Let them eat cake?

Not only are Glasgow Labour getting rid of free fruit to save cash, they now want to bring back cake in school canteens. Mixed messages? Undermining their own public health initiatives? That'll be Glasgow Labour at work...

Fruitless!

I was disappointed to see reported in the Evening Times that Glasgow Labour intend to cut free fruit for school children. Glasgow's health problems are well known, and this initiative was a positive step to try and turn things around.

I know from visiting schools and nurseries in the city, and from the various gala days over the summer that children in the East End are now getting used to the idea of eating fruit regularly; they know and like the taste. Organisations like East End Kids 'n' Co, who provide fruit kebabs and smoothies at fun days, could barely keep up with the demand!

There are always new mouths to feed though, and while this current crop of youngsters have adopted healthier habits, those who follow need to be encouraged too. Sadly, not every parent will choose to have fruit at home, or can afford it; parents might not be in the habit of eating fruit themselves. Schemes such as this can make a difference, and use the 'pester power' of children for good.

The really frustrating thing is that, according to the Herald this morning, the SNP Scottish Government, anticipating that free oranges could be squeezed by budget cutbacks, applied to the EU to be part of a free fruit programme. Success looked likely until Westminster indicated their intention to claw back 72p of every £1 we would save by participating. This is absolutely farcical; in these circumstances, the Scottish Government is penalised for trying to be innovative and fiscally efficient. EU money is out these, but under devolution it doesn't pay us to apply for it.

Independence would allow us the freedom to manage our economy - from school fruit to high finance - for the benefit of our people. We shouldn't have to ask permission for this basic principle.

PFI costs continue to rise

Labour are constantly bleating these days about jobs in the NHS and teacher numbers. The truth behind the stories, however, reveals Labour's complete and utter hypocrisy.

Labour choose to ignore the impact of their profligate PFI credit card spending on education and health budgets. Figures released in March demonstrated quite clearly that the more Councils have to spend on paying their PFI costs, the less they have in their education budget to spend on teachers.

In Glasgow, PFI payments represent 8.6% of the Education budget for the city - and considering that budget is around £515m, that represents quite a wadge of cash. How many more teachers could be employed for that sum? How many more nursery places could be provided?

I'm not in any way arguing for the closure of schools, but the PFI contracts in Glasgow were so ill-thought out that they have also had the effect of the forced maintaining of secondary schools which have so few pupils that key subjects like history are being dropped. When Primary Schools in the city were described as being 'half empty' plans were brought forward to close them. The Council can't possibly do this for secondaries, as we're still paying for their refurbishment. Primaries and nurseries have been moved into schools to mitigate the effect of this, but in reality, the Council has been tied to the dead weight of the PFI deal and can't do much about it.


Today, I see that Tris has a blog post showing that the NHS are facing a similar problem.

Kenny Gibson MSP puts it well when he says:

“PFI is typical of Labour’s irresponsible buy now, pay later approach to public spending.

“The NHS will pay more to banks in repayments over the next five years for three hospitals than those hospitals are actually worth. That is an example of the profligacy and incompetence that characterised Labour’s financial management and that Scotland’s public services are now paying for."

The really frustrating thing is that we're tied into these contracts. Our health boards, Councils and Government have to pay over the odds for something that we don't want and even warned wouldn't work. We must strive to remind the voters of this truth, whenever Labour trot out lines on cuts. The SNP are fighting to keep jobs in Education and the NHS, despite having to cope with the consequences of Labour's buy now-pay later policies.

School closures... now I've calmed down

I've waited until now to post so I could do so with a clear head. I was incandescent on Thursday, angry, upset and frustrated at the way in which Labour behaved in the Council meeting. If I had posted straight away, I'd almost certainly have been carted off to the Standards Commission. I am still incredibly disappointed at the stage management of the Labour Group, where they were permitted to move against closures in their own wards, but obliged to support closures everywhere else. This was particularly ludicrous when some of the arguments in each case were so similar.

The way in which Labour acted does a huge disservice to those who campaigned, marched, occupied and petitioned. I spent time in Wheatley House reading each and every response for St James' Primary, Queen Mary Street Nursery and Mile End Nursery. I was moved and impressed by the responses, and they strengthened my resolve. I know from the sign-in sheet in the reception that not many Councillors bothered to read these. As far as I could see, no Labour Councillor had done so. This is a huge derogation of their responsibility to their constituents and the people of this city.

By contrast with my feelings about the callous way Labour Councillors acted, I was very proud of my colleagues in the SNP, and fellow opposition members from the Greens, Lib Dems, and the Conservative. We challenged, we reasoned, we let the world (or at least the public gallery) know why the proposals were flawed and wrong. I've since had emails from those in the gallery, and I know how they saw things. The Save Merrylee Nursery website has a good synopsis.

I met with some staff and parents from St James' Primary on Friday morning and the sense of betrayal was palpable. They know how damaged their community will be; this blow is the last thing Calton needs. The challenge now is to see pupils through to the end of term and ensure their education doesn't suffer as a result of this decision.

I know that all SNP politicians are now looking to find some way of appealing and overturning these decisions. The guidelines for this are narrow, but if there's a way, we will find it.

Closure vote today

The Council will meet at 1.30 this afternoon to discuss and vote on the closure proposals. I remain hopeful that enough Labour Councillors will see the error in some of the proposals to change their minds.

I've had a lot of emails from parents from different schools and nurseries across the city, and I've been hugely impressed by the very reasoned and researched points they have made. They know that these proposals, and this process is flawed, but they've stayed determined. I am sure your views will be put across in the chamber this afternoon. It could be a long day.

Participation or manipulation?

Sorry for leaving you hanging over the weekend. I did see the consultation responses, but I've been mulling over whether to reveal my thoughts on what I saw. I think I've found the 4% who supported the closures.

Flicking through the responses, there were a large number from children at recieving schools. I've no problem with young people giving their views and being involved, but it has to be meaningful. I don't think this was true of younger children.

One child wrote:
1. I like my school
2. I like sooperman and spiderman
3. I like football

This will sit alongside the most well-researched counter-argument as an equally valid response.

The consultation responses are being held in a room in Wheatley House, and members of the public can view them on weekdays between 9 and 4. I recommend you take a look.

Consultation Response Update

I'm deeply disappointed that the establishments in my ward, St James' Primary, Queen Mary Street Nursery and Mile End Nursery have all been recommended for closure.

The consultation responses and their appendices (where the interesting stuff is buried) have now made it on to the Glasgow City Council website. I have heard that the Lib Dems got a rougher deal than the SNP Group, not having received the information on the responses before lunchtime. The Greens may have had them by mid-morning. Nice that we're all treated consistently...

The Evening Times reports that;

Despite 96% of those who responded being against the proposals, the ruling
Labour group on the city council voted 31-6 to press ahead with the proposals.

All parents in the City should make a point of speaking to their Labour Councillors, and demanding to know how they voted, and why they failed to persuade their colleagues. They should also double check the lists of respondents in the appendices to see whether their Councillors put in an objection to these closure plans.

450 responses were received by the Council for St James' Primary, 251 for, 188 against and 11 unclear. It's deeply interesting that the receiving school, Alexandra Parade Primary, had 280 responses filled in by pupils. They will receive £75,000 towards improvements to accommodate the pupils from St James'. I'm going over to Education shortly to see the responses for myself, and am sure they will make interesting reading.

145 responses were received by the Council for Queen Mary Street Nursery, but parents have told me that a 20 page petition was also submitted. This isn't mentioned anywhere, and I'm very concerned at the thought that this could go missing.

I'll post another update later, once I've seen the responses in the flesh.

School closures -rumours abound

Rumours are flying around the office this morning about which schools Education have proposed to save. We knew Labour were being briefed yesterday afternoon, and the SNP were due to have the proposals for 9am this morning. At 9.56, these have still not arrived. The Evening Times has a scrolling banner headline saying they have the details, and we've got any news we have through them.

This is totally unacceptable behaviour by the Labour administration, aided and abetted by the Education Department. We meet with Education officials at 10.30, by which time the early editions of the Times will be hitting the streets with no chance for us to comment.

The worse thing about this is the abuse of democracy. The full meeting of Glasgow City Council will take the final decision on these proposals next Thursday. I am appalled at the way this has been spun to make it look like the decision - which lies in the hands of democratically elected Councillors, not Education officials - has already been taken. Labour majority or not, that is wrong and makes a mockery of democracy in this city.

Education Consultation Responses to be Released

Big day today in Glasgow City Council; the responses to the schools closures consultation will be released on the web at 9am. This will give some kind of indication of those still on the closure list, and if any will be saved. I hope to give an update during the day.

Public consultation

The consultation meeting at St James' tonight was ace. The place was packed - at least eighty people turned out to make their voice heard. Excellent questions were put, some of which couldn't be answered.

One which really had parents concerned was bus provision. There's no direct bus from the Calton to Alexandra Parade, so it had been suggested that buses might be provided to take pupils the 1.3 miles between the schools. Fine and dandy, you might think, until it was revealed that there would be no supervision of pupils on the bus (other than from the bus driver, who ought to have his eyes elsewhere!). Parents were understandably worried about their children - some as young as four - being left to their own devices for the trip, and made it quite clear that they felt that was unacceptable.

I was very pleased at the quality of the questioning; officials were left in no doubt why the community opposes this proposal.

Marching in the East

I'm going back... way back. I've decided to date this post from when I meant to blog it, which was last Saturday. Otherwise, the following posts won't make sense!


On the 14th, schools supporters from across Glasgow came together to show their opposition to the schools closures proposed by the Labour administration of Glasgow City Council.

On the 21st, supporters of St James Primary School and Queen Mary Street Nursery came together to march from Queen Mary Street to St James' to demonstrate their willingness to save their schools. Parents proposed to move the nursery to the primary to save what they have.

I only got a few pictures of the demo and march, but it was a great turn out, and massive credit has to go to the parents, especially Kelly and Angela, for their work to pull the march off. It was a great show of strength, and made the wider community (including the smokers standing outside every pub at Bridgeton Cross) aware of how important this campaign is.

More excellent photos are available here, taken by the SSP's Rikki Reid.

Purcell in the Times

I was very confused on reading this article in the Times today - which had the headline Glasgow schools 'being left to rot by SNP'. Had we suddenly become solely responsible for Glasgow's tumble-down schools? Had we fallen into some parallel universe where we, not Labour, had been the administration in Glasgow since time immemorial?

Of course not - it was just Glasgow's Dear Leader mouthing off to a helpfully placed Labour hackette, harking back to the glory days of PFI. Cllr Purcell says;

“It depresses me when I look down south and see Public Private Partnership contracts being signed week after week.”

Well, it depresses me too. It worries me. PFI has been discredited, written off, and found to be a crap way of funding public works. Private Eye covers more of PFI's difficulties in the credit crunch era, and a quick google will turn up various examples of PFI's failings. The debacle over fixing poorly designed ventilation in Glasgow's PFI schools cost the Council some £8m - and set a precendent for future costs being borne by the Council, not the PFI contractor.

What Labour won't admit is that, only last week, they refused to consider the SNP's budget proposals which would have saved the Council around £20m and found money to transform Glsagow's five 'condition D' schools into buildings we could be proud of (for those with only fuzzy knowledge of schools condition surveys, a senior official in Education described 'condition D' to our group as "D for Dangerous"). Interestingly, one of the schools posing a risk to health and safety was in Steven Purcell's own ward.

SNP Education spokesperson in the Council, Patricia Gibson, found that her twenty minute telephone conversation with Ms Davidson didn't result in anything like partiality, so she is submitting the following letter to the Times. In case they neglect to print it, I got her permission to reproduce it here...

Dear Editor,

I have to say that I read today’s article on School Closures in Glasgow, Glasgow’s Schools “are left to rot by SNP” with utter disbelief.

At the Emergency Council meeting in Glasgow, Councillor Purcell stated clearly, and this was echoed by Councillor Gordon Matheson, Convenor of Education in Glasgow, that the Proposed Primary Estate Management Plan was not about money but about improving education in Glasgow.

According to the comments from Purcell as reported in this story, clearly this position has changed. The entire article focused on budgetary considerations.

Furthermore, to suggest, as he does, that this process is necessary since the schools involved are in a poor condition, is bewildering since the five Category D schools in Glasgow, which are not fit for purpose, are not included in these proposals at all, ie Stonedyke Primary School, St. Roch’s Primary School, St. Joseph’s Primary School, St. Mark’s Primary School and Thornwood Primary School.

To blame the Scottish Government for this state of affairs is laughable. The Labour Party has run Glasgow for 50 years. The Scottish Government has been in power for less than 2 years. This clearly smacks of cheap political point scoring by Councillor Purcell and his coterie and a refusal to take responsibility for failing to invest in education in Glasgow.

If this is about budgetary concerns, as Councillor Purcell appears now to be saying, perhaps he could explain why £60m was spent on the Glasgow Riverside Museum, or why £7m has been committed to the King’s Theatre or why £8m has been paid to private contractors to fix faulty ventilation systems in our PFI schools, since the original contract did not guarantee the work undertaken which then had to be paid for again in order to put right? That is a total of £75m on projects which clearly Cllr Purcell has prioritised over improving primary school buildings.

So instead of whinging and blaming the Scottish Government for decay and decline which has taken place under the 50 year watch of the Labour Party in Glasgow, he would be better served spending the substantial budget he has, which has increased under the current Scottish Government, on Glasgow’s schools instead of profligacy in other areas.

And it is further bewildering to hear that SNP led Fife Council is pressing ahead with six new or refurbished schools, since according to Cllr Purcell this is not possible.

It is time Cllr Purcell does the honourable thing and admits he has been utterly disingenuous throughout this entire matter with pupils, staff and parents across Glasgow and continues to dangerously play politics with education in Glasgow.

Glasgow’s children deserve better.

Regards

Councillor Patricia Gibson

SNP Education Spokesperson

Schools on the march

Today saw hundreds of parents and children descend on to George Square for a city-wide demo against the Labour administration of Glasgow City Council's school closure proposals (or "modernisation strategy" as they prefer to call it).

For the parents from St James' Primary and Queen Mary Street Nursery in my ward, this is a bigger fight than keeping schools open - it's about protecting the community as a whole. Their 2 become 1 campaign aims to move Queen Mary Street Nursery into St James' Primary, which keeps the children in the community and safeguards the future of the school. The parents really did themselves proud today - I'm fairly chuffed too that the BBC have chosen to illustrate their closure coverage with a child holding a banner in support of this particular campaign!

There was a great turnout from the schools and nurseries in the city, despite the grim and overcast weather, and the march went well. I was left with the impression that people who came along were bolstered and strengthened for the fight ahead.

Parkhead closure goes ahead

I've taken some time to get over my anger that Parkhead Fire Station is set to close. I, and other SNP colleagues on the Fire Board, asked the questions that needed asked around safety and service provision. We criticised the public consultation, which had received suspiciously low responses from the public. We queried why those comments which were against the proposals got played down in the response to the consultation. Buried at the back, these included:

"I trust that you will not claim in your ‘full consultation report’ that this event and your ‘business plan’ has in any way the support of this community council - since the event was clearly designed to exclude any meaningful participation by working people in general and by this Community Council in particular."

"The FBU presented a petition with over 2000 signatures asking for the Board of Strathclyde Fire & Rescue to retain Parkhead Fire Station. The petition stated that a slower and less efficient service would be provided and no account was being taken of planned regeneration works. The premise of this petition was therefore misleading."

"Our overall conclusion, then, has to be somewhat guarded:
The Public Meetings did not demonstrate a widespread public opposition to the proposals – because they were poorly attended and because fire service personnel were so influential in articulating concerns that were taken up by others;"

In the end, we still got outvoted 17 - 6.

Credit must go to the FBU, who did so much work to raise awareness in the local community and told the other side story.

I got an assurance from the Chief Officer after the meeting that Parkhead will remain open until the new station is built. This may take around two years.

School and nursery closures

I was out of the office at meetings for much of yesterday, so it was early evening when I was finally able to read through the proposals from the Labour administration to close a number of schools and nurseries in the city. First off, I think calling it a "modernisation strategy" when it is in fact a series of closures is more than a bit disingenuous. Secondly, I'm a wee bit suspicious as to why the news was released yesterday - while the world had eyes only for Obama. It was a very late addition to the Executive Committee papers (not going first to the Education and Social Work committee) which got sent in error to all Councillors in draft form last week.

There are a couple of nurseries and a Primary school in my ward which are set to close, and I'm really not comfortable with the proposal. The head teachers and staff in these establishments do a great job, and these schools and nurseries are hugely valued by their communities. It's true there are lot of savings to be made from the closures, but there's more than the bottom line at stake. I intend to meet soon with staff from the affected establishments and will keep the blog updated.