...Labour feel
you're never too young to get a taste of it:
A children's centre set up by Labour to provide care for local youngsters has been forced to close... because the families using it were judged too middle-class.
Nice going, Labour!
Summer's coming, you know. Want to send some goons out to the beaches, maybe kick over the sandcastles of any under-fives whose parents look a little too
affluent as well?
Yes,
under-fives. This government knows how to pick its targets...
Paint Pots Arts Club was established in 2000 under the Government’s flagship £7billion Sure Start scheme, with the aim of teaching under-fives to paint, draw and sing.
It is one of the busiest of Britain’s 3,500 Sure Start centres and caters for 500 children of all backgrounds who live within a two-mile radius.
Note that: '...caters for 500 children of
all backgrounds...' Pretty unequivocal, no?
However, it seems someone didn't get that message:
The area covered by Paint Pots is one of the most diverse in the country, including deprived council estates and houses worth £1million.
Paint Pots director Ella Ritches said the Learning Trust, which runs 19 childcare centres on behalf of the Government, ordered her to target more deprived families in 2008.
So, she duly leafleted nearby estates held meetings with the local Turkish and Kurdish communities. They didn't bite.
And:
...in January this year, Mrs Ritches was called to a meeting with officials from the Ann Tayler Children’s Centre, a larger Sure Start programme which the Learning Trust used to fund Paint Pots.
She discovered that the Learning Trust had scanned the postcodes of all parents using the centre and decided the home addresses indicated users were not sufficiently ‘vulnerable’.
Ahh, now if only the guardians of educational achievement put that much ingenuity and hard work into, say, teaching the
kiddiewinks to read,
write and add up....
