(1) Critics of what the government is up to cite Roke primary in Croydon , repeatedly deemed "outstanding" but suddenly charged with being "inadequate" in 2012.
(2) She said: "The children at Roke deserve the best possible education, but any suggestion that there is a 'done deal' on a sponsor is wrong.
(3) A Harris Federation spokeswoman said the final decision on Roke would be made by Michael Gove , not them.
(4) This turned out to involve a questionnaire which only asked whether, when it became an academy, Roke should be sponsored by Harris, not if parents wanted an academy at all.
(5) Roke was targeted after Ofsted assessed it as "inadequate" in May.
(6) "We have serious concerns about standards at Roke primary.
(7) Parents and governors at Roke primary in Croydon say they face a "hostile takeover" of a consistently successful local school after a single unsatisfactory Ofsted report, one caused mainly by a computer failure, which they say meant staff were unable to provide inspectors with the correct data in time.
(8) The situation at Roke mirrors that at Downhills primary school in Haringey, north London, which Gove ordered to join the Harris chain last year, despite 94% of parents voicing opposition.
(9) Unlike Downhills, Roke has no consistent history of poor performance.
(10) A DfE spokesman said: "We have serious concerns about standards at Roke primary.
(11) A group of parents battling plans to remove Roke primary in Croydon, south London from local authority oversight have also released a transcript of a meeting in which a Department for Education "broker" told them she believed the school was failing based largely on a half-hour tour during which she thought the children looked "bored".
(12) Roke's governors told the DfE that if it had to become an academy they wanted it to be sponsored by their local secondary academy , the destination school for almost three-quarters of Roke pupils.
(13) At the same meeting some parents were angered when the "broker", a freelance contractor hired by the DfE to work with converter academies, described how she decided Roke needed help.
(14) A parent whose son attends Roke, who asked not to be named, said there had been "zero consultation".
(15) Harris is lauded as a consultant on failing schools, yet Roke is not a failing school.
(16) In May Ofsted gave Roke an "inadequate" overall assessment , with the inspectors citing a lack of data about pupil performance and poor middle management.
(17) The significance with Roke is that it has no long history of under-performance, supposedly the only reason for forced conversion .
(18) She said: "Because of our track record in the area and the exceptional primary team we have established, we are confident that we could give the staff at Roke the support they need to provide outstanding education for children at the school, which is why we agreed to become the department's preferred sponsor."
Rook
Definition:
(n.) Mist; fog. See Roke.
(v. i.) To squat; to ruck.
(n.) One of the four pieces placed on the corner squares of the board; a castle.
(n.) A European bird (Corvus frugilegus) resembling the crow, but smaller. It is black, with purple and violet reflections. The base of the beak and the region around it are covered with a rough, scabrous skin, which in old birds is whitish. It is gregarious in its habits. The name is also applied to related Asiatic species.
(n.) A trickish, rapacious fellow; a cheat; a sharper.
(v. t. & i.) To cheat; to defraud by cheating.
Example Sentences:
(1) Veronica investigated her classmates, and that still matters In Mars vs Mars, the 14th episode of season one, Veronica’s classmate Carrie (Leighton Meister) claims she slept with their teacher, Mr Rooks (Adam Scott).
(2) Rooke said dredging was part of the solution, "but not the whole solution".
(3) In their 125th year, the Rooks fended off bankruptcy to become Lewes Community Football Club, thus joining AFC Wimbledon, FC United of Manchester and Exeter City, among others, as collective entities.
(4) · Denis Eric Rooke, industrialist, born April 2 1924; died September 2 2008
(5) David Rooke, director of flood and coastal risk management at the agency, said residents should be "braced for some of the most serious coastal flooding we have probably seen for at least 30 years and in some cases for over 60 years".
(6) Across eight cask pumps, seven keg lines and three hand-pulled ciders, the Rook runs the gamut from exotic European imports (Opat's self-explanatory orange and mandarin Czech pils) to beers from lesser-spotted UK micros, such as Grafters and Jurassic Brewhouse.
(7) Coagulase-positive staphylococci were found in the throats of 46 rooks (69 per cent) and 47 gulls (21 per cent) out of totals of 67 and 229 birds, respectively.
(8) Rooke added: "We are talking about today [Thursday] and tomorrow.
(9) It was a phase in Rooke's experience that he never forgot, though never exulted in nor even willingly discussed.
(10) In a free living rook (Corvus frugilegus) a well differentiated squamous cell carcinoma without keratinization arising from the oesophageal mucosa was found.
(11) Take the well-known example of Rookes v Barnard , decided by the law lords in 1964.
(12) As the rook moves on the chess board, it reaches all 64 squares in the ordering of the codon numbers, which prescribe the codons by a simple formula based on the position and size of the nucleotides in a triplet.
(13) Bacteria of the genus Campylobacter were isolated from 28 Rooks (Corvus frugilegus), 1 Red Kite (Milvus milvus), 1 Lapwing (Vanellus vanellus), 1 Coot (Fulica atra), 1 Common Moorhen (Gallinula chloropus) and 1 Northern Mallard (Anas platyrhynchos).
(14) Rooke had already been in charge of trial runs across the Atlantic - once in a 23-day battle against continous gales because they had to avoid normal shipping lanes, especially in bad weather.
(15) Now, it is said, it may be hard to find new senior executives at the corporation's successor, Centrica , because Rooke's equivalent, Sam Laidlaw, earned just £2.2m last year (after a £5.7m payout 12 months earlier).
(16) and 21 Rxe6!, a temporary rook offer which gave White a raging attack.
(17) Brought up on the slopes of the Quantocks and Exmoor, hence, perhaps, his love of game, fishing and the odd rook for the pot (his father was a keen field sportsman), he was educated at Wellington school, in Somerset, where a fellow pupil was Jeffrey Archer.
(18) Case study: 'We want to bring him up in a household with working parents' Once the rent, council tax and utility bills have been paid, Kristie Locke, 20, and her partner, David Rooks, 25, are left with £7.70 a day to buy food, clothes and other essentials for themselves and their eight-month-old baby, Leyton.
(19) As Rooke remarked to an interviewer 10 years later, "There isn't any doubt, it was a hell of a battle.
(20) In rooks the residues of chlorinated pesticides and PCB were dependent on the land use of the regions compared (e.g., industrial, agricultural), but no such correlation was found for the HCB residues.