Peter Kent-Baguley

NEWS FLASH  -  SERCO releases some information

"The consultation is a genuinely open process..."

SERCO, the private company catapulted into the City by the government to run our Children & Young People's Services has finally written to all Councillors today with the consultation dates (but not times!) for each of the 5 Special Schools and the 17 High Schools in the City. The meetings are spread over 3 weeks (Monday -Thursday) kicking off at Edensor High School next Monday (13th), Interestingly, the final consultative meeting is at Haywood High School on the 29th November, the only school to have mounted a sustained campaign against SERCO's proposal to close it.

A booklet setting out the proposals, we are told, is currently at the printers and will be distributed next week to all councillors as well as every school, with sufficient copies for parents of every child in the schools. SERCO are still clinging to what they call their favoured option, what I call their fiction, "that all 22 secondary and special schools should close, and that 12 new secondary and 4 new special schools should open in their place." The more I consider SERCO's modus operandi the more polite I think is my term "fiction".

No one disputes the demographic facts: namely, the decreasing number of teenagers in the City, hence the need for fewer High School places. It may follow, although not necessarily so, that fewer schools are required. However, I am content to agree that fewer schools are required. I am not content to agree that we need to plan schools as large as 1,300 students. However, if it were all down to the size and geographical location of schools, the issue would be a relatively straight-forward administrative process.  

But that is not the case! SERCO is being less than transparent, along with the City Council's Executive, the Elected Mayor no less, with the political process. The so-called transformation of our schools is actually much more to do with ideological dogma than with falling birth rates! For example:  first, each faith school and several High Schools survive the "transformation"; second, academies are slipped in without open debate.  

It is difficult to see the government's purpose in sending in SERCO was anything other than making sure academies were forced into the City. The Blair-Brown Labourites knew only too well that the majority of the City Labour party were opposed to academies. (Is not the City party still officially opposed to academies?) This is the same Brown government that prattles on about local democracy. Were it not so utterly serious it would be a joke. And to think that once Labour proudly supported equal opportunities for accessing education!