In 1994, a small boy called Frankie started his school life in the reception class of Millfields primary school. It was was the start of a 20-year period during which at least one child of mine was at Millfields. After my youngest, now aged 15, completed Year Six it took a while to get used to not regularly visiting.
But my sense of connection with it hasn't gone. I still bump into young adults who look vaguely familiar and say, "Hello, are you Frankie's dad?" I still bump into their parents. And when head teacher Jane Betsworth told me that Millfields and some other local schools were off to the park after school on Friday to have a picnic combined with a protest against reductions to school budgets in Hackney as a whole, I knew I had to be there.
It was good to see Jane and some of the other Millfields teachers who had done so much to help my children done the years. There were speeches by one of the governors, a parent from another school and by one of our excellent local councillors, Ian Rathbone. It was also good to see the brilliant flag being waved by the lovely little girl pictured above.
When Frankie began at Millfields, the reputation of Hackney's schools, especially its secondaries, was poor. He was fortunate that the start of his schooling coincided with a tremendous drive for improvement across the borough, helped by increased funding from the Labour government of the time.
To see all that progress threatened is bad for my blood pressure. More importantly, it is bad for all Hackney's children. Follow the progress of the Hackney wing of the Fair Funding for Schools campaign here and here.
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