Londonist » nursery

Local Bromley Paper Worried About PAEDOS

Rachel Holdsworth — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 15:00:22 +0000

We’ve brought you news about nurseries getting paranoid when it comes to protecting their little charges, but how about this for a reversal – Bromley residents don’t want a nursery near them because it might attract PAEDOS.

The News Shopper reports that Sunnyfields Day Nurseries’s application to turn a house in Pickhurst Park into a nursery has prompted 30 objections to the council and a petition of 140 signatures, mainly concerned with traffic, parking and increased noise. But when one mother happened to mention a worry that “paedophiles will be attracted to the area to be close to the nursery”, with a couple in their sixties musing “there are flats overlooking and people could move in there and watch the children. It is a possibility it could happen” (as we muse: they don’t seem that bothered about it. Is there a ‘possibility’ someone has suggested the scenario to them?), the local issue of the News Shopper took it as a cue to start yelling about PAEDOS.

This is ridiculous. PAEDOS aren’t even the main objection to this planning application, but PAEDOS do make for a more arresting headline than “exacerbated parking problems”. Regular readers may recall the News Shopper in Lewisham and Greenwich awarding a homophobic letter its star prize earlier this year and being rather pleased with the ensuing furore: is this more evidence of a race to the bottom? Or is this the start of every school being picketed by mobs objecting to PE kit offering the salacious flash of a pre-teen calf? We all know PAEDOS can’t resist…

We believe the photo of this week’s News Shopper is courtesy of Matt Sawyer, but if anyone knows differently please let us know.

Paranoid Nursery Installs Excessive Security System

Dean — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 14:30:26 +0000

Photo / Cry

Two years after a Dartford nursery introduced fingerprint scanners for parents, a similar facility in West Dulwich is about to turn itself into a veritable fortress.

Asquith Day Nursery’s £80,000 security apparatus includes a six-foot high wooden fence, denying anybody the chance of peering inside (and, of course, giving the children a view not dissimilar to that of inmates at nearby Wandsworth prison). Fingerprint scanners and and a regularly-changed passcode provide two levels of scrutiny for anybody entering, and staff will manually check against an approved list of people cleared to collect their children. Mobile phones have also been banned from the premises, lest some enterprising paedo smuggle himself in and start taking snaps.

According to the nursery’s manager, the tough measures have been implemented to assuage fears of gang-related violence after a spate of stabbings around Lambeth borough. Parents are supportive, and the nursery is considering rolling out the plan nationwide. All very well and good, but has have nursery-aged toddlers regressed so much that they engage in postcode beatdowns? There’s little point repping your endz when most three-year olds can barely remember their name, let alone address.

In reality, the security precautions may placate parents sickened by the awful actions of Vanessa George, and scared to be branded irresponsible (look at the opprobrium heaped on the Schonrocks, also from Dulwich, who dared let their children cycle to school alone); but they’re unlikely to actually do anything to make their children safer — George, after all, was a nursery employee. What the measures will do, unfortunately, is underscore for a child that the adult world is an inherently dangerous one, something to be feared instead of engaged with.

Fingerprint Scanners Introduced At Nursery

Dean — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 14:36:13 +0000

Just a normal, stressful morning, getting your wee ones ready for the day ahead. Has Taynor remembered his lute? Does Duchy have her ballet shoes? Everything in order? Great, just enough time to drive them to the nursery, pass through the fingerprint scanner, and kiss them goodb-

Hang about, fingerprint scanner? Where’s this nursery located, the American embassy? Nope, Dartford actually, where Springfield Lodge Day Nursery has taken the step of introducing scans to confirm the identity of parents picking up and dropping off their offspring.

The scanning device is fitted on an access door to the nursery, and from now on parents and staff must have their digit docked to get in or out. While most parents are satisfied that the scheme will both boost security and “allow quicker access to the nursery”, charity Kidscape branded it as “paranoid and overkill”. Said Director Michelle Elliiot:

“We don’t want to give children the idea that the world is so dangerous that they can’t even go to nursery school without being scanned.”

And we have to agree that she has a point. High-profile abduction cases over the last decade have been molded by a febrile, pandemic-loving press into a climate of fear that is at odds with reality. The number of child abductions and murders in Britain remains low, yet the fear of such crimes is astronomically high.

Hence measures such as those unveiled at Springfield Lodge, which reassure parents yet reinforce from an early age the poisonous notion that the world outside is like Lord Byron: mad, bad and dangerous to know. Do we really want to be impressing this upon our kids from nursery onwards?

Image courtesy of Cry’s Flickrstream under the Creative Commons Attribution license

Won’t Somebody Think Of The Children?

Lindsey — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 16:29:11 +0000

The BBC programme Whistleblower will tonight reveal some fairly extensive and shocking inadequacies in Ofsted inspected nursery and childcare provision.

Following a tip off from an Ofsted insider, 21 year old undercover reporter, Imogen Wilkes, decided to test out the claims herself by infiltrating a Hanwell nursery and getting a job as a nursery assistant, armed with secret filming equipment.

21 year old Ms Wilkes blagged a job with a fake CV and references, despite having no actual experience of looking after children. She was then charged with the care of up to 13 toddlers at a time, admitting herself “terrified” and only able to exercise “damage limitation” in respect of the poor kids who’d wound up in her “care”.

We’ll be watching the show with interest tonight and trying to work out exactly who’s more irresponsible – the Ofsted inspectors allegedly instructed not to go looking for problems, the duped nursery that didn’t get round to checking out their new employee’s background or the hapless undercover reporter angling for a big shot Beeb break at possible expense of toddler welfare.

Whistleblower is on BBC1 tonight at 8pm.

Image courtesy of Claudecf’s Flickrstream