21 November - Shenstone School
At the last Full Council meeting almost two weeks ago the subject of Shenstone
School took up a fair bit of time. I expected it to become an interesting story
here except that I knew nothing about why Shenstone School had become a problem apart from one of the
parents
who beat Bexley Council at the LGO recently referring to it as a ‘scandal’.
It’s not easy to write something sensible on a subject
about which one knows nothing and a search of Bexley’s website drew a blank. So did two calls to
friendly Councillors who both diplomatically said they had heard something but
didn’t really know what it was about. (Actually I think that was a genuine
response in both cases.)
Eventually I decided that the only way forward was to ask the Cabinet Member for Education
if she could provide a link which might educate me or even a couple of short
paragraphs of her own which could be used here. Her auto-responder kicked in
immediately but eight days later and Councillor Caroline Newton (Conservative, East Wickham) has not replied.
At that Council
meeting on 8th November the Labour Group dragged along two sets of parents
affected by the delayed opening of Shenstone School which Leader O’Neill at the same
meeting blamed on “tendering problems” and as the two aforementioned friendly
Councillors know, I saw that at the time as a pointless theatrical exercise which
should be castigated here. However I can now see that Labour Councillors may
have been frustrated by the failure of the Cabinet Member for Education to
answer their enquiries.
Not, in my view, does that make using two sets of parents as exhibits in the
theatre which is a public Council meeting a worthwhile exercise because it is
not really public in any meaningful sense. My view was restricted but there were
no more than five members of the public present, me and
the four
questioners, one of whom was
a former Labour Councillor.
On top of that there were perhaps a dozen people silly enough to waste their
evening on the webcast so if the intention was to embarrass the Tory
administration in front of an open mouthed borough the stunt was doomed to
failure. Despite listening to everything the Labour Group said about Shenstone I
still didn’t discover what the problem was. That is frequently the problem with
Council meetings generally; they speak in jargon and acronyms such that ordinary
people don’t know what they are talking about. Maybe that is the idea!
When first mulling over what to say about Shenstone I expected to go into
full on David Leaf mode and say something like “my door is always open for
questions, why wait two months for a Full Council to ask your questions?” and
usually I would fully endorse his view but when a Cabinet Member does not have
an open door or a working email system maybe the Labour Group felt they had no
alternative but to resort to pointless gestures.
Note: The DIY job which has deflected me from BiB matters is
still not finished. Having to reroute cable buried in the wall was an unexpected
set-back but finding that
Gorrilla contact adhesive is useless is the latest problem. Good old Evostik
was not available locally so I am once more waiting on Amazon to deliver and
unusually it isn’t available ‘next day’.