THE FUTURE OF CH

[Avon]

Some OBs, who do not contribute to this Forum, are working against CH’s present trend to move upmarket and attract children from richer families. In the words of one such OB, “Housie … seems to be going from strength to strength. … [We] have been fighting a losing battle to keep it for the poor, but the Headmaster and Treasurer seem determined to open it up to the international rich, so it has to spend enormous amounts of money in order to compete with other leading public schools. My fear is that it will end up as ‘Charterhouse in fancy dress’, which is not what Bishop Ridley, Mayor Dobbs and Edward VI had in mind.” So many other schools were founded with similar intentions to serve the poor, yet only CH has continued to do so fully.

Where is this happening please?

[ailurophile]

Eowyn3099 wrote:

If she does get a place we will be one of the many parents who have children being financially assessed on two different systems, our DS arriving before the changes went through. If both children where in school and our income disappeared overnight, our DS would get instant full support, but our DD would only get a temporary hardship bursary, plus any bursary that she received would only be allowed a maximum of a 10% upward fluctuation, while again our DS would be reassessed according to our new income! Confusing or what!

Eowyn, I’m not surprised that you’re confused. Having two parallel assessment schemes is patently both unfair and unworkable!

As an example, for parents whose children entered CH before 2012 there is a cap of 12.5% on the amount of gross income we are ‘allowed’ to spend on housing costs; but the examples published online appear to indicate that this cap does not apply to new entrants (although the available information is no longer specific on this point, and unhelpfully obscure on most others). So for a family with one child on the ‘old’ system and one on the new it must now be possible that not only will a different scale of contributions be applied to each, but the actual total amount of net assessed household income to which these scales apply could also work out differently for each child – even though they live in the same household.

Madness!

[wurzel]

With regard to total enrolment pre&post merger I started in 1981 and Coleridge was pretty much empty by then ready for the merger - my entry year was 95 boys which dropped to 94 when 1 left at the end of 2nd form, when the girls came down from hertford on my UF I think there were about 30 of them on our year giving a total of about 125 iin the year. They initially took over Col and Barnes as full age spread houses whilst the boys rejigged so each B house was jnr (2nd form, 3rd form LE and half of UF) and A houses were Snr (1/2 UF to Grecians) this was a bit of a stop gap as previously Lamb to Peele had been senior and were internally modeled with studies and toists and Barnes-LH were junior with open day rooms / games room / brew room downstairs. As I left LH converted to girls and by the time by brother was leaving a few years later the grecians houses had just been finished and the current through boys houses had come into existence

At the time I was local living in Itchingfield Parish (just) but I was a full boarder for all 7 years (on 100% bursary) as day pupils were not allowed and I wouldn't have had it different, there was also another boy in LH who lived on tower hill (David Sutcliffe), 1 who lived in the Boars Head, 1 from the Needles estate (Steve Hitch) and one from Southwater (Gavin Howard) but all boarded. The only day pupils i knew of were masters children who lived on site and we always felt they missed out on some of the fun elements of life (like dorm cricket)