that it hasn’t actually been built yet. The children are going to be in mobile classrooms for the first academic year, moving to the main school twelve months later. The mobile classrooms turned up in the last week or so but there is no real sign yet of any permanent school being built.

Some parents can be worried about this – about the building noise and heavy plant machinery near children. Others worry that timescales might slip and their darlings will be relegated to a muddy patch of nothing for their entire school career. Not me. I see it as a learning point, an opportunity to enhance the curriculum. So, for example:

 

Literacy

Children will begin to recognise high-frequency words. With help from the builders, these will likely be, “fuck”, “fuck it”, “oi oi saveloy” and “get your tits out for the lads”. These words have also been chosen as they are all easily decodable phonetically.

 

Mathematics

Children will begin to understand a basic project plan and how many weeks behind they have slipped. Extension work will be provided to more able students by learning to calculate which school year they will likely be in when the school finally completes, if the foreman doesn’t pull his fucking finger out.

 

Understanding the World

Friendly competition will be encouraged in the school by each child being placed into a “house”. This house system will provide many exciting opportunities for the children to compete across several disciplines: bricklaying, grouting, plumbing and electronics. The winning “house” at the end of each term will be awarded a full day’s reprieve from emptying the chemical toilets.

 

Expressive Arts and Design

The walls need painting, don’t they? Imagination will also be encouraged, as children will be regularly asked to “imagine” they have a school, to “imagine” their playground and to “imagine” Sally from Year 1 didn’t climb in the digger and reverse over the school rabbit.

 

Personal, Social and Emotional Development

Standards of behaviour are very important at the school, but so is knowing when to put your foot down with those cunts at Jewsons. Children will be given the opportunity to project manage their peers on a rota basis; ten house points to anyone who manages to shave more than a week off the completion time, without breaching any major health and safety laws.

 

Physical Development

Whilst pupils wait for the playground and PE centre to be completed, the school encourages all children to take part in the school’s daily fitness programme – carrying bricks to wherever Brian wants them today.

 

Communication and Language

See: those cunts at Jewsons, above.