EDUCATION / COUNCIL VOICE
Asian Voice - Saturday 17th December 2011
Council to provide £5k for street parties Neighbourhoods across Waltham Forest will receive an extra £5,000 to spend on street parties to help celebrate the Olympic Games or the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. Full details of the scheme are still being finalised, but it is anticipated that residents will put the funding towards street decorations, entertainment and refreshments via Community Ward Forums while the Council helps by organising road closures and insurance. The £5,000 does not have to be spent all on one event, as different streets or estates may want to celebrate separately or pool their
resources with neighbouring wards. In addition, each Ward Forum will continue to receive its annual £10,000 budget to spend on local projects and neighbourhood initiatives. The decision to give local Community Ward Forums a cash boost was made to help celebrate two pivotal events for the country: the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games and the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. The street parties will be paid for thanks to the same one-off Games-time deals that are funding the Council’s Big 6 events and paid for last week’s Senior Citizen’s Lunches. Leader of Waltham
Forest Council, Cllr Chris Robbins, told the media: “Next year the Olympics will bring together athletes and spectators from all over the world and this cash boost will help bring our local communities together as they celebrate two key national events. We’ve promised our residents a fantastic Olympic Year, and we want every Community Ward Forum to take us up on our offer and show us how creative they can be when it comes to celebrating 2012.” For more about Community Ward Forums visit www.walthamforest. gov.uk/community-wardforums
BBC star says economy is the real casualty of foreign language decline Casualty actress Sunetra Sarker is calling on secondary schools around the country to take part in a new scheme which will award £4,000 cash prizes to schools promoting language learning to 11-16 year olds. The British Academy Schools Language Awards will go to fourteen schools across seven UK regions as part of the Academy’s new £5 million programme to help combat the national decline in foreign language and quantitative skills. One award in each region will be
to a mainstream secondary school and the other to a community school with an additional £4,000 prize for the overall winner. Less than 50% of pupils study a foreign language to GCSE level. While English has historically been the dominant international language, over 75% of the world’s population don’t speak English. Lack of language skills has been estimated to cost the UK £21 billion every year. Sunetra, who plays Dr Zoe Hanna in the long-run-
ning BBC medical drama, explains why she’s supporting the campaign: ‘Learning a language in secondary school enabled me to study French at university. I studied and worked in France for a year with my degree and had one of the best years of my life. The British Academy Schools Language Awards are a great initiative to promote the benefits of learning a foreign language – it can open up so many opportunities for youngsters.’
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Passage to India for Kingston’s Karishma A Kingston University student has won a place on a train journey, travelling the length and breadth of India to look at new design projects. Karishma Rafferty, pictured, will join 450 other young people for the trip that will last 15 days and cover 6,000 miles. The 25-year-old, who is currently studying on Kingston’s Curating Contemporary Design MA course, will join the Jagriti Yatra (‘awakening journey’ in Hindi) as it visits cities all over India. The locomotive leaves Mumbai on Christmas Eve, returning more than two weeks later, having travelled as far north as Delhi and to Madurai near the country’s southern tip. Karishma – who was also an undergraduate at Kingston, being awarded a first class degree in
Graphic Design in 2007 – secured her place with a CV which includes stints working for publisher Phaidon Press and the Royal Society of Arts in London and for internationally renowned design agency Pentagram in Berlin. Karishma is anticipating a very inspiring journey. “I think it’ll be intense,” she said. “Those 15 days on the train are going to be packed with fascinating speakers, visits and discussions, I
want to document as much of it as possible for the students and staff back at Kingston University.” She’s hoping to build close friendships with other participants on the trip with whom she’ll be able to collaborate in the future. “I feel confident that this experience is going to be a huge boost to my career as a designer and curator,” she said. Although Karishma’s mother’s family is from India, this will be Karishma’s first visit to the subcontinent. Her grandparents were born in Sindh province, which, after the partition of India in 1948, became part of Pakistan. They emigrated, eventually settling in Spain. Karishma will be blogging about the journey at www.designyatri.wordpress.com
Olympic tickets on offer for city status schools competition Tower Hamlets youngsters will have a chance to get their hands on a pair of tickets to the Olympic Games, thanks to a competition launched as part of the borough’s city status campaign. Launched by the Mayor of Tower Hamlets, the competition involves schoolchildren drawing their favourite place in Tower Hamlets from the
50 landmarks that are included in the borough’s city status bid document. Amongst the landmarks are some of London and the UK’s most well known places such as Brick Lane, Tower of London and Canary Wharf. There are also landmarks cherished by the local community like Victoria Park, Whitechapel Bell Foundry
and Columbia Road Flower Market. As well as winning themselves a pair of tickets to the Olympic Games, the winner will also have their design framed and put on public display. The winning design will also be put into the archives along with other information and materials from the city status campaign.