Monday 5 October 2015

An Unexpected Journey to Dismay

In the third instalment of our trilogy of advertisement-bashing, The Battle of Five Smarmies, we attempt to strenuously liken the school's incessant advertising come Open Day time to a set of films that has gone on for too long, involves characters who somewhat lose the plot, and despite all the decent graphics, has a disappointing end; we wonder how we'll cope...

In the latest bout of local press marketing, emblazoned atop the Hampstead advert, was a massive image of the Head's face, pretending to care about a student, and so the following section will be entitled 'The Desolation of Szmaugkowski'. The title this year had strayed from the usual meaningless collection of buzzwords, the press-monkeys spending more than five seconds copying-and-pasting last year's stuff onto this year's, and instead read 'Our journey has been remarkable'; remarkably pisspoor, judging by the remarkably thin copy in the faux article accompanying the advert, and we're sure remarkable for some of the remarks we have made, which have been so remarkable that the nationals found them remarkable, and not in a good way. The remarkably thin blurb, of course, had nothing to do with the school's poor results and lack of any meaningful award in, well, ever. Instead they had to fall back on their Achievement for All (which they paid for), their UNICEF Rights Respecting School Awards (both of which they paid for), their Investor in Careers Award (which they paid for) and their Investor in People Award (are you getting the gist? -Ed), all of which could be put to better use educating children, you know, like what a school does. What we're trying to get at is that any Ingrish teacher will tell you 'remarkable' doesn't necessitate good, and Hampstead, as we've shown, may be 'remarkable' for all the wrong reasons.

Also what's remarkable is their persistence to use awards, even after we've mocked them for it, or have been downgraded in, and still call it a success. The second half of the full-page spread (which, as we've said before, costs a few thousand pounds) had the usual emphatic quotes from a cast of unknown adjudicators and anonymous parents, who, judging by their reviews, had never actually been to Hampstead, as well as on the page a large, red, super-imposed sticker heralding the school as being "amongst the TOP 5%" of Sixth Forms. This sticker, however, neglected to mention, as we have in the past, that the school used to be in the top 2% of Sixth Forms, which, you guessed it, the school paid for, and it's not even for achievement, but improvement (which means in the last year the school has got worse at being less crap).

If you want see the advert in full, we would have to question why you are reading this blog.

Exceptional: the exception being its the only school in which the
boilers never work.

No comments:

Post a Comment

DON'T GET OVERLY GASSED.