Imagine taking 5 children and barring them from going to secondary school.  They can stay in, play out, go shopping and play sport but definitely no schooling allowed for five years.  How bad would that be? 

As usual, two inches of snow caused chaos in London earlier this week.  In many areas schools closed, including 22 in Newham.  Fortunately, at CST we managed to stay open across all schools in our trust. 

Each child in our trust attends school for roughly 200 days a year.  They do this for at least 5 years.  So that's a total of 1000 days, give or take, in a child's entire secondary school career.

Across the piece, we’re teaching around 5000 children a day. So now, go back to the top paragraph and, as they say in the USA, “do the math”: what if we had closed? 

At the end of Stephen Spielberg’s magnificent epic “Schindler's List”, Stern utters a line from the Talmud: “Whoever saves one life saves the world entire.”  Oscar Schindler couldn't save everyone but his small actions helped a few.

On a much smaller scale, and hypothetically speaking of course, thanks to the resolute determination of our staff this week in coming into school despite the snow, we saved the equivalent of five children from total secondary educational purdah.