Climate Change: Education, Employment and Engagement

This 2008 film warned of the perils ahead. Have we done enough in the last 5 years?
 
The Mayor of Brent and Council Leader Muhammed Butt will present prizes to the winners of the Brent Climate Change Competition at 1.30pm on Wednesday March 20th at the Climate Change Conference being held at College of North West London, Dudden Hill.

This full day conference for 200 older secondary school students and further education students will include film, panel discussions and workshops all aimed at raising awareness of climate change, publicising university courses and training opportunities in the green technology sector, and publicising opportunities to engage in campaigning activities on the issue.

The conference is jointly organised by Brent Council, Brent Campaign Against Climate Change and the College of North West London.

Speaker	Title
Caren Trafford Environmental writer, Presenter, Educator	"One world… one problem"
Carly Walker-Dawson   Deputy Chair of Woodcraft Folk British Youth Council Vice-Chair (Participation & Development) IFM-SEI Rainbow Network Co-ordinator	If Climate Change takes place at the same speed as it does now, what will the UK look like in the year 2113?
Isobel Edwards   YUSU Environment and Ethics Officer and People & Planet society Treasurer	Easy changes to make to the life of a student which can have a big impact on their carbon footprint
Kelly EatonWaste Development Officer - Waste Policy Team - Recycling & WasteBrent Council	Recycling and One Planet Thinking: Reducing your impact on climate change
Thivya Jeyashanker & Edison Lasku Brent youth parliament Chair and Vice Chair	“Encouraging engagement and participation of young people”

Brent housing crisis strategy meeting on Tuesday March 19th

Overcrowding is one response to high rents

A message from Brent Fightback

Everyone is now aware of the deepening crisis in Housing in London.  We are aiming to bring together people from across our community for a more united response: individuals (especially those with housing problems), Tenants and Residents Associations, housing and advice workers, community and council representatives, trade unions and political organisations.

We want to hold an initial strategy meeting so we can begin to: 

• build connections and share ideas/ experiences about the challenges that are hitting residents in Brent,
• discuss what we can do to raise awareness of what all these changes mean,
• help people who find themselves struggling to cope; make their voice heard and develop strategies to meet these attacks
• develop a campaign around policies which would begin to meet real housing needs in the borough

We hope you will be able to attend and publicise this meeting to others who may want to be involved:

6.30pm-8.00pm , Tuesday 19^th March 2013,

Brent Mencap offices 379-381 High Road, Willesden, London, NW10 2JR

Contacts: Robin Sivapalan, robsivapalan@hotmail.com, 07974 331 053 and Ken Montague, kenmontague@msn.com

(some of) what’s happening now: ·         Inflated rents and house prices, huge shortage of social housing, overcrowding… ·         …reduction in the Local Housing Allowance (housing benefit for private accommodation), the Universal Credit benefit cap… Brent will be the worst affected area if the Universal Credit cap is introduced. ·         …’Bedroom Tax’, charging Council Tax on Benefits, “Affordable” rent being defined as 80% of the market rate…. ·         ….Cuts to legal aid, advice, support and language services… ·         …Low pay, rogue landlords and mortgages companies, loan sharks…

Brent Fightback is an alliance of workers and service users campaigning against privatisation and cuts to jobs and services.

Green Council says no tenant to be evicted if they can't afford bedroom tax

Source

A council has declared that none of its social tenants will be evicted if they cannot afford to pay the government's forthcoming bedroom tax.Brighton and  Hove City Council has become the first local authority in the country to take such a stance.
 

Councillor Liz Wakefield said: "The so-called 'spare room subsidy' is yet more immoral and harmful legislation from this morality-free coalition government.

"As Greens, we cannot throw people out onto the streets just because they're unable to pay it. I will therefore be bringing proposals that seek to ensure no household will be evicted from a Brighton and Hove City Council owned home as a result of ‘spare room subsidy’ rent arrears accrued solely from that household's inability to pay this unjust bedroom tax."

She added that steps would be taken to ensure that tenants don't take advantage of the proposals, and that officers would have to be satisfied that those pushed into arrears by the bedroom tax were doing everything they could to pay their rent.

Brighton Pavilion MP, Caroline Lucas, is also backing the proposals. She said: "The so-called bedroom tax legislation is not only morally wrong and a cause of great potential hardship, it is also unworkable in a city with a long waiting list for smaller properties.

"The council cannot downsize households on the scale required by the government, nor would we want it to, and we should not be prepared to evict hard-pressed families, the disabled and other vulnerable people purely because they are unable to pay this unjust levy on a home they either cannot or should not have to leave.”

Chair of Brighton and Hove Green Party, Rob Shepherd, said: "This government is willing to see people thrown out onto the streets purely because they can't pay their bedroom tax.

"They can be sentenced to homelessness simply for trying to maintain a normal, liveable family home. The Conservative and LibDem coalition government should be ashamed of itself and, as Greens, we will have no part of it.

"I congratulate the party and councillors who are taking such a principled stand. We call on the other parties to support us in protecting, in this way, some of our most vulnerable residents."

What Michael Gove's outrageous academisation programme is doing to my mother

The daughter of a teacher has asked that her Facebook posting on her mother's plight as a teacher be shared widely LINK I publish it here for you to share with others. 

I'm feeling low and a little bit helpless at the really horrible struggle my mum is currently going through. Hopefully she won't mind me posting about this - but I want to put it out there as it's something I really think people should know about.

My mum is a primary school teacher in a state school in Yorkshire, and has been for 20 years. She is a wonderful teacher: caring, committed, enthusiastic, her pupils love her, she has produced countless concerts, plays and choirs that have won national competitions, and has never received anything but very good / outstanding reports from Ofsted inspectors.

Her school is now, it would appear, in the midst of being systematically forced to become an 'academy school'. Academies have been around for a while - originally the stillborn brainchild of the Blair government, they are now being ruthlessly implemented by the self-important imbecile - sorry, 'moderniser' - Michael Gove; a representative of an even more clueless government obsessed with results tables and change for its own sake. But what is most disturbing about the whole pointless affair is not so much the staggering waste of time and resources, as the shockingly corrupt way it is being implemented.

For the first time in the entire history that my mum has worked at her school (which is 10+ years), the school was judged in an Ofsted report as having 'serious weaknesses' (having only ever been judged as good / outstanding prior to this). The headteacher was let go, and an 'executive head' was drafted in by the local authority, a woman who apparently has a reputation for supposedly 'turning around' failing schools (and by this I mean that she clearly deliberately fails them so that she can be seen to have 'turned them around' six months later).

The teachers were all subject to impromptu lesson inspections, and almost EVERY SINGLE teacher in the school, individuals my mum described as 'some of the best teachers I have ever known' were failed. My mum was failed for the first time in her career (Although on receiving this news she rather wonderfully told the inspectors "I don't give a monkey's"). The school has now been given six weeks to 'improve', before the government will come in to inspect them again. The teachers are doing 16 hour days in an attempt to do an impossible amount of work so that they don't fail this second inspection. My mum hasn't had an evening or a weekend off for weeks. She worked all through her supposed holiday last week. She is getting chest pains. One teacher collapsed from stress.

My mum had been planning to retire at the end of this year - this will be her final year as a teacher - what a way to thank her for 20 years of hard work and dedication to the state school system. She has always been an incredibly strong, cheerful, optimistic person, and whenever I speak to her now she talks of her life being a 'living hell' and 'just making it through the next five months'. I have never in my life heard her talk like this.

And all this in spite of the fact that the teachers at her school have been made perfectly aware that when the government come in to 'inspect' the school, they will be doing so with an agenda. That agenda being to turn the school into an academy - as they have done with several other schools in the area.

Essentially, all the work the teachers are putting in will most likely be for nothing, because the government have every intention to fail the school so that they can be seen to 'turn it around' and make it into an academy. It seems to me to be the most ridiculous scam - a con on a national scale which must be happening in countless more schools and which is abusing the time and resources of already desperately over-stretched, underpaid and under-appreciated teachers.

I feel very frustrated at not being able to make more people aware of what seems to me to be a total outrage. I am going to make this post public - please share, and if anyone I know is interested in the story or has any suggestions about how to increase awareness of this please get in touch. Thanks.