Tag Archives: Totterdown Community Children’s Workshop

SHINE ON YOU CRAZY REVEREND

The smooth roll-out of one of the Rev Rees’s keynote policies is something to behold isn’t it? In his vast and creaking manifesto last year the vicar promised to, “work with businesses and voluntary partners to ensure that all schools have a BREAKFAST CLUB by 2020.”

By October, the Reverend’s breakfasting ambitions had vaulted somewhat and following his ‘State of the City Address’ the Nazi Post reported that every child would have access to a FREE BREAKFAST at school “to ensure they get off to a good start”. The Reverend also promised he would maximise uptake of the pupil premium “to provide the costs”.

By January this year, the vicar was for turning and announced in a rambling New Year message in the Nazi Post that “we will deliver on a promise to have breakfast clubs in every primary school, so no child has to start the day hungry”. Although any discussion of “costs” had miraculously DISAPPEARED.

Now news arrives from Hillcrest Primary School in Totterdown that a private business, ‘Shine‘, has won another contract with a gullible Bristol primary school to deliver ‘wraparound’ childcare services at the school. This will include a BREAKFAST CLUB and after school childcare at the school.

Shine – getting themselves off to a good start at least – will be replacing the existing locally-run breakfast club at the school after Easter and have announced they will immediately raise charges to all parents by an inflation-busting 30 PER CENT!

Any kids who might be starting the day hungry, however, aren’t even mentioned by the school or their shiny new BUSINESS PARTNER in this brave new breakfasting world. Is this the model the Reverend had in mind for his school breakfast clubs?

Shine, to squeeze a few more quid in profits from parents and to piss off any locals they may have previously overlooked, will also be setting up an afterschool club at Hillcrest in DIRECT COMPETITION with the current service run on a wing, a prayer and a shoestring by a longstanding local charity – the Totterdown Community Children’s Workshop.

And to complete this neo-Roman orgy of PRIVATE SECTOR GREED emerging from the school? A special icing on the cake for some parents: most of the school’s locally sourced music teachers – providing individual tuition to kids – have also announced to parents they will CEASE lessons after Easter!

This comes after the school tried to slap a room hire charge on these teachers, which would have resulted in a 25 PER CENT INCREASE in bills to parents for the same lesson!

Welcome to Rees’s rip-off Bristol where, maybe, for a fat fee to a well-placed business, no child starts the day hungry but parents may well end the day bankrupt …