Monday, August 27, 2007

1st Education Committee tomorrow ...

Sorry - the blog is becoming a bit of a constant 'education' experience at the moment ... it is hard to avoid though, with feelings running so high in so many communities.

So, tomorrow sees the 1st meeting of the new Education Committee ... that's right, the Council has agreed to consult on closing 22 schools and 4 community centres and the new Education Committee, which will have the unalloyed joy of overseeing that whole process, hasn't even met yet.

Of course, it may be the cynic in me .... but it surely wouldn't have anything to do with the fact that the new Administration has no guaranteed majority on the Education Committee, due to the presence of an additional 5 voting members; 3 from the Churches, and 2 from the Unions - as opposed to the Full Council where it can always count upon the casting vote of the Provost.

It will be interesting to see how they approach this issue tomorrow - the report before them asks that the Committee "approves the attached papers for the purposes of consultation". I still don't see why we should.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

You may be able to help. Back in 2004 when school closures were again high on the agenda and the good women of Lismore Parents Action Group made their own local history and front page news by having your administration defeated on the closure of their school, we were all told that in 2007 there would be yet another review of school closures.

As much as I have tried searching Council Papers online I cannot find the reviews that were done by your administration for the current closure round of 2007. Perhaps you can post links to the documents?

This will enable us to see exactly what the difference is in what would have been the Labour and the current administration proposals.

Andrew said...

John

This is a fair question - I'll find the relevant links for you (they do exist!) and do a separate post about it all later today (Thursday).

Andrew

Anonymous said...

I see you are having the same problem with finding the links. That CPOL system needs to have the search sorted out - suggest you speak to your IT people and refer them to Norwegian based Fast Search & Transfer who could have it sorted out within weeks and the prices are not too bad either - www.fastsearch.com - they were the people behind the old search engine alltheweb.

Andrew said...

John

Thanks for the Fast Search suggestion.

I have provided some links to the minutes of the relevant meetings in this later entry, as promised:

http://andrewburns.blogspot.com/2007/08/what-would-you-have-done.html

Andrew