Ten Reasons the Suffolk Library Consultation is Flawed

Suffolk County Council are "consulting" on their plans for libraries and have asked the people of Suffolk to "have their say". Consultations by governments local and national are often said to be somewhat dubious with the suspicion that the decision has already been made never far away.

I think the Suffolk Library Consultation is blatantly biased and flawed. Take a look here at the documents.

Here are the 10 reasons I think the "consultation" is flawed:

1. The consultation document is completely based on the assumption that library services must be cut by at least 30%. Cllr Judy Terry, Cabinet lead states in the forward:

Libraries will have much less funding in future. The council will be reducing the funding for libraries by greater than 30% in order to protect more essential front line services like fire services and services for vulnerable people like elderly care.

So rather than consulting Suffolk CC have made the decision already.

2. This isn't a consultation at all. It is more a gun to the head of local communities. Basically the message is come up with ideas to fund and run your local library yourself or it will close. The consultation document goes on:

If we do not receive your ideas for ways in which the county council can substantially reduce its funding, we propose to fund or part fund some of the county’s libraries, and stop funding the rest. This is why your ideas are so important.

3. The consultation is based on dividing libraries in Suffolk into "County" libraries and "community" libraries. This division is arbitrary and has been invented for the purposes of the consultation. The real distinction is the "Community" libraries will close unless someone else takes them on.

4. The consultation has a questionnaire that asks leading questions rather than allowing the person answering to state their own opinions, for example:

How will your idea or interest generate changes or significant efficiencies in the way the library operates to reduce what the county council pays by a minimum of 30%?

You may want to refer to the consultation document 'Have your say on the future of Suffolk’s libraries' for criteria and suggestions about different approaches to running libraries in Suffolk and elsewhere.

Also, please include in your answer:

• Whether you can personally contribute, or if your suggestion is made on behalf of a local organisation, company or individual(s)

• Who might provide the service and how?

These "questions" are leading and do not allow the response that Suffolk should continue to fully fund and run the library service which is at the very least a valid opinion.

5. People should not be expected to have ideas on who might provide library services in order to be entitled to an opinion in the consultation. Indeed many will quite understandably feel that this is the County Council's job.

6. Many library users do not use the Internet yet Suffolk County Council made very few paper copies of the survey available, have been reluctant to provide further paper copies even if they run out and appear to have inadequate resources to key in the paper consultation responses.

7. The consultation invites community groups to submit bids to run library services and provides financial data in order to allow a business case to be prepared yet issues a disclaimer with the data saying it should not be used for business planning purposes:

The information we are providing is as accurate as we can make it at the point of publication but given the volume and detail of this information we cannot guarantee that it is error free so it should not be used for business planning purposes If you require any clarifications on the information provided please contact us using the details below.

8. The consultation shows both county wide and individual library data on financial and visitor numbers yet these figures do not add up and there is a further disclaimer:

Visitor figures are derived in two ways, and there may be a discrepancy between the figures used in the countywide financial information sheet and the more detailed information on each library. The figures used in the countywide financial information sheet are taken from one source consistently for comparative purposes only.

9. The consultation process is being led by Cllr Judy Terry who is a partisan Conservative member of the Cabinet. It would be much more appropriate for the consultation to be led my officers who would report the findings to elected members to make decisions on.

10. Further lack of confidence in the impartiality of the consultation process was caused by the failure to name the project team analyzing the survey responses until an FOI was served despite several requests from library campaigners.

Suffolk County Council 's "Secret" Library Consultation Project Team Named

For sometime myself and several library campaigners have been trying to get hold of the names of the consultation project team who are apparently analysing the responses received as part of the library consultation you can find here.

For reasons that are unclear they did not want to release this information and I had to serve an FOI to get it. The results are below and I have now been invited together with some other library campigners to meet this group so it is nice to actually know their names!

Guenever Pachent - Suffolk County Council Project Sponsor
Roger McMaster - Head of Suffolk Libraries
Mike Ellwood - Suffolk Libraries Project Manager
Stephen Taylor - Suffolk Libraries Adult Services Manager
Helen Boothroyd - Suffolk Libraries Children and Young Persons
Services Manager
Lisa Elmer - Suffolk Libraries Area Manager
Linda Farnworth - Suffolk Libraries Area Manager
Paul Howarth - Suffolk Libraries Area Manager
Alison Wheeler - Suffolk County Council Head of Service Development
Richard Catherall - Suffolk County Council Group Manager Business
Development

Additional support from:

Wendy Herber - SAVO
Miles Cole - LEAP Co-Operative
Quentin Cass - Suffolk County Council Property Services
Lindsey Richardson - CSD Finance

The analysis of the consultation responses is being led by Lyn Baran, Head of Research and Intelligence in Transformation and Performance, Suffolk County Council.

Academy Status: The question that won't go away

The author is Chair of Governors of Stradbroke Primary School, Suffolk but this article is written in a personal capacity and all opinions are mine

Like many from a personal point of view I have many misgivings about the Government's academies policy. It appears to be designed to set school against school and privatise or at least marketise state education. It is also clearly designed to see local authorities almost completely removed from their role in education.

Like many other coalition policies it is ostensibly about localism and giving control to communities although ironically in practice the academies programme has seen a shift towards central govenment control in Westminster which is even more remote than County control. It has also in some cases weakened links with local communities by reducing the number of community governors and elected stakeholders like staff and parents.

You would imagine then that I would be strongly opposed to academy status but, actually, that is not my view. I think that all schools should very seriously consider academy status and that for many schools it would be the best choice to make.

As Governors our job is to make the best decision for the children in our schools and for our staff and local communities. This has to be a decision taken after carefully considering all the facts and putting our own political and personal views to one side. Academies are real, they aren't going away and there is no reason to doubt that the Government wants all schools eventually to become academies.

So in many ways the question is more "when" than anything else and there are some compelling reasons to consider this sooner rather than later. When introducing any kind of major change there is usually a "carrot" phase where you try and convince people of the merits of a change and even offer incentives. Often there follows a "stick" phase when pressure subtle or otherwise is used.

We are clearly in the "carrot" phase now although there are some signs of the "stick" with continuing to be a state school looking increasingly unattractive from both the perspective of funding and control over areas such as the curriculum.

On a practical level though academies do bring freedoms for schools although in many ways this this is the culmination of an evolution over many years through delegated budgets, local management of schools and foundation status rather than the revolution Gove suggests.

But as with all aspects of life freedom has the tail of responsibility and there is more work for staff and governors to do. Staff, buildings and finance become completely the academy's responsibility and whilst in many schools this gives welcome control for some schools this is not the case.

This is why very many secondary schools have already become or are becoming academies and it looks like in the not so distant future pretty much all of them will.

Some primaries have gone too but for the small rural primary schools in my part of the world typically with less than 100 children the picture looks quite different and academy "freedoms" here look more like onerous responsibilities.

However in Suffolk something has happened that means that even such schools can no longer sit tight and depend on their local authority to provide the support it used to do. Basically the local authority has all but shut up shop, firing so many staff and positioning itself as an "enabler" rather than "provdier" of services. So such as small school that continues to sit on its own will find increasingly that the local authority isn't there to do anything much at all - it won't interfere or control but neither will it help or support.

Many of us regard with dismay the defeatist and what appears to be politically motivated actions of Suffolk County Council. Recently the CEO Andrea Hill said the authority's future was as:

"a consumer champion, like a local Which? magazine for our citizens".

Not much use if you can't recruit a Head for your school or the roof collapses...

But none of this really matters. What matters is that our children get the best education they can and that our communities continue to have the local schools that help to bind them together. Without local schools communities literally wither and die.

Unlike Suffolk County Council we cannot "divest" oursleves of our responsibilies. If we do nobody else will be there to save our schools and communities. We have to act and do this. These are our children, our communities.

This means that we need to explore all options. For many this will be hard and almost certianly not what they signed up to do when they became governors.

In my view the solution for such small schools is both simple and obvious and complicated and difficult at the same time. It means forming partnerships with other schools to create a sustainable organisation and then seriously looking at academy status as part of the "chains of academies" provision.

This provisions allows groups of schools to join together and become an academy whilst maintaining their own identity as individual schools.

For primary schools there are two real options either they group with other primaries or they join a group led by a secondary school comprising that school and probably other primaries.

Both models have pros and cons and much will depend on local circumstances. Sadly some secondary schools still view primaries as the poor relation and imagine it must be easy to run such a school and would want to dominate such a "partnership" that would look more like a "takeover" by the typically much bigger and better resourced secondary. That isn't always the case though and there could well be problems with groups of primaries on their own too.

This is a big responsibility and especially in Suffolk a lot depends on us making the right decisons and maybe taking some calculated risks. But the prize isn't just that our schools will still be there in future this is also an opportunity - if we are up to the challenge - to make schools better and create some real co-operation between schools. Co-operation that to be honest was sometimes lacking even when we were supposed to be part of the "happy family" of the local authority!