Tag Archives: SEND

THE REAL STATE OF THE CITY ADDRESS

Last night the Reverend Rees delivered his final State of the City speech from the University of Bristol’s shithouse Wills Building. Here’s a response:

Marvin, your State of the City speech seems to be a list of things that haven’t been delivered or resolved in your time in office. 

Most of the key infrastructure projects that previous Labour council’s failed to invest in remain uninvested in but with a tab left to be picked up by the next administration. 

There’s no funded mass transit proposal. It’s stalemated due to a lack of agreement between two bickering Labour Mayors who have prioritised their own personal animosity and egos above the needs of the city and region. 

The city continues to have deep divisions along race and class lines despite all the talk about diversity, equity and inclusion and tackling the “issues”. Where are the measurable outcomes showing improvement? 

But then you did watch the Colston statue come down and spot a self promotional media opportunity rather than a chance to trigger a real attempt to tackle the city’s long standing divisions. 

Congratulations Marvin, you built some homes (the vast majority at market rates with many being bought by private landlords) and yet still managed to miss every housing target you set yourself. 

The housing waiting list has increased to 20,000 families. The highest it has ever been, despite officers actively discouraging residents from going on the list “because it’s a waste of time”. 

Homelessness remains noticeably present everywhere, except, maybe, in the Bearpit, despite your promise to solve it. 

The vast majority of the 14,000 homes with planning permission are not being built and you try to blame a minority opposition party for this failure to deliver.

Still no arena, public or privately funded, anywhere. And tens of millions in public funds sunk into an elitist city centre cultural venue because of a binding legal contract signed on your watch. All while deprived suburbs lose community/cultural facilities.

City Leap has potential but so far isn’t unlocking any private investment and is falling behind its real investment plan, never mind this unsubstantiated £1bn you constantly quote at the press.

Goram Homes also has some potential but your planning delays means it’s falling massively behind schedule.

Bristol Waste is a basketcase with a revolving door board of directors. A direct result of poor corporate oversight. Your political interference in its business planning, meanwhile, has undermined any efforts to reduce costs. 

Elsewhere, your council is still complicit in developing SNCIs despite declaring an ‘Ecological Emergency’ and creating plenty of photo-ops of Labour politicians standing in fields saying how important green spaces are. 

There’s still no real plan for achieving net zero despite declaring a ‘Climate Emergency’. 

Then there’s the poorly implemented CAZ, almost as if it was designed to fail and disrupt. 

You are creating only one Liveable Neighbourhood and this is being poorly implemented and poorly consulted on with middle class neighbourhoods getting disproportionate input while poorer neighbourhoods are ignored.

Local CiL projects, especially transport and parks, are not being delivered partly because staff are being taken away to work on “headline grabbing” strategic projects.

The budget gap is currently larger than the Bundred one under Ferguson and there’s still no realistic plan to address it beyond service reduction and selling off council property. 

SEND?!?!! Say no more. Your “Deputy” Mayor hasn’t a clue what she is doing just like the chain of useless Labour education leads before her. Our kids and, increasingly, their parents are paying the price of this serial incompetence. 

The Dedicated Schools Grant is effectively in special measures and your administration is just crossing it’s fingers and hoping the government doesn’t pull the plug on this ever growing debt.

Basically Marvin, you have left behind a stinking pile of crap and then have the nerve to lecture the councillors who will have to clear up your shit about how the city should be run!!! 

Get da fuck!

HEARD THE ONE ABOUT THE DISABLED ADULTS BOSS?

mussolini
Hugh “Cares” Evans (are you sure? Ed.)


Useless fatso former People boss at the council, Hugh “Cares” Evans, fresh from being fired from overseeing Children’s Services after royally fucking up and getting caught spying on parents, has now been caught laughing at the disabled.

A leaked email he sent out to the SEND managers and education directors he incompetently managed reveals him openly mocking a disabled parent’s spelling.

Hugh Cares, who, for some reason, is still allowed by the Reverend to run Adult Care Services for the council, has a statutory responsibility for disabled adults in the city.

We might, therefore, reasonably expect that he doesn’t laugh at them in private. Does Hugh also liven up his dull meetings with his fawning social work managers with hilarious impressions of the learning disabled?

Can someone please put this useless twat out of our misery?

EVERYONE EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE

Spy medium

A large dump of heavily redacted material has been released by Bristol City Council to local SEND campaigner and blogger Chopsy through a Subject Access Request – part of GDPR personal data rights regulations.

She’s one of the SEND parents severely harassed by senior council bosses through an ugly intimidatory campaign of systematic surveillance of her social media.

Despite their best efforts to cover-up their actions with redactions, this data release looks like even more bad news for council bosses. Revealing that they went beyond monitoring social media and were snooping on parents in ‘real life’ too.

In one email we now find the state openly collecting and circulating the names of people attending a small SEND protest at City Hall on 8 April 2001:

Protest email

Another email suggests the council used covert human intelligence sources to find out what certain parents and third party organisations were up to:

Sendias

Despite this type of intelligence gathering by the state being unlawful, a third party obtained information from persons unknown, sent it to a council boss who then circulated it among numerous colleagues.

Stasi, the KGB and Big Brother eat your heart out!

SENDS OFF

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Richard “Wanksy” Hanks has ‘resigned’ as Bristol’s Director of Education but is officially on ‘sick leave’ for now. Allegedly, Wanksy got a bollocking by the cabinet over SEND just before his ‘resignation’

His replacement, Reena “Dolores” Bhogal-Welsh from the University of Bolton is an interim appointed outside any normal processes.

Sources say she’s “totally out of her depth” and is especially shit-scared of the Bristol Parent Carer Forum. Probably wise. They’ve seen off three of her predecessors in the last three years – Stubby Stubbersfield, Pervy Hurley and now Wanksy.

Also heading for the exit is Head of Education Psychology Vikki Jervis who, seems to have spent most of her work time on Twitter reading parents’ feeds and circulating the material around the council.

Who will be next out the revolving door before independent investigators arrive to look at the SEND spying issue?

SEND WATCH: PROVISION CANCELLED

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Has the council just given up paying for some SEND provision they’re legally obliged to provide?

A lot of children require so-called ‘Alternative Provision’ (AP) in Bristol because they are unable to attend school. This may be because the council is unable to provide a school appropriate for the child.

Or it may be because the child has been thrown out of school because their parents have attempted to assert their child’s legal right to SEND provision that the school has taken funding for and then not provided.

Many of these children are taught by private tutors paid by the council. However, The Bristolian is receiving news that “one-by-one families with kids in AP or EOTAS (Education Otherwise Than At School) are having provision stopped because the council has stopped paying the bills for it.”

So far the council has provided no notice to parents and no reason why they’ve stopped paying for this provision. Our information comes from SEND parents who would probably be viewed by the council as “troublemakers” but we’re assured the problem is now “widespread”.

What’s on earth is going on? Why is our council randomly cancelling SEND children’s education?

SEND WATCH: GRANT NEWS

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At the scrutiny meeting where councillors discussed SEND spying, senior council boss, Vikki “Mata Hari” Jervis also tried to convince councillors that refusing to sign-off funding for the Bristol Parent Carer Forum, who council bosses hate for supporting parents and encouraging some to take legal action against the council was fine. 

Instead, explained Jervis, the money and work could be split among the 22 groups that make up a new so-called “Community of Groups” selected by the council to best represent the interests of SEND parents by never mentioning legal action.

Jervis’s claim is not true. Contact, who actually administer this grant Jervis is trying to award, say on their website, “Contact administers, and pays a grant of up to £17,500 available to ONE parent carer forum in each local authority area of England, funded by the Department for Education (DfE).”

Is anything council management say about SEND true?

SEND WATCH: IN THE EYE

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Our old friends at Private Eye have picked up on the SEND spying scandal.

They picked up on the farcical ‘fact finding’ report produced by the council’s none-too-bright Deputy Head of Legal Nancy “Rollercoaster” Rollason which claims she found “no evidence” of  “systematic monitoring”.

A strange conclusion when emails in the public domain between SEND managers openly state that they’re “working hard to uncover concrete evidence”!

Perhaps they worked hard uncovering unsystematically?

SEND WATCH: DEMAND MANAGEMENT?

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A random and incomplete selection of documents obtained under FoI shed light on what might be the point of the SEND spying affair.

Many of the documents released reveal that Education Director, Alison “Pervy” Hurley and her SEND managers were taking a lot of interest in FoI requests made by parents and in posts on social media between parents regarding legal action or judicial review.

For starters, council officers should not be interfering in the public’s use of FoI. This is laid out in FoI legislation as unlawful. Hurley and her spy team have therefore broken the law by obtaining evidence of FoI requests by parents and using them to discourage parents who were members of the Bristol Parent Carer Forum from making further requests.

On the question of legal action and judicial review, are People Director, Hugh “Cares” Evans and his Education Director Hurley running an informal demand management policy in SEND?

This is a money-saving policy used by public service managers to prevent take-up of services, often through obstruction. Council tactics may include slow and confusing processes, ignoring correspondence and communications, forcing people into long complaints processes and simply refusing people services they are entitled to.

The last thing Evans and Hurley need is parents taking legal action to obtain the services they are entitled to as this creates a double cost to the council. The cost of providing the service they’ve tried to avoid delivering and also the cost of any legal action.

Who agreed to pay our council bosses large sums to block people from asserting their legal rights to services?

MYRA WALKS!

Saskia
“Ground control to Major Tom. I’ve fucked it all right up”

We learn that the appalling Saskia “Hindley” Koynenburg, Bristol City Council’s Head of External Comms and one of the Reverend’s main council flunkeys has quit the council. Her last day was September 30. Was that a small cheer we heard from her long-suffering staff as she left the building?

Hindley’s days always seem numbered at the council after she shot to national notoriety on Youtube this summer for trying to stop the Nazi Post’s LDR journalist, Alex Seabrook, asking the Reverend a question at a press conference because that “wasn’t part of his job description” or some such nonsense.

Matters then got worse for the embittered failed journalist when she was discovered at the centre of the SEND spy scandal. It was Hindley’s sicko team trawling parents’ social media accounts and supplying juicy nuggets of personal information and photos of parents of vulnerable children to Bristol’s SEND managers.

It rather looks like Hindley is fleeing the scene of a crime doesn’t it?

SEND SPYING: ‘NOT SYSTEMATIC’ MY ARSE

Hugh Evans
Creepy Hugh Evans, stalker of local mothers, trying to look hard.

Bristol City Council have been insisting via a ridiculous ‘fact-finding’ report authored by their ridiculous head of legal Nancy “Rollercoaster” Rollason that no ‘systematic monitoring’ of SEND parent’s social media ever took place.

Now a video clip, from the summer, briefly comes to light, before disappearing again into the internet shadows, starring one of the council’s ‘weak men’, People Director, Hugh “Cares” Evans. The “brains” behind the hapless surveillance operation, Evans says:

Would you want to read from your partner organisation or colleagues something on social media the like of which we’ve been reading on social media?

Leaving aside why Hugh’s being paid £180k a year to read the general public’s social media, are we to believe Hugh and his SEND manager mates must have been regularly accessing parents social media in a totally unsystematic way?

Or has he been lying through his teeth to a council lawyer?