DIary of My Week

This my fullest week yet since election.

On Wednesday I attended a briefing from the heads of the various Council heads. Perhaps the biggest message was on finance and how hard it is going to be for the next ten years. The boundaries of what the Council does are going to have to be redrawn. Spending has gone up 47% in real terms these last ten years. It will probably fall in real terms in years to come.

In the evening I attended the School Organisational Review Stakeholder briefing. In short, the programme to replace three-tier with two tier education in Bury will last the next ten years. The first stage of change will be the expansion of all primaries with capacity by two classes and the movement of others to new sites. This will be accompanied by the expansion of secondary schools to take two years at the other end of the Middle School spectrum.

The challenge for all of us is that the secondaries do not all have the current space to do this and that split sites are likely for most schools. Indeed this could be a use for current Middle Schools, creating a three-tier, two tier system!

The permutations are not yet decided and to the Council's credit they have gone out early on this to ask for ideas and create engagement. I suspect the options are narrower than we think but it feels better to be going out at this stage than later.

From here a formal proposal will be generated in October, the Cabinet will vote in June and implementation will actually take place by September 2013.

But this is just the very first phase. The Building Schools for the Future Programme (BSF) is what is planned to make all of this work long term. This is the multi-million capital programme for rebuilding all schools in Suffolk over the next decade. The worry of course is that capital programmes are the most vulnerable now we know the scale of the crisis in public finances.

The worst case scenario which was confirmed by Suffolk County Council officers at the event was that the interim solution - the split sites etc - would end up the permanent solution.

This isn't particularly desirable. It will mean lot of disruption for not that much material change. Parents will have to live with a lot of uncertainty and there will be many odd arrangements. Take my own daughter. She would have gone from Hardwick Primary to Hardwick Middle then onto King Edwards Grammer. Now she may end up at some annex of King Edwards in Westley (a village outside town) or some other place in town not very convenient. Split sites schools are harder to manage and one site generally feels it is `losing out' in terms of time and attention.

But perhaps most of all, this SOR programme without the BSF funding isn't giving our children the quantum leap in educational gain that would justify the investment in change. Indeed there is major risk of `collatoral damage' to children like my own who will be going through the system during ten years of change. Their interests are not being sufficiently addressed in this exercise. They are not even mentioned.

My view on this is that if SCC knew the way the economy would go they wouldn't have embarked on this. So unsatisfactory is the interim situation which could become permanent that it could not be justified to change the status quo. Unfortunately, SCC are part-way down the road and feel unable, I think, to change tack at this stage. Particularly given that there has so far been no confirmation that BSF is vulnerable.

Full Council on Thursday. I can't say I really enjoyed it that much. It is quite traditional in format and runs in a very process-based way. I guess this has to be so, to an extend, but it doesn't make for a particularly interesting or accessible spectacle.

Friday was spent visiting businesses and schools in my Division. I managed to get to all but one retail outlet and introduce myself. Attended Hardwick School Fair and met their excellent head Peter Dewhust. I will be formally visiting all schools before the end of term I hope.

Yesterday was, I confess, probably the most enjoyable of my days. It feels the essence of what being a Councillor is. Being out there.