Stradbroke Library Expansion Plans as IPS Takes Control

Stradbroke Library with IPS banner

Stradbroke Library marked its first day open under IPS control on Thursday as plans to expand the library received a welcome boost with news of a grant from Suffolk County Council towards building costs. The Library and Courthouse working group is to meet in the next few weeks to plan the work. The library currently occupies only part of the downstairs of the Courthouse building and the proposed changes will install doors allowing the library to expand into the downstairs of the Courthouse.

The downstairs area will also be used for the proposed Courthouse Community Cafe and as small venue for cultural events such as book readings and to showcase emerging musical talent. The plans also include more computers and wireless Internet access as well as a small retail area offering greeting cards and similar items.

The idea is to involve the community in a very practical way in the project and several people already have paintbrushes, screwdrivers and the like ready to volunteer their services.

For Stradbroke the transfer of the library and courthouse building to the IPS provides an opportunity for local volunteers to focus on widening the use of the building with the knowledge that the library service is secure. It also means at this stage we do not need to concern ourselves with issues such as building leases.

Stradbroke Library Manager Maureen John
who is also a Parish Councillor and member of the
Library and Courthouse Working Group

Library Manager Maureen John is excited by the plans and sees her role as co-ordinating the volunteers to run what will be a much wider “community hub”. Following the temporary closure of the post office the Courthouse is also being discussed as a possible future location for a post office service.

It does look like we will end up with an expanded library service and a greater use of volunteers not to replace in any way the work done by paid library staff but to add to it.

For a small library like Stradbroke with volunteers  already committed to a number of community projects the fact the IPS is handling staffing and buildings issues a real boon. It means we don’t need to worry about these things and can get on with our plans to expand the service.

Waveney Tories fear Free School Backlash

Tories in Waveney are starting to fear for their seats as the backlash against the unpopular decision to approve Beccles Free School continues. The topic was discussed on BBC Radio Suffolk yesterday and p4 of today’s EADT has a whole article dedicated to making sure we know that Mark Bee is opposed to the school as well as a front page article reporting that the free schools are going to be half full (or is that half-empty?).

Peter Aldous the Waveney MP with the tiny majority did produce a very good paper against the school but sadly when it counted did not have the clout in Westminster to stop the school going ahead. But given his wafer thin majority and the enduring popularity of Labour rival Bob Blizzard it might be that Aldous was not expected to hold Waveney in 2015 anyway.

But it is local Tory councillors that are getting most worried. With County Council elections next year and District Elections the following year this will be a chance for electors to show in the only way they can their anger at being ignored by politicians.

For some Tories this will appear unfair but they do support a party that thinks that decisions on education should be taken in London by Government Ministers and bureaucrats who would struggle to find Beccles on a map… This was never going to work.

But the most high profile potential victim must be Mark Bee himself. The Leader of Suffolk County Council has certainly made it known that her does not support the school at Beccles but the County’s policy on free schools has contributed to the whole mess we are now in. In fairness to Mark Bee though he has taken a strong and influential line on the school (suggesting parents “vote with their feet and don’t attend) and this combined with his local popularity will I expect see him comfortably returned.

However some of this colleagues are not likely to be so lucky and the Tories may well lose control of Waveney Council as well as the parliamentary seat.

What happened in Beccles went beyond just ignoring voters. It was rather like sticking a proverbial two fingers up to them whilst shouting “we know best”.

With Waveney’s Scrutiny Committee set to meet a second time to disucss the free school on 6th August next week Mark Bee and Peter Aldous will set out the steps they tool to oppose the school but the DfE will once again fail to attend to account for their actions. It is this exercise of power without accountability that has angered voters so much.

Someone is going to be held to account - even if it is someone who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time...

Suffolk Libraries IPS sends strong message to customers as it takes control of libraries

IPS Chair Shona Bendix

Today is the day that Suffolk County Council formally hand control of Suffolk’s libraries to the new Suffolk Libraries IPS. On handover day the Chair of the IPS Shona Bendix sends a strong message to library users in a letter published on the Suffollk Libraries website  and distributed to branches.

The letter promises it will be “business as usual"

There will be no change to the things which are important to you so you will still be able to :

• borrow books for free 
• reserve Suffolk books for free 
• browse on the internet for free for 2 hours a day 
• use any Suffolk library 
• get help with information 

But the most important promise comes next

IPS General Manager Alison Wheeler
leads the Suffolk Libraries staff

We are honoured and proud to run Suffolk’s library services and we are committed to ensuring that the services are customer friendly, meet local needs and keep up the high standards. This includes keeping our expert and friendly paid staff.

We will not be closing any libraries and there are no plans to replace paid staff with volunteers.

For those of us who campaigned hard last year to save Suffolk’s libraries these words I think represent the true success of our campaign in not only saving libraries from closure but protecting the jobs of the much loved and respected library staff.

Whatever the politics of why we have an IPS running libraries rather than the County Council the libraries are now in the hands of people who have a real commitment to keeping the service going and who understand the importance of staff.

There is plenty more work for the IPS to do now but I think that the libraries are in safer hands today than they were yesterday.

Today also sees the re-branding of the Suffolk Libraries website and the launch of a new section on the site with information about the IPS

Why Sir John Leman High School performs better than Woodbridge School

Woodbridge School

Throughout the whole free school debacle in Suffolk the Seckford Foundation and the DfE have constantly made references to “poorly performing” schools in Suffolk as a reason to open free schools.

I guess they would have to with some 10,000 spare secondary school places in Suffolk it is hardly about capacity.

The Seckford Foundation have suggested that a school run by them is bound to increase results and they have not exactly been challenged on this assertion. Indeed until I complained to the Advertising Standards Authority they actually ran adverts claiming Beccles Free School (which isn’t even open) was “outstanding”. A label many of us in the State Sector have worked hard for years to obtain.

If you take a closer look it is not just the meaningless claims about attainment in Suffolk being “below the national average” or Seckford’s shameless re-definition of North Suffolk’s boundaries to make sure that the results look particularly bad by including the low performing area of Lowestoft and excluding the higher performing Stradbroke, Debenham, Eye and Framlingham.

Sir John Leman School

The real issue is the substantive claim that Woodbridge School performs better than local Suffolk state schools is itself dubious. Indeed I will show below that DfE performance data in fact suggests that Sir John Leman High School outperforms Woodbridge.

At Woodbridge 95% of pupils get 5 A-C's at GCSE including Maths and English

Source: http://www.education.gov.uk/cgi-bin/schools/performance/school.pl?urn=124887

If we compare this with Sir John Leman High School

Source: http://www.education.gov.uk/cgi-bin/schools/performance/school.pl?urn=124817

If you look at the data carefully you will see that for "high attainer" pupils Sir John Leman actually beats the results at Woodbridge with 96% getting 5 A-C's inc Maths and English.

The "high attainer" pupils are simply those who did better than Level 4 at the end of KS2 ie they got Level 5s.

Now Woodbridge School is an academically selective school. The FAQs on their free schools websites described it like this:

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.

So as the school is highly selective and so I think it is reasonable to assume that its pupils would at least match the high attainer criteria on entry to the senior school in Year 7

Unfortunately the data required to make a more certain like for like comparison is not available

This school (Woodbridge) is not included in the 2011 KS2 Performance Tables

I have already written to Seckford with a straightforward challenge asking them to release all the data relating to Woodbridge so we can see for ourselves. I have asked for the selection process and papers and the KS2 SATs scores of Y7 entrants. I have asked for KS2 SATs results for their junior school. So far they have not even acknowledged my request.

If they do not agree with my claim that their school performs worse than Sir John Leman then they need to produce some data to prove this.

If attainment is an issue in Suffolk I do not see why a school run by Seckford is the solution. Where is the evidence that they can add value to the educational attainment of children? By this I mean that they do better than expected. No disrespect but anyone can run a school that takes Level 5 children in Y7 and produces almost all 5 A-Cs in Y11. It would be hard to fail at this.

My guess is that the "success” they are aiming at is in recruiting as many Level 5 children into Y7 as they can and going for meaningless headline GCSE results. As such they would be taking the credit for the work of state primary schools that did all the hard work. Overall results would not increase at all.

Personally I would like to see less of the tax payer funded marketing and some real evidence that they can offer success not just a load of aspirations. Plenty of schools aspire to be great, it is actually delivering that counts.

A level playing field between schools would also be good. It is almost as if private schools prefer glossy adverts to supplying actual data. Whilst we are on the subject why can they not be inspected by Ofsted too rather than “independent” inspectors? If we had the same data and inspection regime then parents would be in a better place to make informed decisions. I guess that might be too much of a risk for some.

Stradbroke Post Office "temporarily closed"

As the Diss Express report Stradbroke Post Office is “temporarily” closed. It is still not clear exactly what happened but following a visit by post office auditors the post office was closed for “operational reasons”.

Carol Smy, Stradbroke Parish Clerk is quoted as saying:

If you do not have your own mode of transport, it’s not necessarily that easy to go elsewhere to get to a post office.

We have been in contact with the Post Office to find out what is going on, but have not been given any timings as to when a service will reopen in Stradbroke.  

Local MP Dan Poulter has also intervened and is quoted by the Diss Express as saying:

I was extremely concerned to hear about the closure of Stradbroke Post Office, which has caused much distress to many of the village’s elderly residents who regularly use the facility and are unable to travel elsewhere to access key day-to-day services.

Local post offices lie at the centre of our communities in Suffolk, particularly in rural villages like Stradbroke, and I have written to the chief executive of the Royal Mail to find out what contingency measures are being put in place and to ascertain exactly when a permanent Post Office service will resume in Stradbroke.

As the Diss Express report the former sub-postmaster David Johnson has been trying to sell the post office for some time but without success. Not that long ago the post office shop area was halved in size prompting suggestions that they might want to sell it as a residential property.

It remains to be seen how long Stradbroke will be without a post office, ironically the nearest post office is in the tiny village of Horham leaving much larger Stradbroke with its two schools, doctors surgery and swimming pool without. Perhaps a solution is for it to move into the “top shop” (Spar) which has been mooted in the past.

DfE announce unqualified teachers move just as Olympics starts

As the country became gripped with Olympic fever the DfE decided it was a good time to release the news of its latest “academy freedom”. In the future academies will no longer have to employ qualified teachers enjoying the same “freedom” that free schools do.

In angry exchanges on Twitter last night Sam Freedman from the DfE suggested that several academies had “asked” the DfE for this freedom but refused to either name them or even say how many. He said the news had been welcomed by the IAA a somewhat ironically named organisation - Independent Academies Association. In fact this body seems to consist mainly of academy chains rather then erm independent academies.

But the clue is in the word independent. The real motivation behind this reform seems to be to simply do what private schools do because that must be best. The fact it will help weaken the power of teaching unions and initial teacher training colleges is doubtless seen as a bonus.

Christine Blower of the NUT reached angrily to the move, quoted in the Guardian she said:

The NUT believes all children deserve to be taught by qualified teachers," she said. Blower said a poll conducted by the union last year found that 89% of parents wanted a qualified teacher to teach their child. "Parents and teachers will see this as a cost-cutting measure that will cause irreparable damage to children's education," she said. "Schools need a properly resourced team of qualified teachers and support staff, not lower investment dressed up as 'freedoms'."

In the Blogsphere the excellent Scenes from the battleground blog which has taken a pro-government line in many recent reforms said:

For a short time it seemed the tide might actually be turning. The government might actually be against dumbing-down. They might actually want teachers to know what they are doing. They might have an educational agenda beyond privatisation and union-bashing. They might actually care about what happens in the nation’s classrooms. My optimism just ended. Tonight the government announced (apparently on Twitter) that academies would be able to employ unqualified teachers (i.e. without QTS). Now I don’t want to overdo the value of QTS. Some PGCE courses are dire. The training signified by QTS is not always worth a lot. However, what QTS does represent is a commitment to join the profession. If you want to dedicate your life to teaching then you needed to, at the very least, work towards QTS status. Teaching was not seen as something you do for a few months when there are no better jobs available. It is a career and a profession, not something to be done in a gap year before starting a real career.

This points out how completely unnecessary the reform is. Justifying it the DfE stated:

Independent schools and free schools can already hire brilliant people who have not got QTS. "We are extending this flexibility to all academies so more schools can hire great linguists, computer scientists, engineers and other specialists who have not worked in state schools before. "We expect the vast majority of teachers will continue to have QTS. This additional flexibility will help schools improve faster. No existing teacher contract is affected by this minor change."

But the DfE seem to forget that there is nothing stopping any school hiring unqualified staff and once in place there is already a graduate teaching programme to allow them to qualify whilst on the job. As Scenes from the Battleground rightly point out getting QTS isn’t exactly rocket science but it does require a degree of commitment.

Frankly anyone not prepared to put in the effort to get QTS isn’t fit to be in the job and I would share the view of the massive majority of parents who want and expect qualified staff.

The DfE itself obviously thought this was such a popular move that it deserved to be launched in the school holidays just as the Olympics was starting….Sadly I fear that the government does not in fact have an educational agenda beyond privatisation and union bashing.