A schoolboy has been excluded from lessons after he organised a mass protest over a lack of homework.
Aaron Parfitt, 14, led 100 of his fellow pupils on a walkout at Bispham High School in Blackpool last Wednesday over concerns about teaching standards.
Despite his eagerness to learn, Aaron was told he was banned from lessons for the next two days, and now claims to have been excluded again ahead of a meeting between teachers and his mother.
Aaron originally contacted Blackpool Council and Ofsted to raise concerns over the quality of teaching before losing patience and organising the 100-strong walkout last Wednesday.
Teachers took a dim view of his actions and excluded him for two days on Thursday and Friday last week – much to the anger of his mother Janet, 52.
Now Aaron – who returned to the school today – claims he has been told he has been excluded again ahead of a meeting with teachers and Mrs Parfitt later this afternoon.
‘I’m absolutely fuming they’ve excluded him because he’s doing the best he can to get a good education,’ she said.
‘He was only trying to stick up for himself and his mates and then he gets told to stay away from the school for two days,’ she added.
Mrs Parfitt says her son emailed Blackpool Council and Ofsted to say he was worried about teaching standards, but claims they kept passing him on to other numbers.
She says Aaron eventually got so ‘fed up’ that he started to organise the protest.
Aaron said he felt forced into staging the mass walkout after raising his concerns to the school’s acting head teacher, his head of year, and the head of the maths department.
He said: ‘I failed my maths exam in school and I was really worried because I just wanted to make sure I was able to do the work properly.’
‘We’ve had loads of different teachers and we weren’t getting enough homework so I decided to call the council and Ofsted to see if they would help me but they couldn’t,’ he added.
Aaron said that after his complaints got nowhere, he and a group of friends decided to walk out of their lessons.
He said that by the time the group got to the school’s playing field, they noticed a large number of pupils had followed.
In May last year Bispham High School was placed under special measures by Ofsted inspectors who said standards were low and that there was too much ‘mediocre teaching’.
