Poor old Stanley Deason would not be happy were he still around to see what had happened to the secondary school which once proudly bore his name.

Standing high on a hill above Whitehawk in Brighton, it was intended as a tribute to a man who, although always on the Labour opposition benches of Brighton Borough Council, made a great contribution towards education and who became mayor of the town.

At one time, Stanley Deason High School fared fairly well. But it began to fail in the Nineties and was then renamed Marina High School in an attempt to give it a new start. Another head later and it was renamed the East Brighton College of Media Arts.

When Tony Garwood was appointed head of that, he was well known in Brighton having already taught elsewhere in the town. He was seen as the ideal person to take advantage of the Government's Fresh Start initiative for schools in trouble.

Now Mr Garwood is going and there has been much criticism both of him and Frieda Warman-Brown, education cabinet councillor, for suppressing the contents of a letter expressing concern from education director David Hawker about standards at the school.

I don't blame them for wanting to keep the news close to their chests at that time as they wanted to give the school a fighting chance in its new guise. The real problem was that, so soon after the start, it should ever have got into trouble in the first place.

Once again, the unhappy saga of the East Brighton College shows how difficult it is to turn round a failing school in an area which has more than its fair share of problems. Often many of the best pupils and teachers take flight to other schools, leaving remaining staff in a state of siege.

If reports of what went on at the school are to be believed, there were extreme problems with controlling a substantial minority of pupils, with many others not bothering to turn up.

Mr Garwood has been thanked for his loyal service and is undoubtedly a fine teacher. But even he, in his resignation statement, seems to have realised that if he was the right man for the job when the school was started, he is not the right head for the future.

What this school desperately needs is a head prepared to crack the whip and remove, if possible, all the main troublemakers among the pupils. Then a close look needs to be taken at the staff to see who is suitable to steer the school along the steep and bumpy educational road ahead.

Then the school needs to look at the governors and make sure they are an exceptional bunch - tough, determined and loyal. An appeal must be made to parents from parts of East Brighton outside Whitehawk to make sure they support the school and give it a better social mix than it has at present.

If councillors and officials, who support this beleaguered college and the education zone which surrounds it, are prepared to announce their public commitment by sending their own children there, so much the better.

Poor old Stanley Deason doesn't have a school named after him now and probably just as well considering its recent history. But this month a brand new double-decker bus came on to the streets of Brighton bearing his name and that's a much safer bet for not getting into trouble.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.