Free-School: Governors appeal

A south London school that has transformed the lives of local children is seeking to convert its Saturday lessons to an all-through full-time Free School to educate 380 – 400 children.

Aiming to educate pupils between the ages of 5 -18, the Board of Queen Mother Moore School (QMMS) are seeking community support to realise their “monumental” ambition.

For the task ahead they are looking to enlist volunteer support to help them achieve their aims. QMMS say they need help in many areas, including with finance, capacity and capability, marketing, business planning and premises development.

The school started  in 1981 and has transformed the lives of over 4,000 primarily  African heritage students who were either excluded or were having major difficulties learning in mainstream schools, others merely needed extra curricula support. 

The Saturdays and summer projects tutorials, enabled the students to develop into skilled professionals. 

In Lambeth, only 55% of families managed to secure their first choice schools in the 2010/11 intake. And QMMS want to use the opportunity offered by the Department for Education to create an all-through Free School supporting local children where, in many aspects, they may otherwise be held back.

They plan to deliver fulltime education to 380 pupils per year, ‘through improved teaching, active accountability, and compliance to the national curriculum; to enable pupils of minority communities to attain qualifications that compare with the best schools in the UK’.  

A QMMS spokesperson said of the disengaged young lives that they have helped turn round; “There is a correlation between the lack of educational opportunity, deprivation and crime, we believe that since it costs an average of £100,000 per year to keep a young person in prison,  the QMMS’ added value is enabling these young people out of the deprivation trap, has saved the State an average of £400,000,000 in prison costs, plus the taxes and disposable income, derived through some of them becoming employers and employees”.

The school states that they have adopted the educational ethos of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) in the United States of America that have recently received a grant of $100 million dollars from President Obama.  

Which the Board says has ‘added greater educational value by restoring pride and a thirst for educational excellence’.  And that there is ‘rigorous suitability and vetting tests’  for teachers who apply to the school.

They have also adopted 'critical pedagogy' related to the Brazilian ‘community education theology’ model of Paulo Freire. This pedagogy is characterised by its emphasis on orientation for learning, social cohesion and active citizenship through dialogue between teachers and pupils, and as equal participants in the learning process and mediated by lesson content’.

To get involved and support the QMMS Board in their proposal for anall-through full-time Free School contact them at: email: queenmothermooresch@claphammethodist.org or thompson308@btinternet.com. Telephone: 02077200763/07507129449