Week 314: How this makes me sound
September 8, 2024
- “I’m a big boy because 4 is a big boy age and look at my long legs” – Chaz, wearing only a tiny pair of underpants with a fish in a baseball cap on them, gestures emphatically at his legs. Clear proof that, yes, he is a big boy.
- E calls things that are medium either “smally-big” or “biggy-small”.
- My big boy (who is actually a little boy, but I get really yelled at when I call him that) started school this week. He did 15 whole minutes.
- So now I no longer spend approximately ÂŁ60 per day on nursery fees.
- It makes me feel a bit light-headed to think of how much money that is. That’s going to buy me a lot of knik-knaks down the charity shop.
- An indication of who my readership is and their interests, last week I got not one but two emails with train themed locations to stay following my Duxford Holiday Inn rec.
- September. Never a good month at the FT. I have to white-knuckle it til Christmas every year.
- I asked E (6.5) to “explain that to me like I’m five years old” and wow she think’s five year olds are thick.
- I hate how this makes me sound but 2 weeks ago I read this article in the guardian and it got me thinking about how the kids at my kid’s school probably do pretty well because of all the money their parents are able to contribute, compared to the kids in economically poorer areas.
- And so I thought “Should I just match every £1 I give to my kids school to another school in Brighton?”
- And then Lizzy showed me this medium article by Tom Spencer about the differences in PTA raising across Haringey and I thought “I could do that for Brighton”
- So I’ve now managed to join three datasets into one spreadsheet:
- PTA fundraising data for the whole of Brighton & Hove. I had to artisanally hand search all ~50 of these from the Charities Register
- Schools data for the whole of Brighton & Hove (which is just available as a CSV via the GOV.UK schools register [DREAMY])
- English indices of deprivation 2019 data at the Lower Layer Super Output Area (LLSOA) from the the Open Data Communities site
- The next step is putting that on a map, which I’m sure I can do if only mapit.mysociety.com will take my money for some more API calls.
- When I was talking about this to another parent, they told me about this podcast about the educational divide in Brighton. It’s really well produced and regrettably I did cry a few times listening to it because it’s do damn sad how f’ed schools are.
- Anyway OK there’s going to be a lot more on this. And I still haven’t worked out if matching my current school spending to another school in Brighton is a good idea, and if so, which one.
- Sorry this has all gotten a bit david cameron’s big society.
- Don’t even get me started on how much money the PTA at the nearby private secondary school of Roedean is getting. I will immediately start shouting.