Lurching from one crisis to another in education

I FEEL so sorry for the teenagers who found themselves left high and dry by the withdrawal of A-level courses at Salisbury College, or Wiltshire College Salisbury - a ridiculously unwieldy title that I’ve never got used to using.

Why was the decision so last-minute, announced just a couple of weeks before the start of term?

I can see that it doesn’t make financial sense to run AS-level courses in a range of 16 subjects for a new intake of only 30 or so students.

The disappointment for these still-very-young people is equally understandable. It must have been horribly worrying for them to have to scramble about to find a place at another institution.

Presumably, some of them will have been away on holiday when the announcement was made, and will have had to take whatever they could get on their return.

But those who had already completed their AS-levels and were about to embark on their A-levels were in an even worse plight, seeking to transfer to institutions following the same syllabus set by the same exam board and having to hope that their new classmates would have covered exactly the same ground.

Surely the college authorities must have known how many students had just taken their AS-levels and would be expecting to continue for another year? It cannot have come as a surprise to them? Were there factors other than class sizes affecting their decision?

With the city’s proposed University Technical College facing a year’s delay due to a lack of proper planning to relocate the police, and a new Salisbury Sixth Form College due to open in a year’s time although nobody knows where yet – it might be to the east of the city or it might be in the city centre, according to its website - it all feels like a bit of a muddle, to put it mildly.

Once the Sixth Form College is up and running it will offer everything that Wiltshire College did and more in terms of A-level provision. With luck and a couple of years of good exam results, students will no longer feel forced to travel out of the county to get the education they deserve.

It’s going to focus on science, technology, engineering and maths – just like the UTC, funnily enough – while offering other subjects, too.

So do we need both? And which would our scientifically-minded young people prefer to attend? 

Why aren't our councillors standing up for Salisbury?

IT’S all too easy to blame Wiltshire Council leader Jane Scott and her cabinet from across the Plain for the plight of Salisbury’s retailers.

It’s true that she was in charge of the iniquitous rise in parking charges which drove motorists away and has ended up costing her own council money.

It’s also true that she’s refused to rule out raising them further, which is hardly what I’d call a conciliatory attitude in the face of so much hostility from the paying public.

Having observed her in action at many a council meeting, I’d hardly expect her to back down in the midst of the current bout of bad publicity.

Maybe once it’s died down a bit she’ll go away and have a quiet rethink.  We have to hope so, though I’m not holding my breath.

But in the meantime what about the Conservative backbenchers who represent Salisbury and South Wiltshire divisions on her council?

I haven’t heard a peep out of any of them since I reported the council’s own figures showing what a counter-productive policy this has been.

Why aren’t they standing up for us and declaring publicly that it’s time she changed her mind? Any of them care to comment?

Meanwhile, another week, and more shop closures.

I’ve got no problem with charity shops. I love them, and check them out frequently for bargains.

They seem to be thriving, as there are always plenty of people flicking through the clothes rails and poring over the bookshelves.

We’ve even got a British Heart Foundation furniture shop now, as befits our Heart City status, and jolly popular it is, too.

But it’s getting to the point where charities, along with cafes and hairdressers – how many haircuts can people possibly need, I wonder? -  must soon outnumber our embattled independent retailers.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I read that Cllr Scott was blaming the recession, the internet and out-of-town shopping centres.

I’d like to echo Tony Blair’s 1997 election anthem (not that I supported him) and say that things can only get better.

But with this lot at the helm, I fear they could get a whole lot worse.

A lesson learned over plan to close police station

HOORAH! Common sense has prevailed and the rush to turf our police out of their station to make way for a University Technical College turns out not to have been so essential after all.

With all the authorities apparently dead set on 2014 as the launch date for the new school, it was Chief Constable Patrick Geenty who wisely called for extra time in the end, admitting he was “not satisfied” that police would be able to maintain their current level of service.

Last month in my newspaper column I voiced the concerns of serving officers about the same thing, only to be accused of “falling into bad habits” as a journalist in a letter from UTC project chief Gordon Aitken.

I’m not infallible (don’t tell my husband) but on this occasion I was right.

One thing I hadn’t realised, until Mr Aitken pointed it out, was that the UTC will only take in “around three students per year group” from each of Salisbury’s secondary schools.

The rest, he explained, will commute from a 20-mile radius, with 46 feeder schools in all.

As I’ve said previously, I see nothing wrong with a UTC in principle. But it doesn’t sound as many local children will benefit from it.

And whilst a “sub regional centre of excellence” may be a desirable extra for the chosen few, for their employers, and for local politicians seeking a bit of glory to bask in, it’s the general public of Salisbury who will pay the price unless Mr Geenty can say in a year’s time that he’s convinced the loss of the police station will have no adverse effect.

People may well feel inclined to ask whether it’s a fair exchange. That’s a question which could be avoided if an alternative site could be found for the UCT.

I do hope this breathing space will be used, at the very least, to reconsider plans to base response cars at Amesbury.

We’ve been told up until now that this won’t affect how long it takes officers to reach an emergency in Salisbury.

But unless the force intends to recruit the new Time Lord, Peter Capaldi, and beam bobbies about the place in his old police telephone box, logic suggests this can't be true.

In another recent letter to the Salisbury Journal, Police and Crime Commissioner Angus Macpherson stated that the "direction of travel" on this whole project was agreed between Wiltshire Council and the old Police Authority back in 2011.

I'm sure he is correct. I just don't remember anyone bothering to mention it to the public at the time, or in the run-up to May's elections.

The decisions that really matter are all too often presented to taxpayers as faits accomplis, and this climbdown shows what a bad strategy that can be.

Creeping suburbanisation of Salisbury's parks

I USED to walk the dog in Queen Elizabeth Gardens maybe once a fortnight. He loves to jump into the river at the little beach area and fetch a stick, and passers-by are always amused by his headlong enthusiasm.

Having given up on the habit while the noisy and messy refurbishment work was going on, for some reason I hadn’t strolled across Town Path from Harnham for months.

So on Sunday when I finally got round to it, what I found came as quite a surprise.

I know the old planting needed replacing, and that new planting schemes take a while to mature, and that’s fine. We’ll just have to be patient. It’s a work in progress.

But in the meantime the hard landscaping is just that – hard on the eye.

In a less-than-mellow shade of yellow, it looks as if someone has simply upended a few dozen packets of Rice Krispies on the pathways. This gritty stuff is being trodden all over the place, filling the gaps between the boards on the bridges, and spilling over onto the grass, and whatever lies underneath it is already starting to show through.

I remember when the parks department wanted to build a diagonal path across Harnham recreation ground. That was going to be golden breakfast cereal, too. Residents protested that it would stand out like an airport runway, and the project was shelved, thank goodness.

In my view both these much-loved parks should be treated, as far as possible, as visual extensions of the water meadows, since they lie at either end of them. That means green, leafy and natural.

The city council’s wildflower planting in the Harnham field was a welcome and appropriate addition.  But the Environment Agency’s flood defence scheme with its pumping station control kiosk has already spoiled the view towards the picturesque Old Mill. And now a bright red charity clothing bank is sprouting an unsightly crop of carrier bags at the entrance from Netherhampton Road.

It may be for a good cause, but haven’t we got enough recycling facilities at charity shops in town, at Churchfields, and at skips in our supermarket car parks?

Part of Salisbury’s charm lies in the way these two parks have remained semi-rural oases, linked by the Town Path, within the heart of a built-up area. They are places where we could almost imagine ourselves to be in the countryside. I’d be sorry to lose that.

Council's parking income falls after it raises charges

I NEVER for one second believed that squeezing motorists till the pips squeaked would work the required wonders for Wiltshire Council’s bank balance.

And hey ho, what do you know? I was right.

Quite by coincidence, in the week that city councillor Mark Timbrell called for Wiltshire to bring forward a review of our parking charges because of the hardship they are causing, I received a reply to a Freedom of Information request I submitted a little while ago.

I asked Wiltshire how much money it had taken from parking in Salisbury, both on and off street, in the most recent financial year, 2012-13. The answer was £2,991,894.

How much did it take in the financial year 2010-11, before its Conservative leadership imposed massive price rises? £3,171,553.

So one might argue that the policy that sent trade plummeting and led thousands of readers to join the Journal’s Show Some Sense campaign also resulted in a drop of £179,659 in annual car park income.

At the Maltings, takings were down £69,777 compared with two years earlier. At Culver Street, they slumped by £53,383.

Not exactly a howling financial success.

I asked for further figures, to work out how people’s behaviour has changed since the increase in charges.

Overall, they showed big falls in the numbers of vehicles using the council-owned car parks in the city.

And I’m sure the local ‘pop in’ shoppers didn’t all ‘pop out’ to the park and ride sites instead. Like me, they probably looked for a cheaper space on a meter, did what they had to do, and didn’t hang around browsing or making impulse buys.

I’ve saved a fortune, which is probably not what our traders want to hear, although it makes my husband happy!

Anyway, I decided to compare how many drivers parked in the Maltings in March 2011 and in March this year, the most recent month for which figures were available.

The total for just that one month was down more than 10 per cent, from 38,312 to 34,242.

One-hour stays were down from 19,048 to 15,094, so it wasn’t just a question of commuters moving out.  Two-hour stays were up by 4,529, though, so maybe people came in less frequently and stayed longer. But then again, three-hour stays were well down.

Sorry to bore you with statistics, but we need to know what’s going on.

At Culver Street, the number of users was down by well over 40 per cent. At that rate I expect Wiltshire will soon argue that the site is redundant and flog it off for some lucrative development. Which will be fine till all the new housing estates are built and the thousands of new residents want to do some shopping.

In Brown Street, user numbers were down by 1,512. Hoteliers have complained that the imposition of a three-hour limit there has damaged their conference trade.

It’s true that usage of Salt Lane, where a three-hour limit was also introduced, rose marginally. But its takings were more than £10,000 down. I can’t make head or tail of it … though I do know that some council staff used to be given free parking there at one time.

No questions about Southampton Road car park, though. It’s what the Sex Pistols might have called ‘pretty vacant’. Too expensive now for most students, it was used by just 258 vehicles in the whole of March.

All in all, there were 11,339 fewer vehicles using council car parks in Salisbury this March than there were two years previously.

Some all-day parkers have undoubtedly been forced out to the park and ride network, and they will account for some of its improved performance. Its income (not profit, I hasten to add) rose over the two-year period from £569,191 to £755,361.

And Wiltshire may be encouraged to see that the number of people opting to pay for two hours has risen in most car parks since one hour became relatively expensive. Perhaps it feels like better value?

I’d love to know what readers think. But please don’t accuse me of being negative and ‘talking down’ Salisbury.

I’d say I’m simply being realistic, and hoping our elected representatives will deign to reopen the debate about parking sooner rather than later, for their own good as well as ours.

How will the new UTC affect other schools?

I'VE been wondering what the impact of the new University Technical College will be on other schools in the area.
This planned development will have 600 students aged 14-18, specialising in science and engineering.
Our MP says it’s “excellent news for the young people of Salisbury and South Wiltshire”, giving them a “vital new option”. And so it is, even though I don’t agree with closing the police station in a mad rush to accommodate it.
But where will the UTC draw its students from?
I haven’t spoken to local headteachers about it, so I’m only guessing. But isn’t it likely to cream off the most able pupils from our non-selective secondary schools?
And if so, won’t that make it tougher for these schools to attract good teachers and sponsors, and hence disadvantage those pupils who are left behind?
I don’t disapprove of academic selection at all. Neither do I disapprove of selecting pupils for a whole range of other talents, such as sport and music.
But I do firmly believe that all children should be given equal opportunities in terms of funding, facilities and most importantly, quality of teaching, and I would like to hear from the powers-that-be that plans are in place, maybe through incentives to teaching staff, to make sure that no pupil, anywhere, leaves school feeling like an also-ran.