Our school are adding a new reading programme into our school day. At first these may seem like a good idea, we agreed. Then we found out, in order for this to work the school are planning to take away half of our lunch. Leaving 20 minutes to eat. This is especially a problem as the school have also introduced a restrictive canteen line system. With this, every house has a certain time slot to purchase their food. Unfortunately, these two combined, have resulted in the leaving the last house to use the canteen with barely enough time to eat their lunch. We as students feel this as unacceptable, as we don't have enough to relax, socialise and prepare for our next lesson.

In addition to this, the new reading scheme will not work in our school. This is because students who do not want to read will pay no attention and no one can force them to read. Which will in the end leave no benefit and render the scheme pointless.

Already our school sets unrealistic time goals, as they expect us to get eight hours of sleep, take part in an extra-curricular activity, complete our homework in a deadline, revise for any tests and have a healthy mindset. The addition of this reading we see this as pointless because we already do plenty of reading in class, not just in English, and during homework. Furthermore, plenty of students already read at home. Since we are now in upper school and our GCSE's are nearly upon us, the amount of stress put on us is already too much and adding in this scheme will just make it worse.

The school talks about how we must get three balanced meals a day, yet we have barely enough time in school, and out of school, to achieve this.  Without having enough food our energy levels are low, we can't pay attention as well and our moods are affected. We can't seem to understand why our school thinks this a good idea.

Yes, the school might be doing to please Ofsted but the amount of backlash from students and concerned parents will become a greater problem than this, which will just make the school look worse.

With all of this said, we hope you will sign our petition and help make a change for our school and for the better. Thank you for reading.