- the process amounts to cheating the public - imagine pretending that a long deputation/hearing at the C+F committee is a proper substitute for people who will want their say to the entire Council...it's clear to me that Marilyne is terrified her troops will cave in if confronted with true parental resistance...the report says patronisingly that 'repeat deputations [are] not conducive to attentive listening'. What do they think we are? Five year olds?
- The proposals are flawed: too many annexe solutions taking us back 10 years when Labour marched people to the top of the hill, got kids out of portacabins and split sites and into proper classrooms and single schools - and now we're being marched right back down again to conditions we thought we'd abolished forever
- And...this proposal was meant to help rebuild Council balances (or so we were told by Marilyne in June) yet here we are with a report, peppered with commitments to reinvest any savings (both capital & revenue) back into C+F. Doesn't look so good for poor old Donald McGuigan's balances, does it? And £16 million of capital from the closure of 13 primaries won't go far in building many new schools either! So blaming this Lib Dem/SNP's 'brutal' (Marilyne's words, not mine) school closure programme on Labour mismanagement won't wash...they've not proposed this programme to rebuild balances at all
So, I'm left wondering where their vision thing is...school rationalisation in the 90's (by me) was to find the money to create the first universal nursery provision in the country and in 2000's (by Ewan) to let the biggest new school building programme in a century go ahead in Edinburgh. ..big ambitions - huge vision for our Capital City's Education.
Anybody know what the narrative is here?
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