Opinion: Perhaps Fenland should step up and help town pool’s trustees
News that Chatteris’ Empress Swimming Pool has had to close temporarily because it can’t find someone to offer insurance is really sad for all those involved: the trustees who run the pool on a voluntary basis, those that use it and the town as a whole.
Chatteris is the only town in Fenland that does not have a publicly owned swimming pool – it has been a long held dream of the town council to get one built.
But despite funding being available to build one years ago Fenland District Council has never really shown an appetite to operate a pool should one be built.
Now, of course, they have signed over all their leisure facilites to Freedom Leisure, so the chances of Chatteris getting its own publicly owned baths is realistically a pipe dream.
So it really is a massive blow that the Empress, which has been home to a successful swimming team over the years, and has been the venue where most of the local school children learned to swim, is now shut.
The trustees are hoping it is only temporary; for some reason insurance companies are not happy, this year, to insure the pool without life guards being available, despite doing it for donkeys years.
I really hope some solution can be found soon, because learning to swim and having the opportunity to have a splash around really is something that should be available to all – after all we live in a district renowned for its many waterways making being able to swim a real life-saving skill.
Perhaps Fenland, so long absent in helping Chatteris with its swimming facilities could step up and help either find an insurance broker, or if all else fails perhaps offer some funding so life guards could be availabe at the Empress.
I would say Chatteris should have that kind of help, after all the other Fenland towns get support with their pools.
The council has offered financial support to Freedom Leisure so the pools can stay open in Wisbech, March and Whittlesey, so why not Chatteris…
Ofsted – a word to send shivers down the spines of teachers everywhere and for good reason, a school’s reputation and success hangs on what an inspector from the Office for Standards in Education thinks.
The impact an inspection can have on a school and its staff cannot be under-estimated – just look at what it did to headteacher Ruth Perry who tragically took her own life after learning her school was set to be rated ‘inadequate’.
Her death has called for a shake up in the Ofsted system – and I would say it is about time.
Reports that sum up whole schools and what they have to offer in just one word ‘outstanding’ ‘good’, ‘requires improvement or ‘inadequate’ - cannot possibly be a true reflection of a school, its teachers or its pupils.
Of course ensuring schools are offering our children a good education is important.
But, and it is a big but, there is so much more to a school than an arbitary report drawn up after one or two inspectors have spent a couple of days in classrooms every four or five years.
Surely the most important thing is how your own child is doing.
Are they happy to go to school?
Are they learning as well as you would expect them to be and achieving at the level they should be?
Does the teacher understand your child and know what they need as an individual?
If so then that’s all that matters...
And while I’m on the subject of education let’s talk about making everyone do maths until they are 18 – really? Thank goodness I’m well past school age.
Maths was pure purgatory for me, I did not understand it and it took many hours of extra lessons from my friend’s mum (a maths teacher) for me to scrape an ‘O’ level – I needed it for this job – but to this day I do not know why I needed to do trigonometry or why I carried a little blue book (called a log book) to all my lessons.
Maths is a ‘Marmite’ subject, and as long as people have enough skills to add,
subtract, multiply and divide then what does it matter.
Making it compulsory to 18 is not going to make
children love it more, or if they’re like me, even better at it – that’s another bureacratic thought that needs to be subtracted into the ether...