Backlash in Brandon against new IES Free School

IES Breckland isn’t open yet but it is already running into trouble with people in Brandon taking to the BrandonSuffolk.com online forums to discuss their concerns.

The main concern is that not a single one of the Breckland Middle School teachers will be hired by IES to work in the new free school which opens in September.

Given the strong campaign run by SABRES to “save the middle school” many Brandon residents are angry.

This post is an example of someone very angry:

RIP Breckland Middle School ----- hello all that stinks to high heaven in the Tory paradise which is Cameron's Britain and, more pertinently, Gove's sad little educational fiefdom.

Sad is perhaps the wrong word ---- all of the existing staff made redundant in the cynical ploy which the "new" school looks ever more likely to have been all along ; staff whom the kids around here have for years largely trusted and liked ; staff who have, to my certain knowledge, put in hundreds of extra hours of their own time ; staff with whom the children of the town felt safe.

All this under an organization which seems quite happy to allow into the public domain such literary nuggets as "Sweden History" , "aproximately" and "this shield shapes" --- this cleerly promotes a truely and reely gud egsample to the rest off us. lol

Joking aside, how appalling of IES to sack the existing teachers. 

( "Oh no, Choceur --- they were not 'sacked' ; they were merely not up to the "outstanding" talents of those who HAVE been recently employed" ........ "Oh yes they were", replies Choceur," this was a strategic cuckoo's nest move to tip the existing teachers out of the tree") 

I could go on, but what's the point ? It seems to me that this has been a done deal from the start................ Well done ( SLOW HAND-CLAP ...) 

Others are unhappy about both the cost and organisation of the uniform sale event that was recently held:

What an utter shambles it was- totally disorganised. Uniform people were, actually, spot on. The general organisation of the event was pitiful. I agree with Chocolate Hearts, it doesn't bode well for the running of a whole school if this simple event couldn't be organised properly. Not only that, it seems not everyone was even told it was on, some only found out by word of mouth! And who was told to bring money? Yes, it is probably obvious, but it was only billed as a measuring event, no mention of payment (and quite a big bill, at that, though it does look nice) Then there are the grammatical errors on the web-site...... I am seriously considering looking elsewhere, even the dreaded bus ride to MCT. Big shame about the staff, too. My little one only wanted to stay here because she thought some of the excellent staff were staying too. Will give it a go, but I'm not convinced, not by a long way.

Bear in mind that this is in a town - Brandon - that apparently had strong support for a free school. In reality what it seems parents wanted was to save the middle school. People told them the free school would do this and now they are becoming angry as it increasingly becomes clear it will not.

Do read the comments on the Brandon Suffolk forum if you get the chance.

Suffolk Free Schools set to receive £2.6 million for children they don't actually have

Yesterday I revealed how Stour Valley Community School is receiving £1.4 million over two years for children it does not actually have on roll.

With the announcement yesterday of the approval of Beccles and Saxmundham Free Schools I have calculated that next year around £2.6 million of funding will be received by Suffolk free schools for pupils not on roll.


Download the full spreadsheet on Wikisuffolk.Remember this is just the start of what this is costing. There is also:

• “Diseconomy” funding for management costs. We know Seckford’s management costs are around £1 million for Beccles and Saxmundham
• Building costs. We know just Stour Valley is costing £5 million. If all four cost this much that could be £20 million
• “Set up costs” paying for consultants, PR, lawyers and advertising. Who knows what this cost

All this at a time of “austerity” in a County with 11,000 spare secondary school places.

"Vote with your feet" urges local Councillor as Seckford impose Free School on Beccles

Back in February Roger Finbow the Chairman of the  Seckford Foundation wrote to me saying:

We have consistently made clear that if, contrary to our understanding, the desire is not there, then we will have no wish to impose a free school on the community. 

Since that time it has become clear as the day that the desire is not there in Beccles as evidenced by:

• The low number of expressions of interest in the school (107 across three school years)
• A petition of around 3000 opposing the school
• The opposition of Peter Aldous local MP
• The opposition of Mr Bee local County Councillor
• The reaction of the Question Time audience in Beccles
• The collapse of the “parent group” behind the school
• Letters to the local press
• The opposition of five local head teachers

I could go on. It is genuinely difficult to find anyone in support of the school in Beccles and Free School “Group" leader Aidan McHugh seems to be on his own with the view:

This is fantastic news, I have already spoken to a number of other parents and we look forward to continuing to work with The Seckford Foundation and the new head, John Lucas, to ensure we develop a truly exceptional school for our children.

Reacting to the news local County Councillor Mark Bee is quoted in the EDP saying:

I am extremely disappointed that the government has taken this view. I feel there is a great deal of talk about localism, but what consideration was given to local feelings and views? 

I feel it is unfortunate that the government has chosen not to listen to their local MP who worked hard behind the scenes.

I would urge the people of Beccles to continue to support the John Leman as the established school and vote with their feet.

MP Peter Aldous certainly did work hard on this project and produced an excellent report showing clearly why the school was not needed that the Government would have done well to have listed to. He responded:

I am disappointed by the decision. I felt improving education in the future was better served by taking full advantage of what John Leman has put in place and I made the government aware of that, but they have taken the decision to pursue this

I suppose at least the Beccles school has a Head unlike the school also approved down the road in Saxmundham where the Head Seckford appointed later withdrew.

Meanwhile Sir John Leman Headteacher Jeremy Rowe vowed to fight on. Jeremy Rowe has fought a strong campaign on behalf of his school said last night on Twitter:

We might have lost Round One - due to some dodgy refereeing - but this game has a few twists & turns left in it yet, I'd say

— Jeremy Rowe (@lemanhead) May 25, 2012

Something tells me this is right and this story isn’t over yet. Maybe it will end in the courts with a Judicial Review or maybe parents will follow Mark Bee’s advice to vote with their feet and the Free School will fail.

Live Blog: Beccles and Saxmundham Free Schools Approved

Revealed: Stour Valley Free School gets £1.4 Million funding for pupils it doesn't have

Stour Valley Community School, Clare

When I attended the final transport consultation meeting in Sudbury a parent present said something that amazed me. She claimed that Stour Valley Community School, the new free school that opened last year in Clare on the site of the former Middle School received funding for all of its planned capacity regardless of the actual numbers of children it had.

In education jargon it was fully funded to its PAN (Planned Admission Number). All other schools are funded by the pupils they actually have on roll. This per pupil funding makes up the vast majority of all school budgets.

Now this might not really matter if the school was either full or nearly full but this was far from the case at Clare when the school opened in September. Across the three years of entry that opened the capacity of the school is 324 but it opened with 190 pupils.

Taking the average £5,325 that a Suffolk secondary school gets per place this means it received a total of £713,550 in additional funding for pupils that the school simply doesn’t have. Apparently this continues for two years making a cool £1.4 million.

What really surprised me is everyone in the room seemed to know this and the Suffolk County Council official present did too and confirmed this was true. Clearly he was constrained by what he could say but he did make the point that local schools were unhappy about the inequitable funding and also that they had confirmed to the DfE that there were no additional school places needed in the area.

Building work at Stour Valley

This might not be the end of the story. After I wrote my piece on the £1 million wage bill for managers at Beccles and Saxmundham Free Schools I became aware of something called diseconomy funding which is a grant free schools can apply for to pay for management costs in their first years of operation. I think this is in addition to the per pupil funding. What if any funding Clare received I do not yet know.

For new free schools opening in 2012 and beyond it is unclear what they will receive. The whole process is surrounded in so much secrecy but someone reliable did say they would be fully funded by PAN for one year rather than two. It might be individually negotiated.

But with this extra funding, capital investment for building work and free transport from more or less anywhere this school would have to work extremely hard not to succeed.

We have already seen the impact on Sudbury Upper School as it is having to be taken over by an academy sponsor. The nightmare scenario though is that despite this there are declining numbers of children and it is far from impossible that one of the schools in the local area will fail completely.

That school isn’t going to be Stour Valley. If this happens we will be left with a secondary school in Clare, a small town with a population of around 2,000 serving a much larger town like Sudbury with 17,000 people. I hope they are building plenty of space for buses at Stour Valley...

This is what school provision by petition rather than planning gets you.

Free School Travel: The Long Melford Story

At Tuesday’s final transport consultation in Sudbury Upper School a parent told a story about travel that was so unbelievable I made a point of speaking to her afterwards to check the details. This parent lives in Long Melford as do two of her friends.

Now this parent has three children at Sudbury Upper School all get a bus to school. However as her house is 2.8 miles from the school she has to pay as the statutory distance is 3 miles. The journey would be along unlit country lanes and whilst there is a path I am not sure many people would let a 13 year old, let alone an 11 year old walk this route every day to school. So she has to pay around £1300 a year.



Her friend lives a bit further up the road and her children travel on the same bus. But as she is 3 miles away she doesn’t have to pay.

Now already I am feeling this woman’s pain - but - I suppose you do have to draw the line somewhere.



But it was the next thing she said that astonished me. Another friend sends her children to the Stour Valley Community School, the free school in Clare that opened in September. That is 7 miles away and although Sudbury Upper is closer Suffolk County Council pay for their travel to Clare but they would not to Sudbury Upper as they are too close.

So if the lady in question moved her children 7 miles away to Clare she wouldn't have to pay a penny.



I still do not understand how this happened. Suffolk County Council say that the DfE advised them that they way they were dealing with transport in the area was “unfair” and alleged it breached the Academies Act as it did not treat the free school the same as other schools. So the County Council seem to have ended up paying for transport to Clare for pretty much anyone who wants it.

The transport consultation is at least in part an attempt by the County Council to extricate themselves from this mess. I alternate between sympathy at how the DfE have messed things up for them and anger at the fact that the County Council has a policy encouraging free schools.

The County Council officer told us how they told the DfE that the free school in Clare was not needed and there were not enough pupils. Now Sudbury Upper School is in trouble and there are doubts that the current number of schools are sustainable in the long term.

There was a lot of call at the meeting for the County Council and elected councillors in particular to stand up in public against the DfE

Seckford's Graham Watson orders free school supporters off social media

For a few days now my Blog has been full of arguments between Ixworth Free School supporters and others about the proposed Seckford free schools. A few new users appeared on Twitter too and started to engage with the Suffolk Campaign Opposing Free Schools and others.

For a while we were actually having a debate about the issues and members of the free school group made some interesting points.

All this stopped abruptly this morning. Ixworth free schooler Wendy Canham published the following Facebook Message:

As soon as I saw this it was clear to me what has happened as I have seen it several times before. The first time was when the Saxmundham Free School Facebook Group was closed down as soon as a few people asked awkward questions about who was paying the Principal’s salary. Then there was the Stoke by Nayland Facebook group that closed down all discussion becoming an “information only group”.

Later on more information emerged. Seckford have ordered its supporters off social media.

I thought these free schools were supposed to be parent led groups? Incredibly parents have been reduced to distributing leaflets and holding microphones at meetings.

Any suggestion that parent groups are “working together” with Seckford is shown to be nonsense by this incident. It is clear that it is Seckford who are calling the shorts unless any of the free school group would like to comment below and show me that I am wrong? Anyone

Suffolk Libraries IPS to take over libraries on 1 August 2012

IPS Chair, Shona Bendix

Suffolk Libraries IPS have announced that they will take over running all libraries in Suffolk on 1st August. On that date all staff will transfer from the County Council and the IPS will assume responsibility for running the library services including mobile libraries, prison library service and the school library service.

This date is a month later than originally targeted. I actually think this is a good thing as it shows that there has not been a huge rush to meet a deadline even if the job could not be properly done. I would not be surprised if some in the County Council would have wanted this.

IPS Chair Shona Bendix commented:

The next few months are going to be hugely significant for Suffolk's libraries. By giving community groups more say in the way libraries are run, we're creating a service that really meets the needs of the people it serves. 

The quality of service delivered by Suffolk's excellent and dedicated staff will most definitely continue - and we look forward to expanding what we can offer to customers in the coming months. 

By making libraries independent from a large organisation like the county council, we're able to save significant amounts of money on back office and management costs whilst protecting what's most important - frontline library services.

If the delay shows anything it is that setting up this kind of organisation is far from simple. I would imagine that if the Board Members were paid the savings would not be anything like as great!

The IPS are saying that services will remain as they are now although the work to establish local library groups continues. Clearly it is too early to draw any conclusions yet but we still have libraries and the Suffolk Libraries network which is certainly a good thing.

But how things pan out after the 2013 County Council elections remains unclear. The IPS however successful needs adequate funding and I am sure that will be a big part of the election campaign next year.

EXCLUSIVE: Head appointed for Saxmundham Free School will not take post up

Alex Hayes currently Vice-Principal at the Open Academy in Norwich has confirmed to me that he will not be taking the post he was offered as Headteacher of the Seckford run Saxmundham Free School.

Hayes cites "personal reasons" for his decision but this will clearly be a blow for the Woodbridge based Seckford Foundation as they appear to have schools without either the staff or the children needed for them to open in September.

I wish Alex Hayes good luck in whatever he does and think that he has probably made a wise decision.

 

Live Blog: Final Transport Consultation Meeting at Sudbury Upper School

My response to Suffolk County Council's School Transport Consultation

If you have followed my Blog and Tweets you will know that I have attended more of the Suffolk Free School transport consultation meetings  than is probably good for my health. I have been pleased to see that Cllr Graham Newman has also attended the vast majority of them in person. I had a go at him for missing the first one but this was a little unfair.

Having attended so many of the meetings and thought a lot about the issues I am making my own response to the consultation because I think that the proposal made by Suffolk County Council is unfair and gives an unnecessary advantage to the free schools at the expense of established Suffolk schools.

The basic flaw seems to be the way in which the catchment area policy is being applied. Take for example a convertor academy such as Stradbroke High School (formerly a maintained school called Stradbroke Business and Enterprise College). When it became an academy what happens legally is that the former maintained school ceases to exist and is Closed and a new school (the Academy) is opened.

But for Suffolk CC’s transport policy both as now and as proposed in the consultation this former catchment area is used for the purposes of the transport policy even if the new academy doesn’t have (as most don’t) a catchment area in its admissions policy any longer.
So here is the catchment:

Now when it comes to the free schools let’s take a look at what happens. A maintained school is closed and a new academy school (for that is what a free school is legally) opens. What’s the difference? Sure the age phase is different (although overlapping) but the size seems to stay broadly the same.
If you look at what has actually happened in Beccles you can see Beccles Middle Catchment below:

But look what a huge catchment area Suffolk County Council are proposing:

So as I see it there are three options:

Option 1 - Overlapping Catchments with Free School getting Former Middle Catchment
The policy is kept literally as it is now with the former middle school catchment areas being used for new free schools opening on the former middle school sites.

The current schools catchments would be unaffected - so some areas would have overlapping catchments and a choice of two schools.

This might be expensive and some people in areas without such a choice might say it is unfair.

Now I know the County Council have to provide transport on request to the nearest school so they might have to transport some other children under this rule but this will be a smaller area.

I personally favour this option.

Option 2 - Free School gets former Middle Catchment and Other Schools Catchments Reduced
New Free Schools get the catchment area of the former middle school with the catchment areas of other local schools reduced accordingly.

This would take choice away for people in the former catchment area.

Option 3 - Expanded Catchments for other Academy Schools
If a new free school gets a huge catchment on opening why should a convertor academy not get the same? This option would be hugely expensive as it would give large 20 mile radios catchments to any school that wanted one just like some of the free schools are getting.

Note I have used catchment to mean transport priority area as they amount to the same thing

The final transport consultation meeting is at Sudbury Upper School tonight 7pm to 9pm. The consultation closes on 1 June.

Seckford: "Managing parental perceptions" in a fee paying school when you open free schools

When you are a private school charging upwards of £13,500 a year for a school place it must raise a few eyebrows amongst the parents of fee paying children when you announce you plan to open a chain of free schools which will cost nothing for children to attend.

If you’re the one paying the £13K you are going to want to be sure that the education you are getting is better than they are giving out for free down the road.

The Woodbridge based Seckford Foundation in Suffolk run the fee-paying Woodbridge School and have now proposed a chain of four or more free schools as part of their “portfolio”.

Interestingly Seckford Director and Woodbridge Bursar Graham Watson has a speaking engagement in September to talk jointly with MTM Consulting’s Melanie Tucker. The event is entitled Practical Strategies for Recovery and is about helping private schools deal with the current economic climate:

It may be too early to be counting the green shoots of recovery but there are signs that the protracted four-year period of economic uncertainty may be ending. The road may yet be a long one but schools should already by laying their strategic plans for a changed and still-changing environment.

Regular readers of this blog may remember Tucker from my post Beccles Free School Proposer Melanie Tucker and MTM Consulting. Tucker was one of the members of the original “parent” group behind the Beccles Free School proposal.

Their talk entitled Educational Charities and Free Schools is described as follows:

The Seckford Foundation, a Charity supporting the young and the elderly since 1587 has won approval for two Free Schools in Suffolk, due to open in 2012, and aims to add at least two more Free Schools to this portfolio. The Foundation also supports Woodbridge School, an HMC school. Graham Watson will discuss the benefits of running a group of schools across a rural county and across the sectors, including the cost savings; the bidding process; how the Free Schools might work with independent schools; and managing parental perceptions in the fee paying school.

I assume parental perceptions do not need managing in the “free schools”. You get what you pay for!

When I wrote the story about MTM I tried without any success to discover what links MTM Consulting and the Seckford foundation might have. Clearly they must be reasonably close to share presenting a talk.

It seems Graham Watson must be pretty sure that the DfE are going to sign the funding agreements for Beccles and Saxmundham to agree to a presentation in September when the schools should just have opened. If they do not it might be worth the £225 admission fee just to hear what he has to say!

Visit to Ormiston Victory Academy in Norwich

It was great to take some time out from the “interesting” Suffolk education scence to hop over the border to visit the Ormiston Victory Academy in Norwich where @Rachel_desouza is the Principal. Rachel Gooch and I travelled up together, Victory is very much a “traditional" sponsored academy that was created in response to a failing predecessor school that was in Special Measures due to behaviour and poor attainment.

The academy is into its second year of operation and it is clear it is already a much different place. When we walked into rooms children jumped to their feet to stand and were all smartly dressed in Victory’s uniform.

Now I am not the kind of person to think this is compulsory in a school but I would much rather see this than an out of control environment where nobody can learn.  It was nothing like that at Victory, the school was calm, well ordered and everyone was working.

Now that is not unusual, I have visited many schools where that is the case but given the situation at the school previously this is clearly a major change as staff, many of whom worked at the predecessor school were happy to tell us.

Last year the results shot up and the Academy is working on sustaining this as well as a major building project which will see some crumbling buildings replaced with what looks to be an amazing state of the art school. Take a look at the video below:

I liked Victory Academy. It combines a kind of “traditional” approach to behaviour and learning with a modern, real world, practical and relevant atmosphere. It was business-like in a good way. The school is rightly striving for high academic standards.

We heard that something around about 75% of children were now doing a Language although this was not compulsory. Indeed they have added Spanish to the French and German and I think I heard mention of Latin at some point!

Vocational subjects were also a strong focus and we were given a tour of the amazing Victory beauty salon which operates as a real world business. We spoke to some of the students in the sixth form who already had part-time jobs in local beauty salons. The school was giving them a skill that directly led to employment. Unfortunately though they had no solution for receding hair!

The staff very much felt that by offering vocational qualifications that led to real world employment opportunities it encourages students to carry on with their academic studies. They were every bit as proud of the Beauty Salon as the academic departments.

Of course the concern is always that this kind of quick change might not be sustainable. I certainly do not think that a sponsored academy and this rate of change would work everywhere but it certainly achieves a quick turnaround. Some schools need to grow in an evolutionary way, some need a revolution.

We had an very interesting discussion later about the proposed Sixth Form Free School in Norwich which I will write another post about as it is a very interesting and innovative project. Likewise the proposed “Guild of Teaching” is something that deserves its own post too.

It seems everyone at the Academy is on Twitter! And it was amusing to be introduced by our Twitter names by Rachel de Souza who is every bit as enthusiastic in real life as she appears on Twitter!

Live Blog: Visit to Ormiston Victory Academy in Norwich

Why are Seckford not offering the same curriculum as Woodbridge for its Free Schools?

The Seckford Foundation claim that they are bringing their 400 years of experience to help them run their free school chain. Given Woodbridge Fees are £13,500 a year and the average funding for a Suffolk State secondary is £5,500 nobody expects the two to offer the same education.

However a lot of the extra funding is paying more for extra and better quality facilities and smaller teaching groups etc

The Foundation have presented their curriculum plans for their free schools as an “unashamedly academic curriculum”. It focuses on the English Baccalaureate which Sekford talk of as if it was a qualification. However the DfE say:

The English Baccalaureate was introduced as a performance measure in the 2010 performance tables. It is not a qualification in itself.

Seckford however describe the EBacc as if it was some kind of qualification.

The curriculum will be designed to allow pupils if they want to, to gain the English Baccalaureate, or EBacc. This was introduced by the Department of Education in 2010 and is awarded when pupils have achieved a GCSE grade C or better across a core of academic subjects: English, mathematics, history or geography, the sciences and a modern language.

Woodbridge have as you would expect a detailed Options Booklet for Year 9 children and parents. What is fascinating is that it doesn’t mention the Ebacc at all.

On the subject of Languages the website suggests this is not compulsory but "encouraged" but the curriculum booklet has a different take:

At least one of the options must be a modern language. The study of modern languages after Year 9 is no longer compulsory in maintained schools and hence the opportunity to continue with two languages (or at least one) will ensure that pupils will be increasingly attractive to future employers. This is especially true of German, the second language of the EU. Fewer and fewer pupils nationally study this language, which makes those who do so increasingly employable.  

Interestingly Secckford appear to be contributing to the trend of not making German available by not teaching it in their Free Schools.

Graeme Bruce need not have been so modest at the consultation meetings as the curriculum offered at Woodbridge is certainly broader than the free schools. This table from their website shows what is on offer in Y10/11

There is also the opportunity to study more languages as well as GCSEs in PE, Computing and Business Studies. Even Latin if you like.

In Years 7, 8 and 9 the Woodbridge Curriculum is described like this:

Opportunity to expand and dig

Solid foundations for success at GCSE and beyond are laid in these first three years so all pupils have opportunities to progress in English, mathematics and sciences, the humanities such as history, geography and religious studies, the creative areas of music, drama, art and design technology and all pupils take French. Lessons in ICT allow them to start working towards modules for the European Computer Driving Licence. In Year 8, all pupils take a second modern language (either German or Spanish) along with Latin, and they continue with all three languages to the end of Year 9. Physical skills are developed in PE lessons, a games afternoon and some of the activities under the aegis of the Seckford Scheme on Friday afternoons.

But we were told that Free School children would spend up to 50% of their time in Maths and English with other subjects “gradually” introduced.

This difference is striking. Woodbridge students are encouraged to broaden their horizons at this stage to see what they want to study for their Options in Y10/11 whilst the free schools have a narrow focus on English and Maths.

Incredibly ICT is “optional” in the free school and Computer Science is not mentioned. Both are available at Woodbridge.

The following table shows the Y7,8 and 9 Woodbridge curriculum:



So why this difference in approach on the curriculum? Strangely Woodbridge ends up looking a lot more like a “standard” Suffolk secondary in terms of its curriculum than its sibling free schools.

Perhaps the reasons lie in this answer from their website FAQs:

Will it be just like Woodbridge School but free?

No. Woodbridge School is one of the premier schools in the East of England and gains exceptional academic results as well as reaching a national standard in music, drama, sport and other activity. Woodbridge is highly selective.

The Free School will try and use some of Woodbridge School's approaches to pastoral care, and like Woodbridge will give importance to extra-curricular activity (things done outside class). The Head of Woodbridge School will be a Governor as will the Director of the Seckford Foundation. 

Maybe the real reason for the clearly inferior curriculum is that Woodbridge parents might not be impressed that the Free School are getting much the same education that they are paying £13,500 a year for.

Orwell returns to Suffolk as Seckford seek to re-write history

The River Orwell runs through Suffolk’s County Town of Ipswich. Last year I observed the Orwellian double think that the County Council’s New Strategic Direction involved.

This year Orwell seems to have returned to Suffolk and if anything in an even more troubling way but this time through the Seckford Foundation.

If you are familiar with the plot of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four  you will remember that the protagonist Winston Smith works at the Ministry of Truth. Now of course the Ministry of Truth doesn’t really concern itself with the truth.

Winston himself is engaged in re-writing newspaper articles to make them more “accurate” and to remove “mistakes”. The book describes this:

The messages he received referred to articles or news-items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or as the official phrase had it, to rectify. For example it appeared From The Times of the seventeenth of March that Big Brother, in his speech the previous day, had predicted that the South Indian Front would remain quiet but that a Eurasian offensive would soon be launched in North Africa. As it happened the Eurasian Higher Command had launched its offensive in South India and left North Africa alone. It was therefore necessary to rewrite a paragraph of Big Brother’s speech, in such a way as to make him predict the thing that had actually happened.

Yesterday this is essentially what the Seckford Foundation did. They succeeded in re-writing history and removing inconvenient facts by getting a local newspaper group to remove newspaper articles and replace them with a more sympathetic article. Truly Orwellian.

The inconvenient truth of Graham Watson’s over-optimistic statements that approval would be given by the end of May is removed as if he had never said it.

So Orwell is alive and well in Suffolk. I half expected to pick up Nineteen Eighty Four and read:

It was a dull wet day in May, and the clocks were striking thirteen.  

On each landing, opposite the lift shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which is so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. GRAHAM WATSON IS WATCHING YOUR BLOG, the caption beneath it ran.