Tag Archives: young people

Buses, Cabinet, Council spending, cuts, eXplore card, Suffolk County Council, Transport, Uncategorized, young people

SCC: where does their “Interest” lie?

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 At their last Cabinet meeting SCC’s Tories revealed that they had underspent a total of £13.1m in the last financial year. Much of this money is going into the already large reserves (now standing at £158m).

Yes, you heard me right.

At a time of huge financial stress when we need to make best use of every penny, they quite unnecessarily took more than £13m from our hard-pressed services and entrusted it to the banks. 

They must be the last people left in the country who have any faith left in bankers.

And they put their trust in the banking system at a time when public money is desperately needed to support the local economy. When the community is reeling under the impact of lost public services .

The Conservative administration has told us they’ve cut these services because they were unaffordable. This is how they have justified the huge damage that they have inflicted on Suffolk’s public transport – by tellling us that  “you can’t spend a pound more than once,”(as the Cabinet member responsible has told us rather more than once).

Now it seems clear that the Cabinet just doesn’t want to spend some of these (our) pounds at all.

We live in a time where belt-tightening may be unavoidable, but it is clear that the Conservatives’ cutting has been overly-enthusiastic.  The money they have put into low-interest reserves could better be spent on restoring such valued and socially valuable services as the eXplore youth travel Card, our closed Household Waste Recycling Centres, the Bury Road Park and Ride, many axed bus routes, and those essential and valued walk-in Youth clubs (so useful for those who cannot afford subscription activities) as well as improving the bus pass conditions for Suffolk elderly and disabled.

These were all services that my colleagues and I argued to reinstate at Budget time, but it fell on deaf ears.  More than deaf ears – as I recall, the Leader suggested our budget had been ‘scribbled on the back of a fag packet.’

Better than on the front of a paying-in slip, Cllr Bee!

Suffolk County’s Conservatives would much rather invest our money in banks than in the people of Suffolk – preferring to build up capital than to build social capital.

 

Care homes, Scouts, Woodbridge, young people, Your councillor

No room for the next generation?

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Recently I’ve been worried about  the Woodbridge Youth Centre  and all those who use it. And now I’m  sharing both information and my own concerns about this situation.

The Centre houses a number of spectacularly useful and important groups for young people, including Just 42 – the only open access youth group in 400 square miles of Suffolk Coastal;  provides  rehearsal room for the Company of 4,  offers meeting places for various groups;  and is the only place between Leiston and Felixstowe which can provide meeting space for children and young people in a safe, non-school setting. Already, the centre is used for  something like 170 different meetings a month of one sort and another.

However,  if you look at it cynically,  the Woodbridge Youth Centre’s  Kingston Field site is also one of the last pieces of prime development land in Woodbridge. My concerns were aroused when I was told that a three-year lease promised a year ago to one of the groups that used it had failed to materialise. I then discovered that decisions about the future of the WYC appeared to be occurring without any traceable reference to any elected member at County, District or Town level.

It was as if some of the council officers involved were acting as entrepreneurs rather than caretakers. And suspiciously as if they  had forgotten that they did not own the land, and were supposed to be administering the site on behalf of the people of Woodbridge. Having first raised the matter with the County Council  in May, I eventually got an email telling me that indeed, the group in question

“ were offered a three year lease. However, it became apparent that there was a need to look at the bigger long-term future of the building and occupants following the start of the Our Place discussions… The intention is to continue to renew the annual licence, while the options are considered.

I didn’t think that this covered the issue completely, not least because I discovered that there seems to have been an unilateral decison made as to the  best usage of the site : the development of yet more sheltered housing for old people. ( As if there isn’t really quite a lot of this in Woodbridge already!). And because, after a whole year  this other (again unilateral) decision to downgrade a 3 year lease to an annual licence  had not been mentioned to anyone until I  started making a fuss. And because I have been representing Woodbridge since before the inception of the ‘Our Place’ scheme and I had never been party to any discussions on the subject!

I am therefore raising  the following wider concerns on behalf of the councillors and residents of Woodbridge:

a)  “it became apparent that there was a need to look at the bigger long-term future of the building and occupants”  As this sentence is in the passive  – a timehonoured way for bureaucrats to avoid telling anyone who said what, when and why to whom –  I have asked who it was to whom “it become apparent’?   I know, it was  not to me, nor to the building’s occupants, nor to the Town Council, nor to the residents of Woodbridge.

So far I have had no answer.

b) “There appears to be a lack of space in Woodbridge generally.” I have asked for this remark  to be disambiguated, so that everyone can be clear whose lack of space is being referred to.  Past conversations and emails suggest that it doesn’t refer to the young people of Woodbridge –  the group who really do lack space in Woodbridge. Rather it  refers to the amount of  sheltered, and care provision in Woodbridge. If this is the case, it is  not true.  There are already 660+ units offering such to the elderly people in Woodbridge – and that excludes those who prefer to live in  standard housing!
Just to remind you, there are 7500 people in Woodbridge, and because of the amount of sheltered housing  already,  3000 of these are in the ‘grandparent’ age group.  Many of these  have contacted me with concerns about the extreme lack of facilities there are for young people – particularly those people who grew up here and raised their own children in past decades!

c)  The email mentioned “the start of the Our Place discussions” ( which supposedly consist of ‘officers working alongside elected members to develop local service solutions‘.) Yet any discussions as to the “bigger long-term future‘  clearly took place without the presence or knowledge of me, and as far as I know, of any other elected member. The start of these particular Our Place discussuons must have occurred quite a long time ago, bearing in mind the lease has been witheld without any reason for a full year

In conclusion  – and because localism is about joint decision-making from the start – I have asked SCC  to approach no organisation with any proposition whatsoever  without having discussed in advance the various available options  for the site  with all the stakeholders.  That is – at the very least – myself (as County Councillor), the members of Woodbridge Town Council, the current occupants, and representatives of other youth stakeholders within Woodbridge.

I have shared my concerns with the town council, and they are very supportive, and I’ve convened a meeting of all the youth groups  this Friday.

We all need to make sure that our town’s youngest generation  does n’t get marginalised and forgotten. After all, they will be supporting us one day!

epilepsy

Epilepsy and GCSEs: built-in injustice

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So today we hear that Michael Gove would like to abolish the GCSE system and go back to old fashioned O-levels and GCEs?  Maybe. (Though the Lib Dems  think otherwise)

In the interim let us hope he looks at whether he can find a system that will be any more fit for purpose  than the existing (GCSE) system  in assessing young people with  consciousness-fluctuating conditions such as as epilepsy. That is,  the very small percentage of the youth population who toggle between being ‘perfectly well’ and briefly ‘incapable’ without warning and at a moment’s notice. That bunch of young people whose gifts and capacities have  been so ruthlessly ignored  by our current inflexible educational system with teaching shifting between  ‘special needs’ and ‘failing mainstream’ without any acknowledgement of their actual abilities. People who could be easily become a Julius Caesar, an Edward Lear, a  Dostoievsky, a Socrates..

Here is  the case of modern-day  Ms X.

Ms X has no mental impairment except for that caused by the effects of bad epilepsy and the heavy-duty medications she has to take to try and control it. Ms X is sitting GCSEs for the Nth time. This is rather a tragedy for Ms X who studies up to seven hours a day, and has done so for six years to little practical purpose.

This is because if you have a catastrophic tonic clonic seizure before or during  a GCSE  exam, you are not able to put it off till a better time. ‘Use it or lose it‘ as they say – and lose it is often the result. Ms X’s seizures are so frequent it  is pretty unlikely she will ever go through the period GCSE exams take without one or two fairly substantial tonic clonic seizures on exam-days.

Sure enough, last week her parents  were woken by a loud crash at 6am in the morning of the longest Maths GCSE exam. On rushing into her room, they found that – apart from the ongoing tonic clonic seizure itself- she’d managed to drop from a standing position, hitting her head extremely hard, and cutting both her mouth and tongue.

She was lucky. She had no more seizures that morning  and so didn’t have to take the heavy barbiturate required  to prevent her going into status epilepticus and the hospital (as had already happened for her English exam two weeks previously). In fact, she was lucky enough to  ‘come round’ – well, at least regain consciousness – two hours later. Sixty minutes before her 2 hour Maths GCSE paper. Which naturally  could not be put off or rearranged for such minor trivialities as an early morning seizure.

Yet Ms X had had the equivalent of a knock-out blow to the head. I suspect that once again, she will not fulfil her potential.

What a different outcome there might have been for Ms X and for this exam if she were sitting it in the state of health she was in the day before – or the day after.

Successive ministers and education departments have not chosen to recognise the full extent of the difficulties of a student with epilepsy. Ms X has sat the same exams under Michael Gove’s, under Alan Johnson’s, under Ed Ball’s watch. All have talked about a world-class exam system.  None has recognised the injustice of insisting on a fixed-date one-off exam for those students with a serious yet fluctuating health condition.

Ms X is either bright, alert and mentally competent, or she incapable of remembering a thing. Is a GCSE exam instituted to discover what she knows – or merely what she is capable of remembering on one specific date?

If only Mr Gove, Mr Johnson, Mr Balls – if only every education minister that has ignored the exam issue had some recognition of the condition… If one day they were woken by having live electrodes attached to their brain for 5 mins and then were punched hard in the face without means of defence or a gum-shield (causing considerable pain and disorientation, broken teeth, split lips, bitten  tongue) and then were asked to prove all their last two years of knowledge in an exam paper 2 hours afterwards, would they consider this to be a reasonable test of their own abilities?

I suspect not!