If you are interested in transport issues, the County has produced a leaflet reporting on the outcome of Year 2 (2007/08) Area Programme Schemes. A leaflet can be viewed on the council web site at Area Programme Leaflet Yr 2.

This and much else is available on the Local Transport Plan web pages.

A group of councillors (including your truly) visited the new Durham Johnston building last week. It is currently 61 weeks into an 80 week build and is on target to be open next April in time for the Easter school term.

A view looking along from the main entrance.

A new teaching wing.

As the building is pretty well weathertight now, there should not now be any delays due to bad weather. The scale of the new building is extremely impressive and will, I hope be a tremendous improvement to the education the children of local families.

I held a meeting for parents of both Neville’s Cross and St Margaret’s Primary School on Tuesday this week to discuss the options for secondary school admissions criteria in the light of the consultation that is currently under way. [Thank you to Vanessa Kind, a governor at St Margaret’s, for her help in advertising the meeting and giving a well-informed contribution to the meeting.]

As luck would have it, there had been a meeting of the County Lifelong Learning Scrutiny Committee that morning to discuss the issues around the consultation.

One thing that emerged at the Committee was that the County had revised their original (now shown to be unworkable) criterion giving preference to families furthest from the next nearest school.

This new attempt was to first give preference to those for whom the applied-for school was the nearest school and if a futher tie-breaker was required to use the above (next nearest school) approach.

The parents meeting turned out to be pretty well attended (around 45 people) and had a good debate on the issues.

They quickly noticed that even the new suggestion from the County could be problematic for children close to a school if there was also another school not far away (as is the case with Durham Johnston and Framwellgate Moor).

There was also a detailed debate on the relative merits of using feeder schools and catchment areas (options highlighted by the Schools Adjudicator earlier ion the year). There were also some interesting ideas concerning distance rules as final tie-breakers).

At the end of the meeting a straw vote was taken and those present preferred the idea of feeder schools to catchment areas by around 80% to 20%.

It was also a clear view that local schools should be for local children and that any system that discriminated against children who lived close to a school would be unacceptable.

The final message was for parents to make sure that they sent their views in to the consultation to make sure that theri voices were heard, something I strongly support.

If you know someone who wishes to contact the County Council about student finance, (grants, loans or maintenance allowances), then they need to know that they will not be able to get through to the County Council Student Support Team before 12.30 pm (at least until 14 November).

I have just received the following statement from them by e-mail:

“To enable the team to continue to achieve high standards, an operational decision has been taken to extend the closure of the telephone lines between 7.30 am and 12.30 pm on a daily basis up until Friday 14th November 2008.

Due to a change in the regulations, all Local Authorities now have an increased number of means tested applications and Disabled Students Allowance applications to process and closure of the telephone lines will allow us to prioritise our resources towards the most vulnerable students within County Durham.

A similar process is still in operation at a number of Local Authorities and is proving to be beneficial.“

As the debate about admissions criteria for Durham secondary schools gets under way, I thought I should do an analysis of the issues around a system of feeder schools for Durham Johnston should be.

Here is a two-page paper that gives some statistical data (taken from the County web site) and some obvious conclusions (mainly along the lines of - this is a difficult problem!).

Here is the file:  Feeder School Admissions to Durham Johnston.pdf

Health warning:  As stated in the document, I really have not yet come to a firm conclusion about what I think should be the solution to the admissions problem in the County. The paper is intended to set out the facts and the issues that the concept of feeder schools raises in relation to my local comprehensive school.

The County Council has just agreed to take up the Government offer of funding to provide free swimming for everyone who is 60 or older or 16 or younger.

In fact, as the districts all currently have concessions for ages up to 18, the County will fund free access for everyone up to 18.

The scheme will start in April next year and last for two years. The Government contribution will not meet all the lost income, but the County Durham Primary Care Trust has agreed to fill the gap in the hope that this will help tackle fitness and obesity levels.

What happens after the two years is up is anyone’s guess, but no-one has high expectations that the government funding will continue into the long term.

Residents of Neville’s Cross have long been frustrated by the lack of a doorstep green waste collection. This is available in parts of the City. but not everywhere. Indeed there is very patchy coverage across the county as a whole.

Following a Council Cabinet meeting this morning,  however,  I am hopeful that things will improve as the Council has just decided to buy 67,000 more wheelie bins over the next two years for green waste collection which will fill this gap over a substantial part of the county.

The only issue for me is whether Neville’s Cross will be included as the purchase will still leave around 48,000 residential properties unable to access this service across the county. Rest assured that I shall be lobbying hard for our inclusion.

In addition, 5,000  home composters will be available for purchase at a subsidised rate of £8.

I hope to be able to publish details of their availability when I have the information.

Following a (brief but very enjoyable) holiday in Paris to celebrate retirement from the university an e-mail prompted me to look carefully at the consultation leaflet issued by the County Council about admissions criteria.

One option being presented has the following distance-related tie-breaker:

“Distance Priority will be given to those children who would have to travel the furthest distance to the next nearest school.”

Note the wording: “next nearest school”. As stated, this is not the distance from one’s preferred school but from the next one away from that.

At first look this is bizarre, but on further consideration the conspiracy theorists might think this is another cunning plan to disadvantage families living in the Neville’s Cross area.

If I understand the wording, it appears to say that a family living next to Durham Johnston, but less than 2 miles from the next nearest school (Framwellgate Moor)  would be behind someone from (say) Bowburn whose next nearest school (Gilesgate) is over 4 miles away [and they would be behind someone from the far end of Weardale who was even further from their next nearest school].

Given that the associated transport criterion was deemed unfair, it is hard to see whether this is any fairer.

Of course, I may have misunderstood the wording - but in that case, the wording needs a major re-write since it is hard to see what else can have been meant by such phrasing.

I shall investigate further…

I have often had complaints about parking on yellow lines or parking causing an obstruction. My response up to now has always had to be  “call the police” as only they have the legal powers to deal with the problem.

All being well, things should soon change as the County Council is introducing ‘civil parking enforcement’ (CPE) in a few weeks time across the Durham City District area (i.e. the area covered by the City Council).

CPE means that the Council itslef can take action and NCP (who currently manage controlled parking in the smaller City area) will do the enforcement on the ground.

This is why you may have seen a lot of yellow lines being renewed over recent months; the Council needed to get all its traffic orders up to date and all the signage right.

The current expectation is that this will be introduced on Monday 3 November 2008. from this date the NCP wardes will be able to issue fixed penalty notices to those transgressing the parking regulations across the whole district (the remainder of the County will probably follow suit in due course).

The penalty will be £70, reduced to £35 if paid promptly.

Following the Durham Johnston admissions saga earlier this year, the County is now consulting on what should replace the ‘associated transport’ criterion that was deemed unfair by the Office of the Schools Adjudicator.

A leaflet is to be distributed (via schools) to every family with school age children asking for view, particularly on whether catchment areas or feeder schools should be used and whether the same criteria should apply across the County.

Of course, this is of interest to everyone, not just those currently having children in school, so I posting the leaflet and the response form below (as pdf-files) for everyone to see.

The deadline for the consultation is 14 November 2008.

Admissions consultation leaflet

Admissions consultation response form