Tuesday 24 June 2014

School Wastes More Funds on Needless Causes

The school has found new ways to spend an extortionate amount of funds, that should be dedicated to students, on needless expenditures, says new report.

The governor's Pupil Premium Report for the 2012/13 Academic Yearpublished on the School's website, has divulged that chunks of money, that is given to the school for the furtherment of students from Year 7 to 11, have been spent on needless "targeted strategies" and "programmes" (which already sound like jargon that equates to nothing more than a steaming pile of bovine faeces).

Of the £513,671 received for students, only (approx.) 81% went to causes within school that directly benefit students and their education, leaving a 19% that went to causes that the school; that's £97,597 of school funds going to waste.

The main culprit of this money loss was, unsurprisingly, Achievement for All, a vacuous waste of money that we have already proven to be about as important as the Head's opinions on trains. We have calculated in the past the that the school has selfishly wasted £17,250 on AfA, but, as it turns out, we were vastly underestimating by how much the school was willing to spend on a blue plaque for the front of the English Block. The Reported that in the Academic Year 2012-2013, the school spent a whopping £43,000 on AfA. It goes without saying that this is a massive waste of money, and our usual comparison, how many textbooks the school could have bought with that money, comes in at 114,666 textbooks. The report cites that the AfA scheme has given a "5% rise in percentage of students making 4 and 5 levels of progress from KS2-4" as well as being accountable for students grades rising "from 64% in 2012 to 70.8% in 2013". This all sounds great, but these figures fit in with the Head's beloved '5 Year Trend' (which is largely not factually accurate, but that's a whole other article), a results trend that pre-dates the AfA scheme by 4 years. The school's results were already on the rise, and the '64% in 2012 to 70.8% in 2013' fits in with the 63% 5A*-C including Maths and English in 2012 and 2013 trend, as well as the 80% to 88% 5A*-C overall.

Another big spender was Improving Attendance, which scooped £55,000 of the money. There is a difference of opinion over whether this is not money well spent, but we here at the Trash believe the school should not waste funds on getting people into school, and should spend it on those students already in school, and benefiting the reward of going, which is, of course, an education. In spite of this, it should not take £55,000 to improve attendance (it could be done with a twix and the promise of Heads Down Thumbs Up), as that is an extortionate amount of money. In equal regard, why do we need an "attendance team"? A single attendance officer would be too much, let alone a team.

Then we come to our personal pet hate: the School Magazine, which managed to scrape a £600 fund. We are not entirely sure how they could possibly spend six-hundred pounds and produce what they did. The Report cites that the Magazine helped in "Developing extended literacy skills for most able students", which we failed to see in the illiterate, un-spellchecked mutterings scraped together by some Year 7's in their morning break. It also talked of a "wide variety of content", which stretched from Google's top five motivational posters to fanfiction about a bunch of prepubescent twats that, surprisingly, don't attend Hampstead. Finally, the Report said of the Magazine that "students who were involved last year have gone on to lead the work this year", which is bollocks, otherwise they wouldn't have to have advertised for an entire new team for their Magazine. It goes to show that if it is a worthy cause, people will commit; the Hampstead Trash has had £0 of funding, and has an average output of 3-4 articles a week, whilst the school's official magazine has had all that money pumped into it, and its total output is one sullied rag once ever, which not only did we have the bad luck to read, but the poor fish in the pond were burdened with it too after students simultaneously became nauseous over fanfiction.

To view the document of which we speak yourself, you can find it here.

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