Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The school has even asked parents to avoid including meat in packed lunches.
FOOD FIGHT
Our children’s school has BANNED meat forever and we’re furious – they even told us to make vegetarian packed lunches
15:15, 12 Feb 2022
Updated: 16:23, 12 Feb 2022
PARENTS have blasted a school’s decision to go permanently “meat free”.
Students at Barrowford Primary School near Nelson, Lancashire, are only offered vegetarian dinners – and kids are also urged not to bring meat in their packed lunches.
The new rule was brought in last year, but a letter informing parents of the change was only sent out on Thursday.
And while the school claims it has hasn’t received any complaints about its meals, Facebook is full of unhappy parents.
Mum Zoe Douglas is so seething at the situation she is even trying to transfer her children to a different school.
“It is a joke. I’m looking to move mine as I’ve had enough of that school,” she said.
“I think they forget that non-meat eaters and vegans have to take a lot of supplements. What supplements they getting instead at that school?
“Nothing, probably saving on food costs.”
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Read more: https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/17631295/school-bans-meat-vegetarian-packed-lunches/
This isn’t the first time Barrowford has hit the headlines. A few years ago they were criticised for a “lack of structure”, over their policy of never reprimanding the children.
Inspectors slam primary school where there’s no such thing as a naughty child and teachers are banned from raising their voices – and give it Ofsted’s lowest possible rating
- Barrowford Primary School in Lancashire branded ‘inadequate’ by Ofsted
- Head teacher Rachel Tomlinson had banned punishments for children
- School warned it could be put in special measures unless it improves
- Parents call for Ms Tomlinson to resign and complain over lack of structure
By JAYA NARAIN FOR THE DAILY MAIL
PUBLISHED: 23:59 AEDT, 25 September 2015 | UPDATED: 00:40 AEDT, 26 September 2015
A school which refuses to discipline misbehaving pupils saying there is no such thing as a naughty child has been handed the worst possible rating.
Then 355-pupil Barrowford Primary School has been told to improve or face action after it was branded ‘inadequate’ by Government inspectors.
The school has faced ridicule and condemnation after the head teacher ripped up the rule book and scrapped all punishments for bad pupils.
She also banned teachers from raising their voices insisted no child was ever to be considered naughty.
Traditional fixed times for playtime and lunch were also scrapped with the pupils deciding when they wanted to eat or have a break.
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I’m guessing they’ve restored at least one rule – the kids are strongly discouraged from eating meat, in order to save the world from climate change.
My wife tells horror stories about her school in Britain. There were a few teachers who made an effort, but there were also time servers whose focus was on collecting their pension, who couldn’t have cared less about the kids.
I also heard another story, at a dinner lecture given by a head teacher of a deprived school who cared. She told us it didn’t matter how poor or deprived or uneducated the parents were, every one of them wanted the absolute best for their kids. She somehow managed to do her job, despite the 300 lengthy reports she had to complete every year, every one of which was attached to a narrow tranch of funding the school desperately needed.
A few months after the head teacher who cared gave her talk, she was fired. She had quietly transferred some money, not for her own gain, but to help the kids – she used some book budget money to buy the kids some sports equipment.
But she got caught. The tranches of money associated with those 300 useless time wasting reports were very strictly prescriptive on how that money should be spent. The head teacher’s attempt to exercise on the ground judgement infuriated the remote bureaucrats she answered to. The bureaucrats didn’t care that the head teacher was doing an amazing job, that the school in a deprived area was starting to rise up league tables, as growing student and teacher engagement started to bear fruit. All the bureaucrats cared about is the head teacher who challenged their authority by not following their strict guidelines to the letter. She had to go.
My impression of the state education system in Britain is pretty negative. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of teachers who make an effort, islands of excellence, head teachers who burn their life and health fighting off the bureaucrats, trying to do right by the kids in their charge.
There are also teachers who don’t care, who are too lazy or untalented to leave teaching and try to find a job they might enjoy, who linger on, wasting everyone’s time.
Its the third kind of teachers who frighten and horrify me – teachers who see the kids as toys, playthings for their deranged social engineering fantasies. Bad teachers with wild ideas, who thrive like a nasty fungus infection in a decaying education system which appears to actively discourage genuine compassion and effort.
I don’t know whether this is what is happening in Barrowford Primary. I have never been to the school, the closest I came to Barrowford Primary in person is a passing visit to the town, on a day trip driving around Lancashire, admiring the old buildings. But whatever is going wrong at Barrowford Primary, it has to stop.
Education is a tricky thing. Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.
Broad brush strokes naturally, but the strong observation is that if you are actually good at your selected skill set you can usually get a lot further in life shopping in the Free Market.
Those who can’t excel in that environment often fall back into teaching. (Those who can’t excel but have better charisma fall into politics… probably… 😀 )
It is after all a reasonable thing. Kids don’t really need to be taught a lot as part of their education. So if you know more than the kids you are entrusted with then you are probably skilled enough.
So – again broad brush strokes – apart from the minority who want to teach because they believe children are the future, you tend to get a lot of people in teaching who would utterly fail to transfer any of their skills into the professional world.
Who are some of these people? Possible those who have a collection of Hobby Degrees and who have finally been forced to accept the government isn’t going to wipe out their student loan debt.
And which demographic tends to study Hobby Degrees? yes…
The other question is what actually is the role of children’s education?
Big question.
There are the simple knee jerk about the Three Rs – Reading, wRiting and antiRacism… I mean aRithmatic. The theory is this are the core building blocks that allow them function in society. Reading skills to understand the invoice, maths skills to realise you are being ripped off and writing skills to put in the letter of complain. Or something similar.
We also get the social subjects which are intended to inform the growing child of their place within their culture and the more STEM focus that starts to give them a target to apply the Three Rs in greater detail.
Unwritten is the brute force social interaction skills that are needed to teach the child that Mummy and Daddy are not going to look after you for ever and these are basically taught be artificially creating social density far beyond they would otherwise be expected to deal with and then only stepping in if physical injuries occur.
Basically, the thugs are showing that bullying gets results, the alphas realise they are better than their peers and everyone else learns to keep their head down least they attract attention.
Lets be honest, school can be brutal.
Then we get to the question of Higher Education.
The Narrative is the Universities are Vital for our Future. The people normally telling us this are the universities, cause (spoiler) they aren’t doing this for love and sunshine and have bills to pay just like everyone else.
Problem is if you remove STEM you are left with a huge mass of Hobby Degrees that offer very little to the community as a whole. Applied STEM could/should almost be considered a trade. You learn the skills needed to work in Engineering in the same way you would learn the skills needed to maintain a fleet of motor vehicles. Technical skill sets with – for the large part – objective answers to problems.
In my current Day Job there is a Grad Programme where fresh faced end products of the University System sit like glorified work experience kids and occasionally break things. They are NOT the next great thing that is going to lead us to greatness. They are 20 somethings with maybe 3 or 4 years experience and aging book theory.
(Think about it. Courses often revolve around text books. Text books need to be published. To publish someone needs to write down the current level of ‘correct’ understanding. If you are in a dynamic field by the time the text book is published and courses structured around it the data on the pages could be years out of date.)
For STEM fields the students would more than likely be better off being raised by Industry itself, and the only reason they are not is because Industry doesn’t have the time. So universities are accepted (or maybe tolerated) by industry in regards to STEM.
So, at best higher educations is pushing out STEM noobs who still need a lot more polishing before they are useful and at worse is making a circle of death of useless Hobby Degree types who fall back into teaching and further corrupt the long term education food chain.
Hard truth? Probably the only real role in society for Higher Education is to keep the unemployable out of the crowded youth job market for a bit longer.
School debts aren’t cancelled, they are transferred to tax payers.
I have to wonder about the intelligence of people who believe that anti-racism involves the claim that whites are evil and the cause of all problems.
You don’t get sorry wokeness oozing irony much better than this-
https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/distillery-boss-resigns-after-drug-video/ar-AATUBEp
What’s the shareholders’ problem? They think their workaholic CEO keeping an eye on the competition should have better work/life balance perhaps?
silly bugger shouldnt have paid at all and gone public himself
Stupidity is a sufficient explanation.
Yes, flying veg and fruit in from around the world is so much better than eating meat! So many of our food animals are raised on land not suitable for agriculture and feed is stocks not suitable for human consumption. And do these animal lovers really want to be responsible for the death of all these animals if not for food there is no reason to raise them or allow them to breed?
Much as a number of horse breeds face extinction in modern times because their tasks are no longer necessary.
A chicken farmer in America, Perdue, has been buying a lot of Television advertising time where they claim their chickens are better because they’re fed a strict vegetarian diet.
Apparently, the farmer ignores chickens being excellent insect eaters, i.e., carnivores. Given a choice between a grasshopper or cracked corn, they will take the grasshopper every time.
When my family raised chickens, they were notorious for harming other animals, including humans. People that wore sandals quickly learned chicken bites draw blood and chickens are aggressively persistent with the chicken running as fast as a human while simultaneously continuing to peck the injury they caused.
First she banned punishments. Then she banned meat. So what’s the punishment for taking a ham sandwich into school as lunch?
Hmmm… I think the kids have her checkmated on that one.
“My wife tells horror stories about her school in Britain.”
Having been schooled in three different countries, England, Ireland and Belgium I can say without doubt Ireland was by far the worst. School dinners in England were pretty good IIRC.
Those who go into the education field tend to be the ones who couldn’t cut it in other walks of life. When I speak to students at the university I work at, I can usually pick the education majors out in about two sentences. They know all the jargon of the wokerati, but have no sense about life at all. Occasionally, I get pleasantly surprised by one who seems to have a decent head on their shoulders and I try to help them learn as much as possible. The others are already lost. Unfortunately the good ones usually only last 3-5 years in the classroom before they go do something else. The toxic leftist know-nothing environment at most schools drive them away – and I am in a fairly conservative area.
When sausages are made illegal, only criminals will have sausages.
Wait… maybe that was guns.
Don’t be silly, gun’s can’t have sausages.
A self fulfilling statement.
By definition, if they have illegal sausage (spiced chopped or ground meat), they will be criminals.
Here in America, sausage is also cooked as patties, like hamburgers are cooked.
hey…. teachers and schools emits CO2..
or simply heating schools..
the idea is..”we know what is good for you”
Time to the pitchforks and burning torches out. Angry mob assemble!
I feel bad for those kids. Their health will be impacted by the decision and not in a good way.