As we mentioned, we asked for a statement from David Pugh addressing the points made our ‘Loss Of £7m Govt Funding To Schools Not True‘ piece. The press office asked us to delay putting the piece out, while they prepared a statement “as quick as” they could. They got it to us a short while after we delayed the publishing.
It turns out that what sent us is pretty much what Duncan Smith at IW Radio had from David Pugh the previous night. Ho hum.
Below is the official statement indented and italicised. Interspersed into the statements, are our comments on the particular section above it.
IW Council Leader David Pugh said “The only guidance to date the council has received in relation to Primary Capital Plan funding is that issued to all local authorities on 6 December 2007.
We don’t know if there’s been any further ‘guidance,’ but Chris Welsford, Standards Not Tiers, tells us that he placed information in to the public domain, beyond the 6 December 2007 information, including that from Peter Connell — the man in charge of the Primary Capital Plan (PCP) funding programme — with information highly relevant to the Island position, such as “The PCP was not designed to give local authorities an excuse to close schools. It was designed to build new schools and refurbish the current schools.” (More on this later)
If concerned parents are finding this kind of thing out … why the hell aren’t the people who are being paid with our taxes not aware of it?
We have received no advice or guidance to the contrary to suggest that we do not need to show “decisive plans for early action” to reduce our overall surplus places to less than 10%.
The Government has never said it would expect us to quickly reduce surplus places to less than 10%
Why is this being brought up? It’s never been in question that the Government have been saying this – it’s been the Council that have been saying there is a need to reduce surplus places. Phrasing it in the way above, could be seen as a deliberate misdirection of attention.
It simply said we need a plan to show how we would do this. The main point is that we won’t have reduced surplus places sufficiently by the time of the release of PCP funding in 2009 – hence why we need to show how we intend to achieve it in the longer-term through a strategic approach.
David Pugh has said on many, many occasions that if we don’t close primary schools to reduce surplus school places, we will lose £7 million funding from the government.
David Pugh stated this at the Ventnor Middle School public meeting on 28th January and we suspect at all the other public meetings. Listen to it for yourselves on this podcast:
[audio:http://otw-audio.s3.amazonaws.com/david-pugh-ventnor-presentation.mp3]
This ‘intent’ argument is totally new and has never been clearly spoken about in the many times Pugh, Wells or Beynon have taken to the air on IW Radio – what we’ve heard is immediate action needed to be taken, hence the proposal to reduce half of the primary schools. They’ve had plenty of opportunities to raise it, why is it now being discussed?
