SOS - Save Our Schools!

I recently heard on Isle of Wight Radio, a caller phone into Alex Dyke’s phone-in (with David Pugh and Alan Wells as guests) regarding the two councillors not turning up to a meeting that had been arranged at St John’s C of E Primary School to view a presentation that the governing body had produced in the form of a powerpoint presentation to help save their school, as it would be “unfair on other schools”. This comes after they had previously said on air that they urged governing bodies of schools facing closure to do this.

Quoting Alan Wells’ response to the caller’s question on the 26th February:

There was a bit of a misunderstanding as far as we’re concerned. Because we as politicians have made it clear that we will not receive any presentations from governing bodies other than just receiving them in the post. Because if we do it for one, if we have a physical presentation from a governing body for one school, we have to do it for every school and we just don’t have the capacity or the time to be able do that within the time frame that we set for the 13th March for these presentations to come in. So I don’t quite know how that managed to get set up. We were only informed about the meeting with the governors last week and we had never actually agreed that we would see any school, and in fact we’ve made it quite clear that we wouldn’t see any governing body.

In this letter from David Pugh sent to all Governing Bodies on the 18th February, it states that there is “no proscribed format” in which governors should make their submission.

We recognise that some governing bodies, in many cases on behalf of concerned parents, wish to put forward a case at this stage to argue for the retention of their school under the options. There is no proscribed format in which you should make your submission – as we are very much still in an informal consultation process – but it should touch on the assessment criteria as outlined in the detailed matrix on Eduwight, and outline a case, if you believe there is one, for your school to continue under the different options.

I’m sure governing bodies across the Island are confused by this and find it both contradictory and misleading.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 5th, 2008 at 7:59 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.