Vultures Thwarted As Carcass Regains Life

Strange goings-on over school closures in Bath:

The Schools Forum, which is largely made up of primary and secondary heads and governors, has submitted its response to the consultation exercise over whether to close the Rush Hill school.

Its members have met Bath and North East Somerset Council's cabinet member for early years, children and youth, Councillor Nathan Hartley, and say they were not impressed by what they heard.

They say they are concerned with the way the authority has dealt with the process and said the decision to try to keep Culverhay open was based on "flimsy arguments".

Wait, hang on a minute here. The council is trying to prevent closure of a school, and the school staff are against that?

In a letter to the council on behalf of the forum, chair Libby Lee, who is also the head teacher of Ralph Allen School, said: "We are in shock and disbelief that the current administration have so emotively attached themselves to the single issue of keeping Culverhay open without any seeming regard for the implications on the wider school system, which is drained of resources and facing a crumbling and inefficient estate, apart from limited examples such as Writhlington, Threeways or St Kenya."

Ah. There’s the magic word – ‘resources’.

Ms Lee said the process had been "hurried through" and that the minutes of a forum meeting attended by Mr Hartley did not reflect the strength of feeling of its members.

That’s because that’s not what minutes are for. Rather, they are there as a factual record of who attended and who said what.

She said they had been left "bewildered" by the "poverty of arguments" for keeping the school open, adding that the "council have for some time been in receipt of robust data in relation to the financial impact of keeping Culverhay open and will be aware of the poor standards and difficulty in sustaining a full educational offer there."

Seems to be as if ‘poor standards’ and ‘difficulty in sustaining a full educational offer’ are down to you and your colleagues, not just the council?

She said: "We strongly urge the Liberal Democrats to refine their thinking to include some stronger arguments for the whole.

"At present it appears that dubious arguments are being stacked up to support a decision made in haste and in the interests of pleasing a small interest group in the electorate.

"All of us inherit the consequences of this decision, not just one localised community."

Oh, dear. Had you planned to pick the meat off the bones of this school but then the council decided to resurrect it, to please the ‘customers’? What a shame for you, eh?

Who cares about the parents and what they might want from this service, they are just there to provide job security for teaching staff, aren’t they?

Culverhay chair of governors Gerry Curran said he understood the forum's views, but that the school continued to strive to work with other head teachers.

He said: "It is understandable that head teachers are worried about school funding and their own individual budgets.

"Perhaps some of them have become used to the idea that Culverhay was going to close, which may have released some extra funding, but that is not going to happen and now we all need to move forward together."

Shoo, scavengers! Go find another corpse. This one has life left in it.