ANOTHER EXCELLENT RESPONSE this time from Simon on behalf of Christopher Rawlins School in Adderbury: Dear Mr Darlington On behalf of the Governing Body of Christopher Rawlins Primary School, I wish to voice our strong opposition to the proposed changes to the Home to School Transport arrangements and the impact these proposals will inevitably have on our pupils, families and village community. As Governors we consider the consultation to be fundamentally flawed. The consultation should have been distributed through schools at the very beginning of the consultation period, not as it was via School News or on the County website in order that it was properly communicated to the target audience, who are parents, in good time. The first our parents heard about this supposed consultation was just a couple of days ago – just one week before the cut off date of 3rd July. The purpose of any consultation is to seek, collect and summarise the opinions of a target audience before the implementation of change, giving everyone ample opportunity to understand the change and its likely impact and to respond accordingly. Any consultation should always include the people who will be most affected by the decision and in our view this has been overlooked and therefore does not constitute a proper consultation. This consultation process is the responsibility and ownership of the Council and as such it is the Council’s responsibility is to engage properly with the community on matters which will directly affect them and seek opinions. If the Council wanted to reach out to all parents as service users and stake holders - Head teachers, Chairs of Governors and parents should have been informed directly at the very outset. Principals of practice relating to consultation should clearly apply. The most important of which is the need to ensure that any consultation gives enough time for both proper review and response. In carrying out the consultation in the manner that it did, the Council has failed to live up to its responsibility in this effect. We challenge the assertion that £340,000 per year will be saved by the Local authority through this proposal, and under the Freedom Of Information Act, would formally request to see the data which the Local Authority used to back up this claim. In reality any saving will take at least five years to recoup. There will not be a true saving due to additional transport being required by a significant number of children through duplicate buses to and from the same village to transport to the nearest schools. The Warriner Partnership is a rural one in which transport is a major factor in getting children to school. Your proposal splits villages and communities with some villages needing two buses rather than one to transport children to their nearest school. An increase in car users leading to more cars on our rural roads and chaos at schools, putting children’s safety into question , parents commissioning their own transport with taxi’s, mini buses and coaches will all be results of this change in policy. There are many families who are already saying they will not use the bus service and will drive their children to school each day instead. Has this been taken into account in the impact assessment that I assume has been conducted as part of this policy change and if so what rationale was used in deciding that it was neither important nor relevant to this case? The consultation paper requires explanation due to its length, does not highlight the impact on service users, is extremely long, not written in ‘plain English’ and therefore requires a certain degree of literacy to follow. This limits the level at which people can be involved and those who will respond. This is not equitable and discriminates against those people who may not be able to fully comprehend what has been written in the paper. We are strongly opposed to this proposal as it has a seriously destabilising effect on our Schools Partnership, is inequitable and discriminatory against those people who live in villages such as ours in Adderbury. If this policy is adopted the effects on our families and school community are endless. This proposed policy will force parents to either pay for transport to our catchment secondary school The Warriner or more likely dramatically increase the volume of traffic at drop off and pick up times in Bloxham village – much, I am sure to the inevitable annoyance of local villagers. It will also have a massive impact on low income families putting yet more pressure on schools to support these families. It cannot make sense for people to be charged for travelling by bus to their catchment area school but to incur no charge to go to a school outside of their catchment area just because they live closer to that school. Inevitably this will also lead to pressure on places in those schools outside the official catchment area. I look forward to your response. Your sincerely Simon McAvoy Vice-Chair Governors
Posted on: Fri, 28 Jun 2013 21:34:04 +0000
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