How will you manage?”Disillusion about state education sets in because parents feel their child is not doing as well as he might, or because of stories they hear about their friends’ teenage children at comprehensives Once sparked, the anxiety catches like wildfire. Mrs Blackall speaks for many: “I think a lot of these parents don’t have an option. If there was an extension of Alice’s primary school, I think many people would be happy with it But what the state offers in this area is very poor. People are pushed into the private sector who don’t really want to go that way.” A higher proportion of parents in London send their children to independent schools than in the rest of the country (10.3 per cent compared to 7.2 per cent) and that proportion has risen significantly over the past decade.Parents like Oonagh Blackall complain that there is no longer a middle ground in the capital between highly academic, elite and usually single sex private schools and comprehensives where co-education and social integration are offset by weak academic results. Many speak enthusiastically about their children’s primary school and would prefer to continue their education in the state sector, not only because it would save them thousands of pounds a year, but because of the broader social mix state schools offer.Oonagh Blackall’s daughter, Alice, who is sitting the mock as preparation for four entrance exams in 1996, goes to a much in demand primary school in Putney, where many of the top class go on to independent schools. And I’ve been s-h-i-t-t-i-n-g myself all morning,” confides one mother “I told him it doesn’t matter as long as he does his best But of course it does. I’ll kill him if he doesn’t do well,” says another.
They are suffering from a vicarious bout of pre-exam nerves.
Any minute now their offspring, aged between six and 11, each wearing a colour-coded badge, will be shepherded into groups and disappear through the school doors. Here they will sit a formal examination, most of them for the first time. It is only a mock examination, but for their parents the results are of vital importance. They will indicate whether their children, the majority from state primary schools, have a chance of passing the entrance exams next year for a highly sought-after place in one of London’s independent schools.That such a mock exam exists at all indicates the anxiety about state secondary education gripping the city’s middle-class parents.
Most of the parents here this morning would never have considered private education a generation ago. As the first paper, English, gets underway, they lurk in the playground before driving off in a collection of functional estate cars. Then it’s just the trapeze.” Those present at the Royal Albert Hall in the fortnight beginning 5 January will not have to listen to philosophising but they won’t feel it’s just the trapeze either Michael Church. At 8.30 on a wintry November morning, the playground of a Victorian primary school in Fulham, west London, is milling with about a hundred very tense parents and their children
“I woke up at 5am and thought I was going to throw up. Smooth-muscled myrmidons shinning backwards up Chinese poles, bungee jumpers soaring like birds, Portuguese pocket atlases, a Cuban juggler whose mind seems to be elsewhere.
The trapeze artists are silver fish, the Russian acrobats are like slow-moving sculptures. “The trapeze,” says Shana Carroll, San Franciscan trapeze artist, “is a metaphor for everything – the pendulum of life, the heartbeat – except when you’re doing it. It owes something to centuries-old traditions of circus and something else to an impluse that feels as though it started in the Sixties.
The characters, as you see, are fantastical and what they do is fantastic Beautiful, mystifying and death-defying There are no animals except human animals. Or at least that’s the message both stores and police are trying to get across with measures such as opening special mobile police units in shopping centres or main high streets and organising phone-rounds when a notorious thief is spotted.Whatever the measures, crime costs stores pounds 2.7bn each year, including pounds 580m on security devices, according to the British Retail Consortium. In consumer terms, that’s pounds 120 extra on the family shopping bill each year.At the end of the day, the honest consumer loses all ways round: handbags, purses, and increased prices of goods It’s almost enough to send you down to the car boot sale..
These are the days of miracle and wonder, Christmas joys and such. Then next month the Cirque du Soleil comes hither, to stretch credulity and extend daylight beyond all knowing. Photographs by Veronique Vial
They say it was conceived in a mystic moment in 1982, in Baie St Paul in Quebec when the aurora borealis hit. And in that circusless terrain was born an idea that has beguiled wherever it has been seen, from Nowhereville to Malibu. Whatever their motivation, naughty novices, unlike their professional counterparts, want small, easily concealable goods such as accessories, leather goods and gloves And they often don’t consider the consequences. “There’s a misconception that unless they leave the store, they can’t be arrested and prosecuted,” says Mr Campbell “That’s totally wrong. We will arrest and prosecute if we can show sufficient evidence.”And, with a growing number of CCTV cameras, exit bleepers and uniformed and plain-clothed security guards, getting away with a casual theft may not be as easy as it looks.