Please find attached statement from Youth Moves regarding the Youth Zone: All The Wrong Moves Article which I have been asked to forward to you. [signed by the admin manager]
The horrifying reality, being built on open space at Inns Court, about Bristol’s Youth Zone, a giant shed for the youth of Bristol that no one in youth works wants, is emerging.
Now chairing Youth Moves, the charity managing this public-private partnership big project that’s swallowing Bristol City Council’s entire youth services budget whole, is Heather Frankham, a Merchant Venturer and, until July, a director of the miserably failing Venturers Trust. The local academy trust so useless it has had to disband and hand their work over to a competent body, the national E-ACT academy trust.
The Venturers Trust’s recent handiwork includes transforming the Merchants Academy in Hartcliffe into a OFSTED-rated ‘inadequate’ school and shutting the school’s sixth form at a week’s notice in September 2023 leaving sixth formers in Hartcliffe without a sixth form to attend. Just the track record required to be trusted with further large sums of public money for youth services in South Bristol then.
Frankham has wasted no time in appointing a snooty twit from Clifton to support her Youth Zone madness. Please step forward newly installed interim chief executive for Youth Moves, Guy Cowper. This former Operations Manager at posh and private Clifton High School will now be responsible for delivering youth services in south Bristol. What on Earth qualifies him in any way for this role is not clear.
Mystery, meanwhile, surrounds the sudden departure of Youth Moves’ former CEO, experienced Knowle West youth boss Ali Dale who suddenly quit in May explaining “it is time for me to move on” after 13 years running the popular charity.
Having wrecked a generation’s education in South Bristol, are the Merchant Venturers and their friends and relatives about to wreak their incompetent havoc on youth services in South Bristol?
Watch this space.
***CORRECTION*** an earlier version of this story said that Guy Cowper and Heather Frankham were partners. This is not the case.
A number of contributors to this site have claimed the state forcing children to wear uniforms at school will make them equal.
In an age of ever increasing inequality the claim is, of course, laughable. Although it’s a nice fit with the current corporate and technocratic “free market” agenda where evidence-free lies, artifice and appearance are promoted over simple facts or reality as our money is openly shoveled to the wealthy in exchange for worthless equalities waffle and cheap meritocratic drivel from posturing politicians and patsy bureaucrats.
But what about the children forced to be “equal” by these education bosses and their military agenda? Do they buy it? Are they as thick and gullible as the well-healed education bureaucracy making these claims?
Tony Dyer is the Green Party’s prospective parliamentary candidate for Bristol South. He attended Hartcliffe School in the late 70s and early 80s. Here’s his personal view on school uniforma:
When I started at Hartcliffe School there was an uniform code (blazer, school tie, etc) and the argument always used was that having an uniform meant that all the kids started from a level playing field and it reduced the pressure to “keep up with fashion”. The implication was that the kids from the poorer parts of the Hartcliffe estate (i.e me) would not be made to feel deprived because the “rich” kids from Whitchurch would be wearing the same uniform.
This was absolute nonsense of course. The fact of whether you were from the Hartcliffe council estate or from the Whitchurch private estate was the dividing line not what clothes you wore. We were always made fully aware of “our inferiority” and that there was no change in that when the school abandoned its uniform code a couple of years later.
What did change was that my parents no longer had to spend (with or without a grant) part of their limited budget on items of clothing that were only available from a restricted number of stores at prices that were higher than we would normally pay. Meanwhile the application for a school uniform grant was yet another means test that allowed some supercilious clerk to look down their nose at my parents for not being able to bring up their family without the support of the state.
I don’t have particularly strong feelings on school uniforms (although have always found it rather odd that we want to put kids into uniform as if they were all budding military conscripts)
What I do feel more strongly about is that there should be a dividing line between what teachers should have the strongest say on (i.e how to teach) and what parents should have the strongest say on (what their children should wear).
Unless teachers can demonstrate that putting on school uniform improves a child’s IQ and ability to learn, then I see no reason why school uniform should be imposed against the majority wishes of the parents who have to pay for the uniform in any case.
All is not well in the once boho suburb of Totterdown… Or rather, all is not well among the parents of the local Primary School, HILLCREST – one of the last schools in the city not trussing up young kids in nasty nylon uniforms for their own good.
As reported in The BRISTOLIAN #4.10, the promised referendum of parents has now taken place at the school on the vexed issue of introducing a uniform and, in a small victory for the area’s dwindling liberals over the gentrifying corporate hordes, 52% of parents said ‘thanks but no thanks’ and voted against. Alas, this wasn’t good enough for the school’s bosses, Headteacher Tim ‘Baldy’ Browse and chair of governors Julia ‘Thick’ Skinner. They immediately announced that they planned to INTRODUCE A UNIFORM ANYWAY!
Cue uproar, Facebook spats, playground rows and fuming complaints as Thick and Baldy were besieged by outraged parents.
Matters then took a turn for the worse when Thick Skinner published a post on her widely-read blog condemning complaining parents as “school bullies” whose complaints were “pointless” and full of “aggressive, intimidating vitriol”! When this predictably stirred up even more anger, she then pulled it down, perhaps not realising that nothing is every really deleted from the web… You’ll never pass your ICT exam with clangers like that!
Meanwhile, presumably not wishing to get left behind in the total nutjob stakes, Baldy Browse has started issuing DARK THREATS that he may be investigating parents comments about the school on Facebook. Oooerrr missus!
What kind of city do we live in when primary school managers with support from council bosses start compiling secret intelligence dossiers on parents who oppose school uniforms?
Following our exclusive exposé in May of the INSTITUTIONAL RACISM scandal rocking east Bristol’s City Academy, an employment tribunal in December backed up everything we said back in The BRISTOLIAN #4.3.
However, despite the official findings showing that major improvements need to be made in management, it seems that old habits die hard: STAFF WERE KEPT IN THE DARK until 23 January, shortly before the media storm hit. Completely coincidentally, Gill Kelly has so far kept her job as Principal… But has been DUMPED as head of the One World Learning Trust.
Whether that’s due to white supremacist attitudes of the school’s bosses or poorer exam results than expected isn’t yet clear…
The CPS ‘Dream Team’: Parsons, Blundell, Ferguson & Cook – making the magic happen. But would you want them looking after your kids?
The SCANDAL over how vital space in Bristol’s publicly-owned and much-used Central Library has been given over to what until recently was a fee-paying private school continues, after Mayor George Ferguson’s Cabinet decision to rubber-stamp the move was confirmed in a ‘calling in’ council meeting in January. This followed Fergo ignoring a December scrutiny report which was highly critical of the deal on almost every count.
This means Cathedral Primary School (CPS), a new ‘free school’ set up by the formerly fee-paying Bristol Cathedral Choir School (BCCS), could take over two basement floors of the library from September 2015 if central government approves it. CPS opened the doors to its first intake this past September, and currently occupies the Abbey House building alongside BCCS’s administrative block, the Deanery.
But exactly how did this behind-closed-doors deal get to be hammered out? And what can be done now?
The PRIMARY SCHOOL PLACES CRISIS in Bristol is real – current estimates show that Bristol needs an additional 30% on top of current primary school places over the next five years – but the most acute shortages are in north and south Bristol, which this school will not address.
Since 2008 a state-funded but independently managed academy (thanks to severe financial problems forcing it to go cap-in-hand for government cash), BCCS has only been open to all children for 36 of its 873 years of continuous operation. In other words, it has been a BASTION OF PRIVILEGE and closed doors – and is judged to be in the bottom 1% nationally for social inclusion. Like its parent school, CPS will most directly benefit middle and upper class families in Clifton – whilst the school boasts of appealing to similarly affluent parents in South Gloucestershire and North Somerset!
Relocating the primary school into the library will mean two floors-worth of books – many in regular use – will now be shipped over to the B Bond warehouse on Cumberland Basin, where they will be MAROONED along with unwilling staff (minus convenient ‘wastage’ or ‘rationalisation’ – which will help Fergo trim down his wages bill). Bristolians wanting to access those books will likely have to wait days instead of minutes, and even face fees for the inconvenience.
So how did it all come to this?
George Ferguson has been careful to trying to appear neutral on the issue, but no matter how hard he tries, he can’t hide the facts.
As a longtime member of that smug, self-satisfied band of local sub-Freemasons, the Society of Merchant Venturers, ex-private schoolboy Ferguson has been kept abreast of the plans from the outset. Ferguson resigned from the MVs in 2012 – only after announcing his candidancy for Mayor – much as he stopped paying dues to the Lib Dems: because it was politically expedient.
A fellow MV is Stephen Parsons. As well as being Chair of Trustees at both the Bristol Cathedral Trust and Cathedral Primary School, as well as Chair of Governors at BCCS and CPS, and Vice-Chair of Trustees at BCCS and an honorary Canon at the Cathedral, Parsons also runs the Quartet Community Foundation. A way for RICH BASTARDS to feel good about themselves by doling out a few grants here and there, Quartet just so happens to administer Fergo’s own ‘Mayor’s Fund for Bristol’.
Parsons is also – alongside George Ferguson, of course – a board member at the West of England Local Enterprise Partnership quango. Perhaps he needs a hobby?
Fergo’s Cabinet chum, Lib Dem councillor Simon ‘Casualty’ Cook, has been another key driver behind the annexation of the library. Not himself a Merchant Venturer, Cook is however a member of the MV-linked ‘Antient Society of St Stephen’s Ringers’. He also went to school (in Norwich) with former BCCS head Kevin Riley. It is thought that this close friendship with Riley brought Cook into PARSONS’ INNER CIRCLE.
Grabber George’s own close connections to BCCS, and the cathedral to which it is linked, stretches back for years. His ex-wife Lavinia Ferguson was for the best part of a decade a director of Bristol Cathedral Concerts Ltd, seven years as its company secretary. In the 90s Fergo himself worked directly with the Cathedral’s Dean to block any harbourside development that didn’t put money in his RED TROUSERED POCKETS.
But not all the pressure has been from a clique within Shitty Hall. Considerable resources have been put at the disposal of BCCS Principal Neil Blundell – the man widely seen as driving the project from the Cathedral side – from ideologically-driven quarters.
Consider the Centre for Market Reform of Education (CMRE), a champion of ‘free schools’ which whilst nominally independent shares its premises and some personnel with the Institute for Economic Affairs. (Yes, that’s right, Margaret Thatcher’s very own BATSHIT CRAZY right-wing thinktank is also in the picture!) CMRE appears to have been used to channel funds into the marketing effort to ‘sell’ the CPS library snatch to Bristolians – not because it’s a good deal for the city, but because it fits a certain agenda.
Key to implementing this has been Wotton-based communications agency Edge Media, which has worked for the Cathedral and BCCS for a number of years, and is now additionally contracted to CPS. Certainly the amount of work Edge has put into the P.R. OFFENSIVE far outstrips the £6,961 that CPS itself directly spent on communications, or the £2,084 BCCS spends with them annually. But then it is unusual for Edge to represent what is nominally a state school: virtually all its clients are private schools or organisations connected to them.
These include the School Proprietors’ Association, for owners of private schools; the Tutors’ Association, for private tutors; the Society of Education Consultants; and iSBi, a search site for private schools. It’s almost as though Edge Media doesn’t really like mixing with us ordinary folk!
But it’s not all bad news. The push to relocate CPS into the library building is not unanimously popular within BCCS – either with staff or governors – or even with the
Cathedral. It seems that many consider it a vanity project of Parsons, Ferguson, Blundell and Cook. Sources say even Blundell was surprised that Cook managed to get Cabinet approval for the DODGY library deal.
Meanwhile, the murkiness of the whole sordid affair has attracted the interest of both the Department for Education and the Office of the Schools Adjudicator.
So watch this space…
Bristol City Council Chief Exec Nicola ‘Lady Gaga’ Yates wants to cut £90 million from what little remains of local services. But it’s not only the council that teeters on the BRINK OF BANKRUPTCY unable to provide basic services.
Remember the ‘Private Finance Initiative’ – or PFI – deals that led to all our new schools being built by private companies which then lease them back to local authorities?
Well, the schools have to pay the PFI companies before they are allowed to spend a single penny on books, or anything else. So when schools get their budgets cut – tough. Blacklisting PFI racketeers like Skanska or Carillion get their money before your kids get educated.
And the brand spanking new facilities aren’t what they’re cracked up to be. The Oasis Academy – previously Portway School – now has to pay more for five-a-side pitches, for example. The charge: a WHOPPING £40 an hour. How many kids do you know with that sort of money? So the pitches stay unused and local kids play in the streets.
Even worse, the company charges BREATHTAKING SUMS for basic caretaking. The PFI deal means that a company provides ‘soft services’ like catering, and caretaking. f a light bulb goes, the school staff can’t touch it. They must call ‘caretaking services’ who, when they eventually get there, will charge up to an EXTORTIONATE £60 for changing a light bulb!
Money grabbing bastards are stealing our children’s education – kids should come first. Time to ditch these sick PFI debts!
BUDGET slashing in Bristol has cut so deep that staffing at our kids’ nurseries and Children’s Centres are now reaching dangerously low levels, sources tell The BRISTOLIAN.
Despite being scored ‘Good’ or above in all areas in its last published Ofsted report, one popular east Bristol nursery school – which we can now reveal as The Limes in Whitehall – now faces a £100,000 budget shortfall. Already staffing shortages mean that qualified teachers and Early Years Practitioners are often forced to act as little more than sentries stopping children from escaping.
The situation for staff on the frontline at The Limes is contrasted with the well-salaried upper echelons, where a recruitment revolving door has seen three new head teachers in little over a year. Each has attempted to stamp their mark on the school – which is attached to a Children’s Centre – by remodelling the kids’ play garden. The total cost? In excess of a STAGGERING £100,000!
One garden makeover, which cost an eye-watering £70k+, even had to be ripped out because it was UNSAFE. Worryingly, there had been no proper health and safety assessment before it was built, and NO OVERSIGHT from Bristol City Council. The garden’s potential for injuring children was only picked up on by chance – when someone who worked in H&S came to collect his grandchild and was alarmed by what he saw.
The garden then had to be immediately ripped up and children barred from using it until it could be made safe!
The cost of these EXPENSIVE VANITY PROJECTS by senior management has lost them the opportunity to employ extra staff to actually look after the children – yet comes at the same time as the current Head spends thousands on expensive consultants.
At least one such ‘expert’ is a former colleague of the Head, and is reportedly used mainly to cover staff shortages – when it would be more sensible and cheaper to hire full- or part-time staff on permanent contracts.
So if this is what it’s like now, what’s it going to be like once Mayor Fergo pushes through his £90 million cuts package?
Well, we have been so busy working on the ‘Ms X’ story these past few days that we have not had the chance to tell you that the latest issue of your favourite local Smiter of the High and Mighty has been on the streets for a week!
November’s edition of The BRISTOLIAN is another PACKED ISSUE, featuring…
» BRISTOL CITY COUNCIL: WE’RE BEING ROBBED!
More cash disappearing from ‘of concern’ authority – this time from cash-in-transit
» MAYOR GRASS FARCE
A right royal game of lawn-acy as Fergo visit gets preferential grass-cutting treatment
» HOYTY-TOYTY’S PORK BARREL POLITICS SCAM
Green Councillor coughs up three times reserve price for allotments that couldn’t be developed on
» COUNTING THE COST OF CITY HALL LIARS
Farcical claptrap from council managers destroys open spaces, runs up massive bills
» CORPORATE FEED-IN FRENZY
China and big business cashing in on city’s solar power bonanza
» CRAP EMPLOYER OF THE MONTH: CLOVER ADVERTISING/APPCO GROUP
The lowdown on why this is one “billion dollar enterprise” you probably don’t want to work for…
» INDYREDPANT’S UNWISE MONKEY’S HORROR NO-SHOW
How the ‘outsider’ who ran in council elections for IfB “shook things up” on audit committee by not turning up
» B-LIME-Y
A merry-go-round of useless managers squanders £100k on lethal play equipment while kids’ education suffers
» HOW MUCH DOES IT COST TO CHANGE A LIGHTBULB?
How PFI deals with the private sector cost us masses more…
» BRISTOLIAN BITES
Tantalising titbits including…
…And all that for FREE!
See the Distribution page for your local stockist – and if there isn’t one near you, let us know!
Then you can DOWNLOAD a PDF version here:
Mayor George Ferguson’s old friends and colleagues in the rich posh boys’ club the MERCHANT VENTURERS seem to be doing all right out of his administration…
STEPHEN PARSONS, in his role as chair of the governors of BRISTOL CATHEDRAL SCHOOL, looks set to take over TWO FLOORS of the Bristol Central Library with few questions asked for his primary ‘free school’ project.
DAVID FREED, director of upmarket property developers DEELEY FREED, has been handed a sizable chunk of CASTLE PARK to concrete over. At least we now know what Mayor Redpants meant when he said he was going to get things done.
Nothing to see here, honest!
Meanwhile, Fergo’s extensive and highly involved business interests in the city have attracted the attention of the council’s official auditors, Grant Thornton. “[A] review of the Mayor’s declarations of interest found a number of organisations with which the Council have had interaction which have not been included within the related parties transactions note,” they say in their ‘Audit Findings for Bristol City Council’.
No doubt it’s all just a big misunderstanding that cash-strapped millionaire George will set straight when he’s able to take time out of his busy schedule.
It seems that the audit report linked to above is now mysteriously ‘unavailable’ on the Bristol City Council website – so download it direct from The BRISTOLIAN website here!
It would now appear that the Council decided to change the document’s address on the BCC website (at around 6pm on a Friday afternoon!) as soon as it was realised that The BRISTOLIAN was linking to it.
You can find the document in question via this direct link, or you can click on the link at item 11 on the agenda of the Audit Committee meeting of 24 September 2013 here…