Fires. Pizza. Education.

I caught a bus to Oldham this morning. From the top road I could see smoke from the still smouldering fire at Dovestone Reservoir. 

Th usually very visible Manchester skyline was shrouded in smoke.

These photos are not my own by the way. I’ve “borrowed” them from other sources.

We have no hint of smoke in Delph. The wind is in the wrong direction for that. Our daughter says they can smell it strongly in nearby Ashton under Lyne where she lives. 

There’s another fierce fire burning at Tintwistle, near Glossop.

There are reports that a young woman has been arrested and charged with arson for the Dovestone fire. But the continued heatwave has the media warning us that we are in for a fire-wave! 

Oddly enough the wind makes today’s heat more bearable. And in Manchester, despite the hazy photos of the shrouded skyline, there was no small of smoke. There did seem to be a lot of police cars and fire engines zooming around though.

I had gone to Manchester to have lunch with my Italian class. Ever since the Covid lockdown we have not met in person for our conversation class but meet online and usually at the end of term head for an Italian restaurant somewhere in the Greater Manchester area to remind ourselves that we do exist as real people. We must combat AI!

Today we lunched at a restaurant on the corner of St Peter’s Square, a restaurant called Forbici, which means scissors. The door handle is a shiny pair of scissors and special scissors are provided for customers to cut up their pizzas. A novel idea for us English but apparently quite common in Italian households. The pizzas were very good.

Amongst the many things that our conversation rambled over was the provision of support for pupils with special educational needs in local schools. A friend of our Italian teacher has a problem in that her son, who had excellent support throughout his primary school is not getting anything like the same level of support in secondary school. I don’t have statistics but I sometimes get the impression that this is often the case. This might be a sweeping generalisation and I apologise to those secondary schools that do provide excellent support. 

One factor that strikes me as significant is the size of schools. One of my bugbears is the belief that our secondary schools are simply too big. Even large primary school are small compared to the huge establishments that are secondary schools. Children who are perhaps cosseted and protected all through primary school can get lost in the machinery of secondary education.

Another factor is the change to having a whole host of different teachers for different subjects. Even though primary schools do “buy in“ specialist teachers for PE and Music and sometimes Art, the children still spend most of their time with one teacher, who gets to know them well and recognises and adapts to their individual quirks. In the secondary school situation, it’s hard to get the same kind of overview. If a pupil is having provlems or being difficult individual teachers may think it8s just their own problem, not something t9 be addrssed by all. That’s a theory anyway! There it is.

Other countries have more serious problems. We have heard a lot about the education of girls in Afghanistan, or rather about the lack of education and the restrictions to their freedom. But this article points out all is not rosily enlightened in the area of boys’ education. A strong emphasis on religion limits the breadth of subjects studied, with university classes taught by recent graduates, often very little better informed than their students. Surely a rather shortsighted attitude to education.

We should be thankful for what we have.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!