ANM

For the last month and a half I’ve been learning some interesting things about Swansea Council, by a rather circuitous route. It all began when my friend talked to me about her concerns about plans to cut the Home Tuition Service, run for kids who are either too sick or too disabled to physically attend school.

If you’re like me and hadn’t thought much about the reality that very sick and/or disabled children are being educated by the Local Authority outside school, then you are very lucky.

Of course your child could just have broken their leg in three places in a kayaking accident, which may not seem that lucky, but on the other end of the spectrum there are the children with serious and sometimes life-limiting conditions, whose education and prospects in life depend entirely on the abilities and commitment of people like the strong, efficient and effective team of tutors managed by Susie Johnston at the Council.

Swansea currently has what can be called, without undue boasting, a gold-standard service for these kids, who fall under the auspices of EOTAS, Education Other than at School.

EOTAS covers multiple areas including Pupil Referral Units, which cater for children with psychological and other problems, Pathways, which caters for excluded and hard to place children, and the Home Tuition Service. Some of the children using the Home Tuition service fall into the obvious category of “temporary”, but others do not and rely on the service for a real chance to achieve the necessary qualifications to allow them to progress in life. Some children may obviously fall into more than one category. Approximately 60 children fall under the remit of the team of Home Tutors (who are all now on notice of redundancy).

If the numbers sound vague, that’s because getting the facts out of the Council is ridiculously tortuous. Not only is it hard to find any kind of map of the power structure within the council, but the “genuine consultation” with stakeholders certainly didn’t stretch to giving them the basic information about how much the different services in EOTAS cost, as well as the other services, which together with EOTAS comprise the whole of Educational Inclusion, which information is basic to any kind of genuine or halfway competent consultation.

Although parents were repeatedly told that the point of the “genuine consultation” was to examine both the effectiveness and the efficiency of the Home Tuition Service, most of the time has been taking up playing cat and mouse with the facts. It was only decided to extend the consultation to parents during the first week of the statutory 45 day consultation and there is currently an FOI request to find out all these numbers that should have been part of it in the first place, but sadly won’t be provided before the deadline, which is Friday.

This is open democracy by (hiding the) numbers. It’s all “tell us how you feel about it, and then we’ll decide what to do”. It’s the tick-box sham of briefly tolerating the stakeholders putting forward their point of view whilst the democratic leaders sit there yawning with their fingers in their ears: paternalism in other words.

Although Robin Brown, head of Educational Inclusion, repeatedly stressed to stakeholders at the first meeting that it was a genuine consultation, you can surmise everything you need to know about the proposal to can the service when you know that the impulse came from the Joint Finance Committee.

Not that even that information was forthcoming as parents were initially told that the impulse came from Secondary Heads themselves, and only later did they find out that only one Secondary Head had had any input at all.

The Joint Finance Committee, looking for savings, instigated an aptly named “task and finish group”, which was clearly tasked to finish off the Home Tuition service, by proposing that the education of these children should be devolved back to schools, who will realistically do what? Send round a Teaching Assistants with some books most probably.

So at the meeting, having held up effectiveness and efficiency as the funding bar, Robin Brown was not open to hearing how effective the service actually is, and when it was pointed out to him that it would be impossible for parents to properly consult within the time frame and without the relevant information he became gruffly opaque and refused to be drawn, even on the question of whether he had the authority to extend the deadline as a reasonable adjustment under the DDA.

So what’s the hurry?

Well cuts have to be made, divide and rule, sink or swim eh? But hello, a parent told me this week that teachers in Pathways, another part of EOTAS, have recently been provided with new laptops and phones, which is extremely odd as we were all categorically told at the first meeting that cuts were being made to all services equally across the board. Hmmm.

Oh, and co-incidentally, Pathways is run by the daughter of the Council Officer responsible for EOATAS as well as Educational Inclusion as a whole. Dynasty anyone?

So now maybe it wont surprise you when I say that the really striking thing about trying to research this is the level of fear of speaking out about it….parents told me that it’s not just fear of losing jobs, but fear of never working in Swansea again, if what? If the wrong people are crossed, clearly.

I just couldn’t find a tutor who felt able to speak to me at all. Plus, the unions have been dissuading people from going to the press, keeping quiet about it under the rational of holding that over them as a threat, so the tutors, as much as Susie Johnston at the Council, are wearing multiple gags.

It’s all just classic.

And what of the Children’s Commissioner, Human Rights and Ethics etc., well they all agree that it’s not correct procedure but “we have no teeth”, don’t you know.

Of course with Swansea having consciously and conspicuously adopted the UNCRC (which shows the same spirit that has produced this rather magnificent gold-standard service for sick and disabled children), it’s doubly damaging to the evolution of Rights process to allow this farce to proceed any further.

So where are the teeth? Aren’t there measures in the UNCRC to prevent the Council riding roughshod over vulnerable children? The second wave of Government accountability to the UNCRC, which applies in much more detail to actions of its officers, comes into force in May, by which time of course, the consultation will be over, the stakeholders concerns will have been “listened to”, and the tutors will be looking for other jobs.

But what about the right to an education of those children that depend on the service? What about their life chances and the level playing field and all that?

You’re having a laugh aren’t you dear? That was then. This is now, and we’re calling it “Open Democracy”.

By ANM

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