Category Archives: young people

EMA, eXplore card, Schools, Transport, Uncategorized, young people

What will be replacing EMA?

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Remember – although EMA has been abolished, this doesn’t mean that post-16 students will  be left high and dry (although some people want you to believe this, for purely political reasons). Instead the coalition  are proposing a new allowance that will be targeted at those who need it most.

This is very good news for those who are worried that loss of EMA will prevent them attending school or college

The government’s intentions about EMA are therefore very different  to Suffolk County Council’s disgraceful and undemocratic decision to scrap Suffolk’s Explore card tomorrow – right in the middle of the academic year.  There was not even a figleaf of a consultation or ‘conversation.’  So please don’t stop signing the Save the Explore Card petition and pressing for this decision to be reversed. We are now only 1000 signatures short!

The government’s proposals are that:

  • Everybody who started their course this academic year and is on the £30 per week rate will continue at the current rate to the end of the academic year  and will receive payments of £20 per week in their second year.
  • All students on EMA who started their course in the 2009/10 academic year will continue to receive the full rate.
  • An additional £15 million will be set aside to provide bursaries of £1,200 for the most vulnerable students, for example those in care, with severe disabilities or single parents living on their own. This is more than the maximum available to students currently on EMA.
  • Finally, schools, colleges and training providers will have £165 million put into a discretionary learner support fund each year which will be available for them to distribute to students facing financial need.
    This is the equivalent of just over £800 for every young person who received free school meals at the age of 15.

Across the country students face very different costs and barriers to attending school or college. In some places – such as huge swathes of rural Suffolk –  students have to travel a long distance to attend, or may find it hard to get transport. On the other hand, some courses involve prohibitively costly equipment.  Under the new plans schools and colleges can decide individually exactly how to distribute the money available to support their students in need.

The government wants to have a short consultation on its plans. You have till the 20 May to respond to this consultation – which you can do online.

So, if you get or got EMA, if you are a parent, grandparent or friend of someone who had it, has it, or will need support in the future  – or if you are just interested in social justice, please  add your two pennorth. We can ensure properly targeted support for the workers of the future if we all contribute to the decision-making!

Helping the community, Home Start, Social care, Uncategorized, Woodbridge, young people

Big Lottery Grant for Woodbridge-based Home Start

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Staff, volunteers and families at Home Start Suffolk Coastal are thrilled today to hear that they have been awarded a Big Lottery grant  totalling £362,637!  This money has been provided as part-funding for the scheme over 3 years to extend its services within Suffolk Coastal.

Home-Start recruits and trains parent volunteers to support families , struggling to cope, within  their own homes, offering non-judgmental, practical and emotional support for a wide range of issues  including domestic abuse, multiple births, isolation, depression, bereavement and lone families. Family support groups are another part of the scheme, offering a nurturing environment for families to grow together. The effect of any intervention at an early stage in childrens’ lives  is magnified – and lasts a lifetime!

Tara Somers,  the Hone-Start Suffolk Coastal Senior Co-ordinator “couldn’t be more delighted! The money is for our Empowering Families project  – and will allow us to reach more local families for whom too often life feels like an uphill struggle. In the current economic climate, this is particularly important!”

The grant will enable Tara and her team  to set up a new Family Group in Woodbridge, and increase Home Start services throughout our area, which stretches northwards  from Felixstowe , as far as Leiston and beyond.

Home-Start Suffolk Coastal is part of the UK’s leading family support charity, Home-Start UK which supports nearly 35,000 families and almost 73,000 children each year.  More than 16,000 volunteers visit families in their own homes – parents supporting other parents in a variety of situations including isolation, bereavement, multiple births, illness or disability.

Since opening in Woodbridge in 1999, Home-Start Suffolk Coastal has supported 530 families, many in very challlenging circumstances. In the last year alone, their 45 volunteers spent a massive 17,000 hours supporting 84 families and 181 children.

Home-Start Suffolk Coastal  has already been part of a pilot, “Maximising Income”, helping families who already supported by Home-Start, to access necessary financial support  (And let me tell you, this is very very necessary: it took me and my daughter and my husband three full weeks of headscratching and together to  complete a Disability Living Allowance form). With the help of the Lottery grant, 60 more Home-Start families will be supported in accessing benefits and grants they are entitled to. Major reform to the welfare system means that there has never been a more vital need to offer support to families in navigating the system

“I really don’t know what I would have done without Home-Start, my volunteer was exactly what I needed, a friend, someone to talk to, someone that’s been there. My volunteer has given me the confidence to go out, and do what a ‘normal’ mum can do”

Pedestrians and Walkers, Quality of Life funding, Transport, Uncategorized, young people, Your councillor

Woodbridge: Clarkson’s Crossing opens live on air!

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There aren’t many road crossings that have their own name, but the brand new Clarkson Crossing in Ipswich Road Woodbridge is very different. For a start, it’s probably the only one in Suffolk  – maybe in the country – that local students have helped plan, design and name, in a joint project with Suffolk County Highway Engineers and their County Councillor! Today students from Farlingaye school, together with Farlingaye Deputy Head Graham Smith,  came out in force to help unveil a specially designed plaque to commemorate their collaboration, live on James Hazell’s radio show.

Caroline Page joins Farlingaye High School Students to open the Clarkson Crossing - live on Radio Suffolk!

The Ipswich road has become increasingly busy over the years and I have been very keen to provide a crossing, since I was elected, two and a half years ago. Althought  I had earmarked the money from my Quality of Life budget, and gained agreement for it to go ahead, we were uncertain what would be the best  solution.  Huge congratulations are due to the public-spirited students of Farlingaye High School who kick-started the final phase when they investigated difficulties in walking/cycling to school last year. This led to Suffolk’s Highway Engineers working with the students to look together at how this problem could be solved  within the money available -to  provide a solution that was fit for purpose.

Working together, the Engineers and the students established that a refuge island would best fit the problem and the bill. The students helped work out where it would have to be sited, and – as a last idea – they christened it. Today they helped unveil a specially designed commemorative plaque to officially open the Clarkson Crossing  live on Radio Suffolk.

The road is not only a school route  crossing point, but it is also a crossing point for bus users (many of them elderly), other pedestrians, and for National Cycle Route 1.

“For years children and their parents have crossed the Ipswich Road on the way to and from school but each year, this has got more difficult with more and more traffic going  faster and faster. It was becoming a daily battle . The worst thing was you could never find a gap in both streams of traffic at the same time. With the new crossing, you don’t have to! And having that island in the middle of the road is also slowing the traffic down.”  Ipswich Road Resident

Here, the young people  of Woodbridge have shown their elders something important: that if you think ‘something should be done’, the answer is often in your hands!

The plinth was designed by SCC's Sam Harvey - and didn't she make a lovely job of it !

This project started a long time before people started talking about the ‘Big Society’ To my mind it’s what we people in Suffolk just call ‘society’ – and society working as it ought to!