Hostile Takeovers

Hold on to your hats East Bristol.

As if rising flood waters, looming recession and the norovirus weren't enough, it seems that 2008 will feature yet more attempts to wrest public spaces out of public control.

This week alone:

1. Let's hand the Bristol-Bath cyclepath over to First Bus!

So that they can transport people to the airport!
Pushing cyclists and pedestrians out of the way!
Removing one of the only green spaces accessible to people in Easton!
But let's not put any plans in the public domain, because then people might be able to make up their own minds!

(There is more sense in the readers' comments on this story than there is in the last 10 years of transport planning in Bristol. There is also a public meeting in the Cornubia at 7.30 on February 5. More details below.)

2. Let's hand two local schools over to Ray Priest and his pals at the City Academy!

To play at "all through schools"! Even though they are totally unproven, have been rejected twice in Bristol, and nobody in the leafy suburbs of West Bristol would dream of sending their child to one!

Even though the City Academy is only able to get 22% of its own pupils to the required standards of English and Maths at GCSE!

But let's not put any plans in the public domain, because then people might be able to make up their own minds!

3. Let's sell off large swathes of the city's green space!

Oops, we already consulted on this one, so let's change the plans at the last minute! So that nobody really has a clue what and when their local park might disappear!

Happy New Year!

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Save the cyclepath!
The Bristol to Bath cyclepath is under threat. The West of England Partnership, composed of local councillors, are submitting plans to Whitehall for funding to use it for a rapid transit bus route from Emersons Green to Ashton Vale, one of three in the scheme. The Bath end of the path is under similar threat.

This is the most popular cycleroute in the UK with 2.4 million journeys per year. The timing of the bus route plan is particularly ironic at a time when Sustrans have just won £50 million for cycling improvements nationwide!

It is a busy commuter route for cyclists and at weekends is popular with families and less confident cyclists.
Although a narrow corridor for cyclists is planned, installation of the bus route will require using most of the path width for an ugly concrete track and consequent removal of all vegetation, destroying the path as a pleasant, green, quiet and ‘fume free’ multiuse facility….diesel buses will destroy that.

The path, sometimes called a ‘linear park’ is also used extensively by local people for journeys on foot to school, to walk the dog, to allotments and other local amenities. People with disability vehicles use it. It will not be possible to maintain this diversity of use on a narrow, fenced in path beside a bus track.

We believe that this plan would significantly reduce the quality of life for many residents of East Bristol, in addition to those from further afield who enjoy this path. We don’t oppose bus rapid transit schemes in principle but it should use roadspace, not space allocated to the most vulnerable and least powerful groups - pedestrians, cyclists and children.

We need to stop this proposal now. To wait until West of England Partnership declare that public consultation may begin, would leave little time to mount a campaign.

Come to the meeting at the Cornubia Pub, Temple St BS1
Tuesday 5^th February 2008 at 7.30 – upstairs meeting room.
Directions: http://www.pubsgalore.co.uk/pubmap/308/
In the meantime, to register your interest, contact savethecyclepath@bristolcyclingcampaign.org.uk

Bristol Schools: ten solutions

So, if we can't blame the local authority for all the ills of Bristol schools, what is the problem, and what is to be done?

1. Rather than abolishing the local authority, it should be given more power. Schools need to be accountable and democratic - everything that academies are not. Local authority officials need to be able to go into schools, find out for themselves whether the head teacher's doing a job, and give a kick up the backside if they're not. This is far from the case at the moment.

2. Governors - the representatives of parents and the community - should be given proper training and be paid for their work. Governors are to all intents and purposes the non-executive directors of a school, and need to be able to afford the time away from work to do the job properly. (Just like jury duty.) Equally, no one should be allowed to to be a governor without taking a mandatory one or two week course in how the education system works.

3. Teachers should be allowed to teach. Like any other job, you get good at teaching by doing it. Teachers need advice and support from proven, experienced teachers, not educational theorists or university educationalists. Unfortunately Bristol teachers are confronted with a different fad at the start of each school year. Forget the endless initiatives and focus on what works.

4. Spend the education budget on teachers and smaller class sizes rather than flash new buildings and endless technology. Most of us learnt to read and write before interactive whiteboards were invented.

5. Scrap national testing and targets.

6. Scrap the national curriculum while you're at it.

7. Scrap state faith schools.

8. Abolish the charitable status of private schools and put the money into the state sector.

9. All children should go to school in their local area. If people want to move to South Glos or North Somerset, then let 'em. But you shouldn't be allowed to live in Bristol and go to school elsewhere.

10. Broaden the catchment areas of all secondary schools and have a lottery for the popular ones. Otherwise there's no getting away from selection by house price.

There's a lot here that would have to be done by central government. But Bristol City Council could change catchment areas tomorrow, it's possible for new academies to be opposed locally, and the local authority could and should change its focus from educational novelty to supporting good teaching.

For the rest, that's what you get your vote for.

Bristol Schools Mythbuster

Blimey. We all knew Bristol schools were in trouble, but the news that 40% of Bristol secondary school pupils are being educated outside the city's state schools (20% in the private sector, 20% in neighbouring districts) is still pretty stark.

On the face of it, the problem and the solution seem pretty simple. The Local Authority (LEA as was) is failing miserably in its duties. Get rid of it, give schools more autonomy, and watch standards rise. This is the Tory view, the government's view, and the view of many in Bristol.

Luckily for them, it's already happening. Practically every crap secondary school in Bristol is in the process of becoming an academy, and primary schools probably won't be far behind. New Oak Primary in Hengrove was saved from the clutches of the Christian Oasis Trust, but rumour has it that the city's academies may have their eyes on other primaries.

Unfortunately it's not that simple. The 'get rid of the LEA and all will be well' view rests on two myths:

1. The LA controls what happens in schools.

Sure, the likes of Heather Tomlinson certainly act - and get paid - as if they have a say in how Bristol schools are run. But in fact, the LA can only really intervene in a school if it goes into special measures. The real power in British education lies with central government and headteachers.

Central government's obsession with testing and targets has, according to a major review carried out by Cambridge University, led a rise in pupil stress and 'teaching to the test' rather than a genuine rise in standards.

Headteachers are held to account by school governors rather than the local authority. Governors are by and large well meaning amateurs totally overwhelmed by the workload and ever changing bureaucracy of modern education. Getting to grips with whatever the Department of Education is called this month is enough of a challenge, never mind truly getting to the bottom of what is going on in a school.

2. Schools outside of LA control will necessarily do better.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that, once freed from the dead hand of the LA, schools will flourish.

Bristol's own City Academy, under "inspirational" headteacher Ray Priest, is often held up as a prime example of this, and used as a justification for the transformation of other failing Bristol schools into Academies.

A much quoted statistic is the improvement in exam results at the City Academy - up from 33% achieving five GSCEs at A-C in 2004 to 50% in 2006. Not bad.

But how many pupils got five GCSEs at A-C including English and Maths ? 18% - a measly 2% rise from 2004.

So, three years after glorious liberation from LA control, 82% of its pupils are still failing to get the qualifications that might actually get them a job. Not a resounding success for a school where, according to its websites, 'learning comes first', pupils are 'learning about learning', 'learning today for tomorrow', and even 'learning to live together' in 'learning villages'.

Academies are nothing less than the privatisation of state education, handing over the education of the most vulnerable to shadowy coalitions of businessmen and the religous right. It shouldn't suprise us that a right wing think tank like Policy Exchange supports them. But it is more suprising that people on the left are in favour - particularly when there's bugger all evidence that they actually work.

So what is to be done? To be continued...