About The Burliegh Nonconformists Society

As you already know, we are students at Burleigh Community College in the UK, but this page goes into more depth about our origins and our school.

Firstly, you need to know this. Most of the things that happen at Burleigh involving major decisions by staff are done to either try and make us all conform, have less freedom, or to benefit the College itself. Now, you would think a school's priority is to its students, but a lot of the time, this isn't the case at Burleigh.

This is how it has always been at Burleigh since we have been here, and lately it has got worse. A chain of events in the past few months was to be the last straw in the minds of us that could blatantly see Burleigh for what it was.

A small example. A recent "vote" on school uniform proved to be a pointless exercise, as it was clear the management had already made their descision. To put it breifly, students we given the chance to "vote" and "have our say", which unsurprisingly was an overwhelming NO! Parents of prospective students also had an input. After the "voting" Burleigh revealed there would be a student uniform for the younger students. In an article in a local paper, the vice principal was interviewed and said that a "significant number" of parents voted yes - notice that a significant number doesn't neccessarily mean a majority, especially taking into account the hundreds of students' votes. Also, in repsonse to students' protests that had voted "no", the vice principal said, "This is not a democracy!".

We couldn't believe it! They had said that we were supposedly voting on this descision, and yet from this statement, it seems our votes didn't matter or even count. Due to the lack of evidence showing a clear majority in favour, it seems Burleigh had already decided to introduce uniforms!

So, in November 2004, a group of us decided we'd had enough! So we formed the Burleigh Nonconformists Society (or the BNCS). Obviously, we as students will remain anonymous, as no doubt the upper ranks of Burleigh will soon get wind of our web site, especially since its URL is almost identical to the school's official site (www.burleigh.org.uk). This brings us to our name.

You may have noticed that our name is "misspelt". This is mainly because, fortunately Burleigh hadn't registered this misspelling of their own website address when we came to think of a name, but also it ties in with our theme of refusing to conform.

Most importantly, our aim is not just to go round saying bad things about Burleigh, but we all believe that as we are practically adults, we should have the same freedoms and rights as adults and overall be TREATED like adults.