Education is one topic where we should have campaigned harder on during the General Election, the reason may have been that we did not have a stronger message nationally but I do believe education is one issue where the message is different in each region.
Tory run Suffolk has – and still is letting our children down, poor Ofsted reports from all over the county and their only solution was ‘Raising the Bar’ which seemed more about glitzy awards evenings and consultations with London organisations that actually getting into schools and helping. At the same time as they were running ‘Raising the Bar’ they were cutting the funding to school improvement service!
But I do have a small crumb of sympathy for Tory run Suffolk, the Ofsted inspections were held in such a way that many schools could not gain a good report- the reason? To make it easier for the Tory Government (Gove and bag carrier Gummer) to push through forced academisation. Not that the County Council fought their corner there seemed to an unwritten policy to get rid of many schools as possible from their control.
The Government said you had to accept the Ofsted report and if that means you had to become an academy, that so what? It had to happen, no matter what staff (or parents of they were asked) thought.
But when Ofsted failed the County Council School Improvement service it then seemed OK to ignore their findings – no threat of the County Council being taken over!
As we approached May, even the local Tory MPs broke their silence and criticised the Tory Council over their slow progress in improving educational standards but since May silence again other than try and take some sort of credit when a good Ofsted report arrives.
So have Suffolk got their act together now? It seems not. This week i received an email from the Suffolk Governor Services, now informing me that I can book Governor Courses online and they have set me an account up. Trouble is I stopped being a Governor when Sidegate Primary was forced into being an academy; in fact they stopped having a Governing Body (no they seemed to have changed their mind since).
So we have Suffolk Education services sending me a letter thinking I am a governor at a school that they no longer run! A further letter will arrive soon giving me a password so I can book courses! Of course it is us the council tax player who has paid for this letter and the next one – and there is not even an email address or phone number I can phone up to tell them off their mistake!
If they can’t get a simple matter like this right how can Tory run Suffolk be trusted to look after our children’s education?
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