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School Closures


Todd
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There isn't a nursery at Ollaberry, they go to Urafirth school for nursery classes.

 

Nursery school travel can't be compared to primary school travel.  Bairns travel in a car, usually with their parents, directly to the school.  They are there for 2.5hrs, think it might be a bit longer now due to new legislation.  Nursery education is not compulsory.  My own bairns did not go full-time until they were 4 years old as I felt that it was too much for them.  It took me 20 minutes each way in the car.  The same journey on the school bus takes 40 minutes.

Edited by trowie246
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My two roubles worth.

School children are tomorrows people. Set them off on the wrong foot and it could have detremental effects on being the fine upstanding adults we would wish. Stage one: play hooky from school because it's too much of a chore travelling many miles every day and the same wearing journey home at night. Youngsters being farmed out to boarding schools or hostels deprives them of family life and could have psychological consequences. Not funny if one feels lonely or abandoned by parents. SIC have a legal obligation to provide schools and educate children. They also have a moral obligation to provide schools in catchment areas where schools are needed. Penny pinching is not always the answer. If savings are to be made, I would suggest a close look at some of the unessential staff and departments at SIC, Health and Safety is one example, However unpleasant it may be, it sticks in my craw that I should have to pay council tax for someone to run around chasing unscooped doggy droppings. Abandoning disabled and elderly pensioners to their fate or pay up is another issue which doesn't impress.   

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Nice to have the resources to have everything, but unless we are being fed misinformation, it appears that we don't. That means that councillors are faced with the dilemma of prioritising expenditure. I wonder in this case whether they have got it right. Educating children must be about more than bus journeys and buildings - significant though that might be. As far as saving by putting hard pressed council officials out of a job do we need to keep in mind the volume of administrative material which Shetland has to deal with from central government is frequently equivalent to that of much more populous regions with an awful lot more staff?

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As far as saving by putting hard pressed council officials out of a job do we need to keep in mind the volume of administrative material which Shetland has to deal with from central government is frequently equivalent to that of much more populous regions with an awful lot more staff?

 

I'm not sure I entirely buy this as stated. Even though the council may be obliged to perform the same admin tasks as other authorities, by definition of there being considerably fewer pupils involved it should follow that even though the tasks may be unavoidable in the present climate, they will in most cases take considerably less time and resources to complete. If this is not the case, then the SIC should be lobbying central Government for change, it should not be up to service end users to be more greatly penalised for no other reason than the population density of their residence location.

 

That said, the above whichever way it is, in no way negates the need for the management and admin structures, and management and admin procedures which are in place being as slimline and cost effective as possible, whatever the workload either one is expected to handle. I have no recent experience of the SIC Education service, so cannot comment on them specifically, but across the other SIC services I have had the misfortune to have to engage with, I have experienced one constant. Without exception management structures and procedures are extremely un-necessarily complex, cumbersome to negotiate and consequently can only be significantly resource hungry. Similarly Admin procedures are disjointed, piecemeal and highly ineffective with (wo)man hours (and thus proportions of salaries) spent unraveling previous errors and correcting mistakes running in to a frightening figure. Maybe Education are the exception to this rule, but I somehow doubt that.

 

Education costs more than we can afford right now, that much we get. However certain priorities need to be borne in mind, a teacher in a school with pupils but with neither managerial and admin backup services will still be able to teach those kids something, kids without a suitable school and/or a teacher, but with the best education managerial and admin in the world sitting helpless miles away from them, will learn nothing. Ergo, that which contributes least to the desired final outcome is where common sense dictates the cuts fall first and fall deepest - in this case management and admin structures and procedures. Have they been made on that basis? I'm not claiming to know the answer to that, but the message coming across from those directly affected by changes in the education service very clearly don't believe so, and I don't blame them. As across the board with recent council cuts all anybody has seen are reductions and removal of desired final outcomes, while the monster machine itself by all appearances continues to trundle on as before, unscathed with not so much as a smudge on its highly polished armour plating..

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If your spending 48.5milion pounds on education . And closing two small schools with all the damage that entails is only saving a paltry 156k. Then it seams to me that even a 5yr old child could work out that the small schools are NOT the problem.

Would it be too much trouble to ask the education department to produce an "honest" pie chart so the people of Shetland can see where all these millions are being wasted.

It might be a start in trying to build bridges again . And actually finding some sort of solution to the huge funding gap that clearly exists.

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They kept saying its not about money but about quality of education.

At meetings I attended I felt that the officials were trying to push it through as this was the instruction  from councillors. However I think the penny dropped at these meetings,  with the more astute councillors  obviously finding it difficult to argue the educational case.

However democracy has probably won through, after all councillors are supposed to represent their constituents, are they not? The savings mentioned have been so small as to be laughable in a fairly well off Shetland. I think that any cost-cutting will have to be made in town or town hall. We could certainly do with one fless councillor in the South Mainland.

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Either Gary Robinson has got his figures wrong or Children's Services costs have actually gone up in the the past year.

 

For 12/13 the budget was set at £45,278,000.  Children's Services budget includes the library,  sports & leisure, the play parks, flower park, Islesburgh and much more.

 

The actual running of schools was costing £33.5m as of June 2013. This includes everything to run the school estate, including Quality Assurance.

 

So I'm not sure where this figure of £48.5m is coming from.

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Either Gary Robinson has got his figures wrong or Children's Services costs have actually gone up in the the past year.

 

For 12/13 the budget was set at £45,278,000.  Children's Services budget includes the library,  sports & leisure, the play parks, flower park, Islesburgh and much more.

 

The actual running of schools was costing £33.5m as of June 2013. This includes everything to run the school estate, including Quality Assurance.

 

So I'm not sure where this figure of £48.5m is coming from.

I don't know either. I've had a look at the papers for the Education and Families Committee on 20 November last year when the budget was set. The total budget for the committee was £39,851,000 of which schools was £31,995,000.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Advice to CURE members

 

Observation... Schools that have been closed in Shetland did not have a Full Time Qualifid Headteacher in place when the consultaion reports being done.

 

Parent Concils of that School have the authority to say  NO consultation to take place until Full Time Qualified Headteacher in place. Please do not allow the consultation to carry on, unless you have a fulltime headteacher. ( Skerries was closed on  false information)

 

Bring back Skerries Secondary you have saved NO MONEY SIC, If you have saved then please show the people of Shetland the figures.

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