Up there with the best

BUTTERSHAW UPPER School's newsletter No 33 is an interesting document.

Page seven is devoted to the amount of money per pupil the school gets from the council to fulfil its function as a place of education and social training.

It points out that according to the Times Education Supplement the country's 20 highest achieving comprehensives each get £2,556 per pupil compared with £2,416 for schools at the bottom of the national performance tables.

Buttershaw gets just £2,115 for each of its 1,350 pupils. Funding has remained stagnant for 20 years, head teacher John Hull declares - the light of battle, or irony, in his eyes.

He likes to think that investment will improve this year, especially as by September the number of pupils is scheduled to increase by 500 to 1,850 under the council's Schools Review.

Page six of the newsletter, however, warns parents to be aware of two points regarding the proposed 11 to 18 Buttershaw High School.

Bradford hasn't finalised its building plans. It's unlikely that our new building extensions will be ready for September 2000. We are likely to be working on two sites - the other will be the old Buttershaw Middle School site which we'll use for one year only.

Bradford can't tell us much about the funding which schools like ours will receive to cope with all the difficulties of creating a successful new school.

On top of all this the school has a deficit of £300,000. It shows in the cracked walls of some of the corridors that lead upstairs to John Hull's study.

"We are under-funded and we are being asked to pay back £100,000 a year for three years. It's not do-able!" he said pleasantly.

"If we got proper funding we wouldn't have a deficit. Part of that deficit is because our heating system was 41 years old and had to be replaced in total. That cost us £80,000. The local authority should have had a contingency fund for things like that. They didn't, so we had to replace the system. Part of our deficit is the heating crisis."

All this is by way of establishing the background, putting the school's real achievements into proper perspective because John Hull is fed up with middle-class journalists spending an hour or two in the locality and going away to write up horror stories about "notorious" Buttershaw.

He has a point.

A supply teacher I know who has worked there said although the decor and state of the books was poor the school itself was among the better ones in which he had taught. My friend's horror stories related to senior schools in north and east Bradford.

Buttershaw's September newsletter, No 31, reported to parents that pupils had achieved their best 'A' Level and GCSE results for several years, with ten gaining more than 20 points in the former while in the latter nine pupils scored A to C grades in nine or more subjects.

Newsletter 33 carries two unsolicited endorsements, one from a parent, the other from the Nell Bank training centre.

In the first a Mrs D Oliver, writing in response to John Hull's publicly-expressed disapproval of the behaviour of some homeward-bound pupils, states: "I believe that Buttershaw Upper is one of the best schools in Bradford despite being located in a low employment area. Both my sons are very happy at your school and its is sad to see its reputation spoiled by a few pupils."

Bruce Fowler, manager at Nell Bank, was so impressed by the attitude, behaviour and work of Buttershaw students who attended at two-day course in early November, that he wrote to John Hull. He said staff-student relations were "of the highest order", their class and exercise achievements were "quite exceptional" and noted the "absence of negativity, the tremendous support" students showed for each other in a strange environment.

Students have also ventured further than Nell Bank. David Plunkett and Karl Dunbar spent a fortnight at a school in Oregon in the USA, with which Buttershaw has developed links. What struck them most was the evident pride of the American students in both their school and their community.

David Plunkett and Harina Patel were among a party who visited the former Nazi death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau in eastern Poland. Buttershaw's history department does a lot of work on the Holocaust and the school itself has a simple, unfussy, anti-racist policy.

Ten other Buttershaw pupils are raising £15,000 for an exchange with students in Nepal, due to take place this year.

John Hull would dearly love Buttershaw to be turned into an Enterprise School.

"We are famous for our enterprise education and have won lots of awards. It began before I came here. A number of pupils form a company, decide on a product, make it and sell it. They then go through to regional competitions, work with our representative from industry. We beat Giggleswick School and Leeds Girls' High School," he said.

Twelve Business Studies pupils raised £200 for War on Cancer as part of their GNVQ Advanced Business course. They split up into groups and in their spare time created a small business which made and sold a range of goods from samosas to computer disks.

The foregoing does not disguise the kind of problems shared by most upper schools, the problem of attendance by pupils with little or no interest for example; but at least it demonstrates that hope has not been abandoned by everyone who crosses the threshold of Buttershaw Upper.

Certainly not by the head teacher. On one of his study walls John Hull has pictures of Nelson Mandela and Bob Dylan, two very different individuals unafraid to voice their convictions, who each in his own way has defied tyranny.

'It was just a damn good place to go to'

Buttershaw's head has an obvious interest in wanting to talk up the school. But what about some former pupils; what have they to say about it?

Owen Williams, right, who takes up his marketing post with Bradford Council next month, said all he could think of was that Buttershaw Comprehensive, as it was 15 years ago when he was pupil, was a good honest place to go to with very honest teachers.

"As a pupil I wasn't aware of its notoriety, if it was notorious. It was just a damn good place to go to. I have two children now who live in the area and I wouldn't be worried if they chose to go to that school. I have nephews there," he said.

Thinking back to his own days, his particular recollection was of Mr Ward, a teacher still at Buttershaw, who introduced the school to basketball.

"I was part of the basketball team. Mr Ward decided to experiment with basketball because we had a small gym. We used to go to school a good hour-and-a-half before school started to train. We trained at lunchtimes and after school, five times a week.

"It was unusual to get that kind of commitment at that kind of school at that time."

Three members of the band Ooberman - Danny Popplewell and brothers Andy and Steve Flett - attended Buttershaw before John Hull's time as head.

Unfortunately, the band are currently recording tracks in Liverpool. However, for Yorkshire Television's recent rockumentary band members did return to Buttershaw Upper for filming.

In 1990 the playwright Andrea Dunbar died prematurely at the age of 29 from a brain haemorrhage. Three years before she died the author of Rita, Sue and Bob Too told me in an interview of the former Buttershaw teachers Tony Priestley and Mike Smith who had made a difference to her life.

The girl from Buttershaw Estate didn't like school, set out to be a rebel, had to leave at 15 because she was pregnant and lost the baby in a car crash.

"After that, somehow, that must have shook me up. I was thinking too much. I went back to school and I went every day. I only missed a couple. I can't put me finger on why I went back, something just made me realise," she said.

The "something" was the interest her teachers took in her writing after the hell-raiser inexplicably developed a passion for plays, copying some of them to find out how they were written and constructed.

Head teacher John Hull says a lot of other former pupils have gone on to be successful if not famous. He is thinking of inviting some of them back to encourage his pupils.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.