Rooney, Ronaldo & Referee!

 REPEAT after me. “Referee! Your constant whistle blowing is causing us no end of grievance. Verily we say, desist and permit the game to flow as the waters beside the bonnie banks of Ayr.”

You join us in the classroom at the new academy school in Reading. The Government is keen to foster links between schools and football clubs and Premiership side Reading FC are in the thick of it.

As the Independent reports, the new £27m academy, which opens tomorrow, “will have a specialist sports focus, giving pupils at the academy the chance to gain specialist training at the club’s football academy.

“They can also take part in a programme which aims to provide youngsters with after-hours classes in the three Rs, in the atmosphere of their football club.”

That’s not Rooney, Ronaldo and Referee!, but reading, arithmetic and writing. This is just terrific.

Who has not looked at the national game and gasped as the likes of the aforesaid Rooney’s academic excellenc? “Whammo!” says the erudite young Rooney as he refulgently slams his metatarsals into the testicles of a prone Portuguese.

Reading’s Madejski academy, named after John Madejski, chairman of Reading, features covered glass walkway and spacious classrooms. As Madejski says: “Our kids are our future, but all the time are left in Dickensian buildings that are falling to bits. These academies give them something better."

And this is better. Of course it is. Designing schools in steel and glass to look like modern football stadiums can only improve students’ behaviour.

But we need more. We need 110 per cent if children are to succeed. Perhaps there could be turnstyles in place of school gates, a PA system that announces whose birthday it is and plays Russ Abbot’s Atmosphere at the start of each school day.

Teachers emerging from a tunnel can only improve things further.

And we hope you will join in a hearty rendition of the school anthem (with nod to the Eton Boating Song): “Jolly learn-ing weather, And a hay har-vest breeze, Blades on the feather/ How’s that referee?”

Posted: 5th, September 2006 | In: Uncategorized Comment | TrackBack | Permalink