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News and Comment November 2023

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21 November - Shenstone School

At the last Full Council meeting almost two weeks ago the subject of Shenstone School took up a fair bit of time. I expected it to become an interesting story here except that I knew nothing about why Shenstone School had become a problem apart from one of the parents who beat Bexley Council at the LGO recently referring to it as a ‘scandal’.

It’s not easy to write something sensible on a subject about which one knows nothing and a search of Bexley’s website drew a blank. So did two calls to friendly Councillors who both diplomatically said they had heard something but didn’t really know what it was about. (Actually I think that was a genuine response in both cases.)

Eventually I decided that the only way forward was to ask the Cabinet Member for Education if she could provide a link which might educate me or even a couple of short paragraphs of her own which could be used here. Her auto-responder kicked in immediately but eight days later and Councillor Caroline Newton (Conservative, East Wickham) has not replied.

At that Council meeting on 8th November the Labour Group dragged along two sets of parents affected by the delayed opening of Shenstone School which Leader O’Neill at the same meeting blamed on “tendering problems” and as the two aforementioned friendly Councillors know, I saw that at the time as a pointless theatrical exercise which should be castigated here. However I can now see that Labour Councillors may have been frustrated by the failure of the Cabinet Member for Education to answer their enquiries.

Not, in my view, does that make using two sets of parents as exhibits in the theatre which is a public Council meeting a worthwhile exercise because it is not really public in any meaningful sense. My view was restricted but there were no more than five members of the public present, me and the four questioners, one of whom was a former Labour Councillor.

On top of that there were perhaps a dozen people silly enough to waste their evening on the webcast so if the intention was to embarrass the Tory administration in front of an open mouthed borough the stunt was doomed to failure. Despite listening to everything the Labour Group said about Shenstone I still didn’t discover what the problem was. That is frequently the problem with Council meetings generally; they speak in jargon and acronyms such that ordinary people don’t know what they are talking about. Maybe that is the idea!

When first mulling over what to say about Shenstone I expected to go into full on David Leaf mode and say something like “my door is always open for questions, why wait two months for a Full Council to ask your questions?” and usually I would fully endorse his view but when a Cabinet Member does not have an open door or a working email system maybe the Labour Group felt they had no alternative but to resort to pointless gestures.

Note: The DIY job which has deflected me from BiB matters is still not finished. Having to reroute cable buried in the wall was an unexpected set-back but finding that Gorrilla contact adhesive is useless is the latest problem. Good old Evostik was not available locally so I am once more waiting on Amazon to deliver and unusually it isn’t available ‘next day’.

 

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