The Bristol Blogger

Right then.

A big thanks to all our Bristol City Council readers who’ve sent in Jan Ormondroyd’s welcome message. Here it is:

Dear Colleague

I hope you have had a good Easter break and that despite the weather you had the opportunity for some fun and relaxation.

Easter is generally seen as a turning point in the year with spring bringing new growth and opportunities after a long hard winter. I am therefore delighted to be joining you at this auspicious time when it feels that Bristol is at a turning point. We have challenges ahead to put Bristol on both the national and regional map and to let others see what we can genuinely achieve. But equally importantly we have to deliver improved outcomes for the people of Bristol, through vastly improved partnership working with other key organisations throughout the city as well as local communities themselves.

I have been encouraged by some of the people I have met to date and their enthusiasm and commitment to make a real difference. I hope to meet with many more of you in the coming months. I am sure there will be challenges and opportunities for everyone and I look forward to working with you to deliver a Council that will be seen as the best in the business.

Best wishes

Jan Ormondroyd

Chief Executive

So this is the quality of leadership you get for £180k a year is it? A metaphor for renewal - “spring” - that’s so stale and hackneyed that the term cliché doesn’t start to do it justice accompanied by a load of the same old vague management speak - “deliver improved outcomes for the people of Bristol, through vastly improved partnership working with other key organisations throughout the city as well as local communities” - we’ve all heard a thousand times before and know means nothing.

“Phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse” someone once accurately called this kind of crap.

For £180k a year can’t you tell us exactly what “outcomes” you’re anticipating Jan? Who these “key organisations” are? And what “partners” you’re really intending to work with? Or are you afraid of something? Have we got ourselves yet another paralysed paranoid wretch at the top already?

Meanwhile those of you worried about where Jan’s next free lunch is coming from can rest easy. After her 3 April private sector “Practical Networking for Female Leaders” gig, Jan will be lunching - at their expense! - with Voscur, the local voluntary sector representatives on 15 April.

This promises to be an interesting meeting as Jan’s predecessor Pigfucker Gurney wasted hours of the voluntary sector’s time earlier this year agreeing “[a] framework of priorities for funding” only to renege on the lot of it just months later. Many of those involved in these meetings are now collecting their P45s while Pigfucker collects his generous pension …

Will Jan be putting her incredible spring metaphor to more use here we wonder? Or will she have a new one for us? Apparently The Very Hungry Caterpillar is suitable for the under-fives too Jan.

And finally - and this really is final - Derek Pickup that gormless plank cabinet member for education will be presenting a six month report on his work next Tuesday to the Children’s Services Scrutiny Commission.

Don’t get too excited though. Despite our education service being a total basketcase that’s bottom of every national league table going, grafter Derek’s managed to sum up his contribution in just two sides of double-spaced typed paper.

Although this is arguably better than his last effort in October 2007 (pdf) when he presented a few glossy pictures, some crappy management jargon and a quote from the Labour Secretary of State for Education, Ed Balls to the committee. Keep up the good work Derek!

This meeting will also feature the last roll of the dice from Derek’s £140k a year chief education officer, Heather Tomlinson. In another desperate effort to look like she’s doing something useful, Heather’s now doing some deckchair rearrangement or management reorganisation (pdf) if you prefer.

Alongside yet more privatisation of our services we can also say goodbye to her £2m a year “directorate” and instead say hello to her £2m a year “enabler core”. Although, of course, all the overpaid failures currently in the “directorate” will be safely transferred to the “enabler core”, which is good news is it not?

And that’s it folks. On that note The Blogger is calling it a day for the time being. We’ve done a year solid reporting on these useless twats and that’s enough for anyone. If you haven’t realised you’re being done over yet, then you’re never going to.

We’re now off to pursue some “new projects”, although they’ll be some occasional postings on this site as we use our time to follow up some of those bigger stories we’ve missed due to the workload.

Look out for stuff on local Labour funding, SWRDA IT budgets and ISiS/Southwest One over the coming months along with the odd ramble here and there. But the day-to-day stuff, alas, is gone until we return this time next year for the local elections …

We’ll leave you with George Dunning’s The Flying Man, which me and the Small Blogger rediscovered while hunting down Yellow Submarine.

Perhaps there’s a metaphor in there somewhere?

Great Hall, Bristol Grammar School

Bristol Grammar School - catchy strapline: “rich[ !!!], vibrant and a real community, BSG is full of possibility, large but never impersonal” - is currently trumpeting its latest result in getting 17 of its students offers at Oxbridge colleges.

This keeps this leading independent school firmly in that tight-knit pack of 100 elite schools - 80 fee-paying, 18 selective state grammars and two that are notionally comprehensive - that account for an incredible one-third of all admissions to Oxbridge colleges every year.

Add in the next 100 elite schools and these 200 schools account for an incredible 48% of all Oxbridge admissions every year. The other 3,500-odd schools in the UK then account for the remaining 52% of admissions each year. (Although you should try to bear in mind too - if you can through the fog of stats - that 50% of all Oxbridge entrants belong to the 7% of the population that are privately educated whether at an elite school or elsewhere)

Further studies show that at least 25% of cabinet ministers and leading politicians are Oxbridge educated; 50% of leading journalists - especially those at the BBC and the Guardian as well as virtually every household name columnist - are Oxbridge educated and an incredible 85% of the senior judiciary are Oxbridge educated.

Factor in the total domination by Oxbridge graduates of the senior ranks in the civil service, public sector management, the armed services and now even the police, and who says that money, privilege and ‘the old school-tie’ doesn’t put you on the fast track to power and influence in the UK?

Sources:
University Admissions by Individual Schools (pdf) (Sutton Trust)
Over half country’s top journalists went to private schools (pdf) (Sutton Trust)
Politicians’ Backgrounds (pdf) (Sutton Trust)
The educational backgrounds of the UK’s top solicitors, barristers and judges (pdf) (Sutton Trust)

“There remain two key issues over documentation issued to the Forum - timeliness and quality.”
Bristol Schools Forum, Minutes of the meeting 29 January 2008 (pdf)

Take a bow Bristol’s £140k a year education boss Heather Tomlinson, who - along with her equally skilled and capable £2m a year management gang and their various hangers-on - don’t seem to be capable of performing simple administrative tasks like getting accurate reports and information to the Bristol Schools’ Forum on time so that they can make properly informed decisions about the education of our children.

Now, the Bristol Schools’ Forum is not some irrelevant talking shop like most city council forums. It’s responsible for allocating the Dedicated Schools Grant (DSG) to our schools. This grant received by Bristol City Council from the Department of Education amounts to around £500m over three years.

Perhaps a little more pertinently, the forum is also responsible for deciding how much of the DSG should be “top-sliced” from each of our schools and handed to Heather and her managers to pay their absurd wages, fund their dubious CONsultants and generally toss inconsequentially about with.

So what support do Heather and her million pound gang provide to our Schools’ forum then? Why they play politics with it of course and embark on endless money-grabbing missions by continually providing poor and inaccurate information at the very last minute in order to try to blind, bully and harass the forum into decisions financially advantageous to themselves.

Some of the outrageously shabby conduct we’ve discovered from Heather and co. includes them demanding extra cash from the forum for pet CONsultant-friendly projects, which were “not backed up with any data” and then once the programme directors responsible [on a salary in excess of £100k a year] were rumbled, we find they don’t bother to turn up to explain themselves.

We’ve also come across “ill conceived proposals” for ‘Healthy Living’ funding stuffed under the noses of the forum that had to be rejected while a “demand” for additional funding to provide more HR resources for Heather - after considerable challenge from the chair and vice chair - also had to be hastily withdrawn at the last minute.

And then there’s this intriguing minute:

“On the agenda this evening we had a proposal affecting Key Stage 4 funding allocations, which again after challenge by [the chair] (on the grounds that it made no sense), and by our Vice Chair, on the grounds that (1) it was contrary to advice he and another secondary head who sits on the forum had provided, and (2) that it had not been discussed with all secondary heads, has been withdrawn.”

The purpose of all this nonsense is, of course, for Heather’s big-spending department to try and effectively maintain control of the DSG budget for themselves by making the Schools Forum an unmanageable mess. They can then continue to grab money meant for our schools to fund themselves, their screwball schemes and their armies of private education CONsultants.

Isn’t it nice to know that the senior education managers of a failing education authority are spending their time and concentrating their efforts on feathering their own nests directly at the expense of our schools and kids?

The situation is so bad that the Bristol Schools’ Forum Chair, has stated on the record “There may be a need to appoint a new Chair at the next Schools’ Forum meeting”

Perhaps instead someone could call Heather a taxi?

Your child in their hands?

This week’s news on secondary school applications and allocations brings few surprises.

The city’s struggling local authority-run neighbourhood comprehensives - the ones everyone wants to work - continue to remain hopelessly undersubscribed as parents vote with their feet and apply elsewhere.

Meanwhile the city’s few decent local authority schools, headed by the new Redland Green School and followed by St Mary Redcliffe and Cotham School, remain hopelessly oversubscribed.

The Blogger has also made a few enquiries regarding entry to “church school” St Mary Redcliffe in the light of recent headlines claiming that many faith schools may be engaging in the rather un-Christian surreptitious selection of kids.

And apparently in order to apply to get a kid in there you do not necessarily have to bother actually going to church. All you need is a recommendation from your local vicar.

So no doubt church roof replacement funds across a number of Bristol parishes are looking distinctly healthy right now, while a number of Bristol families might be foregoing the Tuscan vacation this coming August.

Is it political correctness gone mad or urban myth as education policy?

A report on Bristol Indymedia catches the eye. The story itself is a fairly unremarkable tale about a couple of stupid coppers doing what comes naturally - something completely bloody stupid. In this case overreacting to a school fight outside the gates and spraying a couple of kids with CS spray. So far, so dumb cops.

However the bit of the story that caught our eye was this:

Teachers, apparently, are not allowed to wade in and break [a fight] up

Is this really the case? Or is this one of those myths that moves effortlessly from the pages of the Daily Mail to the staff room without ever troubling reality?

Other urban myths that have mysteriously reappeared as serious policy in schools in recent years include the belief that teachers are unable to administer sticking plasters to children; that the nursery rhyme Baa Baa Black Sheep is somehow racist and that playing conkers in the playground represents a health and safety risk and is therefore banned.

Can we now add stopping kids’ fights to this list?

Convention at the city council dictates that when a decision is brought before councillors to consider it’s always accompanied by a detailed report drawn up by supposedly impartial, objective and disinterested city council officers.

This report will outline what, in the opinion of the council’s officers, are the issues involved. It should also contain carefully considered, unbiased recommendations and advice to councillors and a clear opinion on how they believe councillors ought to proceed when it comes to taking a decision.

This advice then, from council officers, is of the utmost importance and highly influential on the decisions elected councillors reach. The advice not only needs to be entirely impartial and independent but it needs to be seen to be entirely impartial and independent too.

So what’s going on with the report going before councillors on the Resources Scrutiny Commission tomorrow then? The committee is meeting to consider the independent auditor’s report into the building of the Redland Green School. A development that went £6m over budget. Money we, the council tax payer, will be stumping up.

But the officer providing the advisory report to the councillors on the committee is none other than Carew Reynell, who is clearly identified in the auditor’s report as one of the many senior city council officers involved in the Redland Green fiasco who failed to follow the council’s own financial regulations and did not bother to report vital financial information to elected councillors.

And no doubt while Reynell would claim his conduct was a minor issue which had no impact on the eventual overspend. His claims are just that. Claims. And it is actually very difficult to disentangle Reynell’s personal misconduct in his approach to financial reporting procedures from the wider issue of this multi-million pound overspend.

So isn’t it nice for him that he’s been given an opportunity to produce an anodyne report to present to councillors tomorrow that miraculously clears himself of any blame?

And what are Reynell’s recommendations to councillors?

“That members consider the issues raised in Grant Thornton’s report.”

Blimey that’s really encouraging councillors to pay attention to the detail and question his role isn’t it? Reynell also says:

Enhanced guidance on capital programme monitoring is also being prepared, to clarify responsibilities and content of reporting required by the Council’s Financial Regulations.

Is he having laugh? He’s preparing more financial guidance? To clarify responsibilities? What for? He’s the one that didn’t seem to understand or bother following the last lot of fucking guidance that he wrote.

It’s not more and different guidance that’s needed. It’s senior officers who actually understand and unequivocally follow their own guidance in the first place. What’s the point in changing the process when you have members of staff who think they’re above the process anyway?

What’s going on at this meeting is an absolute charade. Reynell is effectively being allowed to deliver a self-serving report into his own conduct that gets him off the hook. You couldn’t make it up, although, er … Actually he probably will!

Perhaps we should also add the fact he has absolutely no idea what a conflict of interest is to his long, long list of incompetencies now?

Let’s hope this committee sees right through Reynell and the rest of Bristol’s senior officer mafia supporting this bollocks and instigates a full disciplinary enquiry into Reynell’s conduct and the rest of the crew responsible for this huge overspend and undermining our democracy by deliberately failing to report financial information to elected councillors.

When you’re at work, have you ever wondered why the receptionist doesn’t order £75,000 of luxury office furniture on a whim and the admin assistant doesn’t decide on a boring Friday afternoon to order a new £2m fleet of Mercedes trucks?

Quite simply it’s because they’re not authorised to do so and if they were to do so, they’d be dismissed pronto for gross misconduct. The documentation in an organisation that usually governs who can spend what amount of money, when and why are the financial standing orders and they are probably the single most important and useful management tool (if you’re in charge of anyway) an organisation has.

Whatever your job - whether you’re a budget holder or not - we’re all working to financial standing orders whether they’re implicit or explicit. Find us a person who doesn’t know how much money they’re allowed to spend on behalf of their employer and we’ll show you an idiot on the way to the dole queue, a convenient fall guy or a dysfunctional organisation headed for bankruptcy and the courts.

There’s a number of reasons why organisations have financial standing orders. First, they provide clear lines of accountability from the bottom to the top of the organisation. Especially in a large organisation, they make it possible for all expenditure to be tightly controlled and carefully monitored. They make staff - particularly if their budgets have also been clearly explained and allocated as well - directly, personally and transparently accountable for the money they’re spending.

Financial standing orders are also the basis of sound financial management. If you have an organisation where your staff spend whatever sum of money they like on whatever they like, you’re not going to have an organisation for very much longer as you are not controlling your expenditure.

Standing orders are also useful tools for preventing fraud, embezzlement, theft and financial malpractice and they are a handy management tool too. Forget all this crap about yearly comprehensive performance assessments, work plans, supervisions and all the other box-ticking exercises beloved of bureaucrats to prove what a grand job they’re doing.

Instead, if you know a widget usually costs £1 and you give your staff permission to spend £500 and instruct them to get 1,000 widgets, you’re soon going to find out who’s doing what.

Since a chimpanzee can pick up a telephone and buy 500 widgets for £500, anyone who comes back with 500 widgets hasn’t done very much have they? And the person who comes back with 300 widgets, £200 of expense claims and a series of excuses about the lack of budget, the quality of the management and how busy they are should probably be shown the door. Then there’s the one who’ll come back with 750 widgets feeling pretty smug until the smartarse (who’s probably an anarchist) shows up with 1,000 widgets and asks you what they should do with the £50 they’ve still got left in their budget.

Financial standing orders also have another function peculiar to democratic organisations. They represent the the democratic will of the people.

For instance, if you’re a Bristol City Councillor responsible for £300m of expenditure and employ thousands of people its pretty much impossible to personally monitor Sharon in accounts expenditure on paper clips. So you don’t. Instead you create a policy that does it for you.

In the same way that elected councillors, say, set a policy to build a road on a cyclepath or build a new museum or employ a load of PCSOs and then council officers implement them, regardless of their personal views on the matter, so councillors set the more mundane, but equally important policies, around how they want their organisation to function.

For instance things like the council’s personnel policies, the daft equalities crap, the sustainability waffle - whether you agree with them or not and whether council officers agree with them or not - are decided by councillors and are therefore the democratic will of the people and need to be implemented in full and to the letter by the city council’s officers. If they do not, they have broken their contacts of employment.

It is not the job of council officers - at any level - to ignore, alter, countermand, override or rewrite these policies at their convenience. These simple facts also apply to the city council’s financial standing orders, which are a policy of the council as much as any other. They are there to be followed by officers and that should be the end of the story.

So it’s fairly extraordinary when you read the auditor’s report into the Redland Green School £6m overspend to find the following:

10.8 … This is not in accordance with the financial regulations …

10.9 … Given the amounts were over £75,000, in most cases, this would require the procurement regulations to be applied. They were not …

10.10 … Subcontractors were then appointed based on the tender returns. These appointments were not formally approved by the Council [as per the financial regulations] …

10.11 Our concern about the above process is the lack of formal approval by the Council [as per the financial regulations] …

10.12 … the process was not in accordance with the financial regulations …

[10.14 The financial regulations state that "Projects will be the subject of consultation with the relevant Executive Member prior to commencement." ...]

10.17 We have not seen evidence of approval of the commencement of the project from the relevant Executive Member …

10.20 … a process should have been established to require the Consultant to seek formal approval for cost overruns [as per the financial regulations] …

10.21 There was no formal system within the Council for recording and approving these changes [as per the financial regulations] …

10.22 … There was also no formal process in place for the approval and recording of decisions [as per the financial regulations] …

10.26 … We conclude that the Council’s Financial Regulations, in place at the time of the project, were not complied with …

10.27 … Education may not have complied with the financial regulations requirement to provide a report of the full cost position to Cabinet on a quarterly basis …

It’s even more extraordinary when you find out that the person fully involved and right at the centre of running and agreeing - time and again - this complete lack of process in financial management was the Director of Central Services, the council’s chief of finance Carew Reynell.

And it’s even more extraordinary that Reynell - handsomely paid over £100k a year and who personally drew up the council’s financial regulations, recommended them to councillors to adopt and is personally responsible for monitoring that they are used correctly across the council - has taken it upon himself to ignore them.

And it is totally beyond belief that he’s presented us, the council tax payer - with a £6m bill for this conduct.

This is not just a serious failure of management from Reynell either, it’s also a complete abrogation of the democratic process. Perhaps he thinks because he earns £100k a year and has the term ‘director’ in his job title the law and the rules don’t apply to him and he doesn’t have to do what he’s told by us?

Reynell, ignorant, incompetent, arrogant and anti-democratic in equal measure, has form for this kind of behaviour too. Can it be only three years ago that financial consultant Captain Haddock delivered his report into the financial crisis in social services, which cost us £18m?

This was the expensive report that had to carefully explain that budget holders in social services should monitor their budgets on spreadsheets. An idea clearly beyond finance guru Reynell who didn’t seem to know about this most simple of financial management tools let alone ensure it was implemented.

Now we’re back here again with another expensive report. And its complex conclusion that nobody could ever have thought of?

“We would recommend that, for future projects, the Financial Regulations are complied with in respect of reporting to Cabinet”

This is fucking ridiculous. This incompetent arsehole has now cost the city £24m (that we know of) through his inability to implement the simplest of financial processes and procedures. And he’s still in post taking home £2,000 of our money every week?

He should resign immediately. And if he won’t resign, our councillors need to clearly assert themselves, protect our hard earned cash, show that their policies and our democracy cannot be overridden whenever an officer feels like it and sack the bastard.

But will our piss weak, powerless councillor cowards do that? Will they fuck. Just wait for the excuses …

The auditors report into the £6m Redland Green School overspend has been published (pdf).

James Barlow has done an excellent in-depth analysis on his blog but the meat on bones of this report can be found in section 10 - Compliance with the Council’s Financial Regulations and other procedures.

It’s not pleasant reading at all if you’re bothered about the proper management of public money and council finance boss Carew Reynell ought to be, at the very least,  clearing his desk this morning …

The Blogger will be reporting further on this soon.

Great news just in! A recent parliamentary answer reveals that the city’s best known higher education college, the University of Bristol, continues to be one of the most ridiculously exclusive and elitist institutions in the country.

Latest figures show that over 35% of students at the university continue to be recruited from private schools, despite an ongoing barrage of soppy see-through PR and spin from the university about “widening participation“.

This means that the university is still very much first choice for Piers and Arabella from the Cotswolds who, despite the best education money can buy and daddy’s magnaminous string-pulling efforts, are way too fucking dim to get into Oxbridge but aren’t quite enough of a half-witted blueblood inbred to have to be hidden away from public view for their own safety at Cirencester’s Royal Agricultural College.

To give you some idea of the the university’s actual record on “widening participation”, the only colleges with a higher intake of privately educated kids in the UK are those famous bastions of the working class power Oxford, Cambridge, the Royal Academy of Music, the Courtald Institute and, er … Cirencester’s Royal Agricultural College!

So who the hell’s responsible for running this ultra-elitist establishment club in the middle of town then? Well, a brief glance at the membership of the university’s governing body - or ‘The Court’ as the snobs like to call it- reveals that no less than fifteen Bristol City Councillors, among others, are.

Surely these couldn’t be the same Bristol City Councillors responsible for running one of the worst education authorities in the country could they? An authority that also has a notorious - if hopelessly ineffective - political obssession with ramming diversity, inclusion and equality policies down our - and our children’s - throats?

So how come these councilllors are so keen on forcing equalities policies on us and very quiet when it comes to pushing similar policies on them?

The university’s boss, Vice-Chancellor Eric Thomas, is even worse. For starters he’s yet another of these unelected rich white men on the board of the SWRDA.

That’s the very same SWRDA, of course, that’s throwing hundreds of thousands of pounds of public money at organisations like Equalities South West to endlessly lecture us on the vital importance of “equality and diversity throughout the region”. A message hypocrite Thomas seems to take absolutely no notice of himself in conducting his day job.

Shouldn’t this silly old fart start practising what he preaches and get his own house in order first before he takes up lucrative public service roles pointing his overprivileged finger at other people?

Bristol City Council has admitted misleading parents over the catchment area for its flagship secondary school at Redland Green. Scores of children living within the “area of first priority” did not get in to the comprehensive last September because of the demand for places. The same situation is likely this year … Last year, places were filled with pupils who live up to 1km (0.6 miles) from the £33 million school in Redland Court Road, leaving about 90 children who had expected to get in to Redland Green having to take up places elsewhere.
Bristol Evening Post, 31 January 2008

It has become abundantly clear that there is a significant discrepancy between the number of pupils within the proposed catchment area and the size of the proposed school.

This was accepted by Mrs Boulter [former Assistant Director of Education] but no ideas were forthcoming about what would happen to all those who erroneously believed that because they were in the catchment area they would obtain a place.

The reality is that if all those who are closest to the site at Redland applied for a place, it would be full from within a half-mile radius.
PACE (Parents Action for Secondary Education), March 2004