The Olympic rings towed through the Pool of London earlier this week, marking 150 days to go until the London Games opening ceremony
Around one thousand schoolchildren from Croydon look set to miss out on the chance of a lifetime, to watch Usain Bolt, Victoria Pendleton or Tom Daley competing at this summer’s London Olympic Games, and all because they have been let down by Mayor of London Boris Johnson.
Tonight’s Evening Standard ran a report, highlighting how Boris’s much-trumpeted Get Set Scheme, which has repeatedly promised to give away 125,000 Olympic tickets to London schoolchildren, will now actually deliver just 95,761 tickets to children. That’s a shortfall of more than one-quarter on the original Boris pledge.
Croydon, because it has one of the biggest borough populations, has one of the biggest allocations of Olympic tickets for school kids – 4,214. Had Mayor Johnson actually managed to deliver on his full pledge of 125,000 tickets, Croydon schools might have expected to receive another thousand tickets.
Under BoJo’s original undertaking to the children of London, 1 in 8 of the capital’s school pupils were supposed to get the chance to be a part of the Greatest Show on Earth and attend the Games, which open in the Olympic Park on July 27. The 125,000 figure was quoted in Mayoral press releases and there is even a video of the Mayor saying it.
The spin doctors in the Mayor’s office are now claiming that despite always saying “125,000 children” or “125,000 pupils”, what they actually meant was school kids and teachers.
Why, when the scheme is restricted to children aged from 10 to 18 years, is there a necessity for so many teachers to supervise the children – a ratio of one adult to every three children, many of whom will probably be in their late teens?
- Inside Croydon: brought to you from the heart of the borough, free of charge, an independent voice standing for freedom of speech for the people of Croydon
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