Natalie Bennett: Abolish politicised Ofsted & replace with collaborative body

 

Cartoon: Rose Asquith, Education Guardian

Natalie Bennett's letter to the Guardian today

Your vox pop of senior education figures (The verdict on Ofsted? ‘requires improvement’, Education, 28 October) was damning. It is clear that all trust has been lost; Ofsted is regarded as a highly politicised, untrustworthy, damaging organisation. That’s one reason why the Green party is calling for its abolition and replacement with continuous collaborative assessment and a national council of educational excellence working closely with local authorities.

Of course we need more change than that. The state of Ofsted is a reflection of the state of a system that is vastly overfocused on exams, has lost local democratic accountability, and has left teachers overworked, disempowered and increasingly demoralised.

Natalie Bennett
Leader, Green party

Rotten Boroughs features Brent Council's HR & CMT Scandal

Brent Council: Trick or Cheat?

Brent Council’s ‘Big Three’ weigh their options to avoid giving Rosemarie Clarke  her Staff Achievement Award

Guest blog by Jack O. Lantern

 

                 Christine Gilbert, Cllr Butt and Cara Davani pictured yesterday

 

With only days to go before the nominations for Brent Staff Achievement Awards 2014  have to be announced, it’s decision time at the Civic Centre. Having used up  the 7 days breathing space which the hastily-announced deadline extension gave them, it’s now time to decide whether to try to

TRICK  the people of Brent by claiming that Rosemarie Clarke is not eligible (even though the Tribunal’s constructive dismissal judgement made it clear that the only reason Rosemarie is no longer a Brent employee is that she was illegally forced to resign by Davani), or to

CHEAT the people of Brent by somehow ‘losing’ the mountain of votes Rosemarie has obviously  received. (Aside from the transparent obviousness of such an attempt, a Freedom of Information request would surely follow).

No matter how  frightening  the choice appears to be for them, one option that definitely isn’t open to Davani, Butt and Gilbert is to attempt to further delay the expected anouncements while they  try to conjure up some other escape strategy.  There are now more than just local eyes on this whole grubby business and the sooner Cllr Butt decides to cut his losses the better.

             Decision time, Councillor:  Witch is it to be?

Stonebridge Adventure Playground Must Stay Forever!

Cllr Muhammed Butt received the petition

A group of children, young people and parents handed over a petition of more than 1,000 signatories to Brent Council leader Muhammed Butt at Brent Civic Centre today.Dawn Butler, Labour Party parliamentary candidate for Brent Central also attended.

The signatures had been collected over the last few weeks from door-to-door knocking,  Harlesden Town Centre, Tesco and Love Where You Live in a amazing effort to save the playground that has served the community since the 1970s.

Costa vs Customer Centre:? Willesden Green Cultural Centre: Have your say on Monday

The saga of the Willesden Green Library redevelopment continues.  Another promise made to sell the redevelopmet appears to have bitten the dust. Here is an update fron Make Willesden Green LINK

Last month we blogged about the rumours that there would be no Customer Services (previously known as the One Stop Shop) at the new Willesden Green Cultural Centre and that, despite several enquiries from both Make Willesden Green and from individual residents, there was little knowledge of the plans from our councillors although they did promise to keep people informed if, or when, they found out more.

Having not heard anything further we were surprised to see the issue on the agenda at Brent Cabinet last week, hidden within a long document on Community Access Strategy. Two local residents spoke at the Cabinet meeting and raised several queries and objections but the document was approved unamended. There were no representations from any local councillors at the meeting.

The document presented a case to say that, since more residents were using the online service rather than seeking face-to-face contact, there was no longer a need for a dedicated Customer Services space within the Cultural Centre. Instead, self service computers and telephones with a direct line to the Wembley Civic Centre would be placed in the library and a weekly "by appointment only” surgery would be held (in an unspecified space within the Cultural Centre) for those who could not travel to the Wembley Civic Centre. 

The (approx 210sqm) space on the first floor that was to have housed Customer Services is now subject to a “local dialogue” about its alternative use but that use, says the council, will need to be both "of public benefit” and “income-generating”.

It’s a great shame that while the strategy document contains some positive proposals to improve the quality of the council’s online service to residents it seems to have come at a high cost, both to those who are unable to use that mode of communication and to library users who will see their facility further reduced.

Some of the points raised by residents at the meeting were:

• a significant proportion of people still do not have online access, they are most likely to be poorer, elderly, disabled and more vulnerable residents. These are the very people who have complex needs that need to be dealt with face-to-face, rather than via a self-service computer or on the phone.
• the majority of the council’s high need residents live in the south of the borough.
• the housing of the Customer Services self-service computers and telephones within the library will represent a further reduction in the actual library facility – library users will be jostling for space with self-service customers and librarians will be expected to facilitate both sets of users.
• the redevelopment of the library site was “sold” to residents on the basis that the old building couldn’t house an enlarged Customer Services facility, yet we are now going to end up with less than we started with.
• there has been no consultation with local residents on what they feel their needs are relating to Customer Services provision.
• how will the "alternative use" of the space be determined? Is there a contradiction between the need for it to be both “of public benefit’ and “income-generating”? Will the “local dialogue” be nothing more than giving us a choice between a Costa and a Starbucks?

Despite these concerns the proposals were nodded through. The broken promise that the Cultural Centre will mirror services at the Wembley Civic Centre  leaves us yet again feeling like the south of Brent is the poor relation of Wembley and that we are subject to a two tier service when it comes to council provision.

Having made this decision without any reference to residents views, Brent Council is hosting a meeting next week, the agenda is to include:

• An update on progress with the building and services
• A presentation from the building designers and a chance to take part in design workshops for the interior
• A chance to give your views on how the community can be involved and put this building at the centre of life in Willesden

Monday 27 October 2014  6:30-8:30pm
St Andrews Parish Centre, 2 St Andrews Road, NW10 2QS

All residents are invited to attend and we encourage you to do so.

The original Brent Council offer for the Cultural Centre is worth revisiitng ahead of this meeting. It can be found in the Equality Impact Assessment HERE

BrentARC steps up rights campaign over Operation Skybreaker

Brent is one of five London boroughs to be chosen as the target for Operation Skybreaker. This follows targeting of the borough by racist organisations such as the BNP, Britain First and the South East Alliance and by the UK Border Agency and Home Office through the racist van and raids on tube stations.

Today the Brent Against Racism Campaign (BrentARC) will be in Wembley Central  distributing the leaflets below informing the public and businesses about their rights regarding Operation Skybreaker.

The leaflet below is particularly aimed at small business owners:

Guest blog: Left Unity and the Green Party - time to talk?

 Sean Thompson is a former member of the Green Party and Green Left, who left the Green Party to join Left Unity. Ahead of LU's November Conference he has written an article about the organisation's relationship with the Green Party.

He has given me permission to publish this as a Guest Blog. I do this to encourage debate. I do not endorse everything he says but I do think he raises some important issues for both Left Unity and the Green Party.



Two resolutions to our national conference in November mention the Green Party; one calls for ‘structured collaboration… between serious forces on the left at the 2015 election, including the Green Party’, while the other states that
‘we will not call for a vote for… the middle class Greens’

Clearly, we need to get our act together and decide on the sort of relationship we want to develop with the Green Party. In my view, it is essential that we not only have a realistic understanding of the party’s politics and its support base, but that we develop a positive (but critical) working relationship with them wherever we can.

It’s only a bit more than eighteen months since our Ken, appearing on BBC’s Question Time, said that what Britain needed was a ‘UKIP of the Left’ and so kick-started the initiative that was to become Left Unity a few months later. However, since May it has started to look more and more as if it is the Green Party which is beginning to match that description. Membership of the Green Party of England and Wales (GPEW) is booming: it now stands at around 23,000 – a near 60% increase since the beginning of this year. Membership of the Young Greens (party members under 30 or full time students) has more than doubled over the same period and now stands at over 8,000. In the week since the TV companies announced that UKIP would be invited to take part in the election debates between the party leaders next May but that the Greens would not be, the party received an incredible 2,000 membership applications and in five days an online petition demanding its inclusion in the debates received over 185,000 signatures. Given our very modest size and limited visibility and the utter irrelevance of all the old far left sects and (except for a couple of areas) TUSC, the Green Party is increasingly being seen as the only alternative to the left of Labour.

Council sells Brent House for £10 million

Brent House

Brent Council has sold Brent House, Wembley High Road, for more than the £10m asking price.

It has been sold to Henley Homes who have plans for up to 265 homes on the site subject to Brent Council giving planning approval.

Brent House is close to the old Copland High School, now Ark Elvin, which  is also the subject of an extensive planning application.

The sale follows plans for the conversion of  the  high rise Wembley Point at Harrow Road/North Circular into homes.