President: Robert Emuss.

Coppins Green Primary School,

Clacton-on-Sea,

Essex.

CO15 3SP.

Tel. 01255 422825

September 2002.

Dear Colleague,

Welcome back to the new school year. I hope that you all had a restful well-earned break and have returned refreshed and ready for the fray. With any luck the batteries will be sufficiently recharged to get us through to Christmas!

Have you joined the Association yet? If not, then the latest spending review is the best reason ever for doing so. Don’t delay, do it now! Many of you have and the numbers are swelling daily. Please call me, or Ann Robinson for an application form.

Estelle Morris has trumpeted that she has won a £15 billion rise for education over the next three years. Obviously, secondary schools will be receiving the lions share, because they are facing reforms! Primary schools have already been through those reforms and have delivered – at enormous cost to our staffs and to ourselves. We may have got a pat on the back, but no extra resources that I can recall for our schools.

In addition, we are seeing the gap in the direct payments to schools widen still further. An average sized secondary school (around 900 pupils) will this year receive £165,000, rising to £180,000 next year and the year after. The largest of our primary schools (900+ pupils) will receive £50,000 a year for the next three years. Schools of under 600 pupils will receive proportionately less, as they did last year.

Are you happy with the status quo? You are in all probability just too busy to do anything about it, and anyway, what can one head do to change things? Well, you can join the association that speaks for only primary schools, and that is not prepared to put up any longer with the inequities that we have had to live with for so long.

Of course, we have no magic wand that will guarantee to right all these inequities, but you join us in the knowledge that we shall not let the matter rest – nor any others that are important to primary schools. What one individual school will not be able to achieve in isolation, thousands speaking with one voice will.

The tragic events in Cambridgeshire have tremendous implications for primary school life. We all use parents in a variety of situations, as well as other members of our communities, all of whom enrich the education in our schools. Many of us also welcome NNEB and other childcare students into our schools. We are told that these should be police checked before they work with our children! We must be careful that the life of our schools does not become impoverished.

In the meantime, let us spare a thought for the headteacher and staff of that school, for the parents of the two girls and for the whole village community, for whom this has been a truly harrowing time. May such a thing never happen again.

I wish you all a peaceful and successful year.

With best wishes,

Robert Emuss