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Children will not suffer in Cumbria council cuts, pledges director
By Julian Whittle Political editor (link to original article)
Vulnerable children will not suffer because of county council spending cuts, the director of Cumbria’s Children’s Services has promised.
Related: 300 Children's Services jobs at risk in Cumbria council cuts
The Cumberland News reported last week that 300 posts in children’s services are at risk including 49 specialist teachers who work with children with special needs.
Now Julia Morrison, the newly-appointed corporate director, has moved to allay concerns. She said: “I want to reassure parents and children that we have their best interests at heart and we are trying to find a way to make the service better.
“Yes, we have to focus and prioritise but we are in a position to reshape [the department] so that it is more streamlined and efficient and gives better value.”
The council is consulting voters on plans to save £24.8m next year. Children’s Services, the department that supports schools and looks after children in care, is in the front-line. But many proposed changes to services provided by the department are not in the consultation document, Have your say.
Staff are being consulted, however. As well as the reduction in specialist teachers, there are plans to cut the number of managers at assistant director or head of service level from seven to three.
A total of 100 educational-welfare officers, parent-support advisers, family-support workers, family workers, parenting-strategy officers, parent-partnership co-ordinators and teenage-pregnancy co-ordinators could be replaced by 96 family-intervention workers.
Mrs Morrison said that rolling all the job titles into one should speed up response times. She said: “At the moment a referral goes from team to team and takes too long. It will be a leaner service but much more efficient.”
She also defended the cut in special needs’ teachers.
The 11 who remain would train classroom teachers rather than teach children.
Mrs Morrison said: “At the moment we have a large team of teachers that work with individual children.
“I want to have a team of highly-skilled professionals who can go in where a school cannot meet the needs of a particular child. This team would upskill the staff to meet those needs.
“It’s about building the professional capacity of staff [in schools].”
She said the public were not being consulted because the changes were an “internal reconfiguration”.
She added: “We have a consultation with staff. It is very much a proposal for debate and discussion. We will take notice of the comments received to come up with our final restructure.”
Mrs Morrison is due to meet headteachers to discuss the proposals next week.
With 2,769 staff, Children’s Services is the largest council department. It stands to lose 300, or 10.8 per cent of its workforce.
Some 611 jobs are at risk across the whole council which employs 9,310 in total. Other departments stand to lose more proportionately. Environment, for example, could lose 56 of its 268 posts.
The council is appealing for volunteers for redundancy. Meanwhile Ian Stewart, leader of the Liberal Democrat opposition, has again criticised the consultation process saying there are too few detailed proposals.
Consultation runs until January 31.
NOTE: Contact details for Julia Morrison from Cumbria County Council website as of Jan 2011 are shown below.
Julia Morrison
Corporate Director - Children's Services
Cumbria County Council
5 Portland Square
Carlisle
CA1 1PU
Phone 01228 226857
Email: julia.morrison@cumbriacc.gov.uk
First published Friday, 03 December 2010 by http://www.cumberlandnews.co.uk
The following two letters were written in reply to the above article.
Service cuts will harm Cumbrian children
Letter published by http://www.newsandstar.co.uk Wednesday, 08 December 2010
(Link to original letter )
So Julie Morrison, the director of children’s services, thinks that cutting specialist teaching staff from approximately 64 to 11 will benefit the children they help.
I suggest she reads this letter and the letter from Mike Mapleton, a retired primary school head, and listens to the staff, parents and schools who will be the most affected by these ridiculous cuts.
Below is some information for your readers to make up their own minds the impact this will have.
SATS currently have a team of approximately 64 staff which cover the whole of Cumbria, at present working from four Locality teams – South Cumbria, Eden District, East Cumbria and West Cumbria based in Whitehaven.
These teams consist of a locality manager in each area, senior specialist advisory teachers for each of the fore-named specialisms, specialist advisory teachers, specialist higher level teaching assistants; and administrative staff, who provide much-needed advice, support and access to learning for some of the most needy and vulnerable children in our schools.
They provide these children/young people the extra help they require while remaining in mainstream schooling.
SATS support children/young people, their parents/carers and staff in schools for those who have specific learning difficulties including literacy difficulties, autistic spectrum conditions, blind/visually impaired, hearing impaired, physical/medical, early years, severe learning difficulties, ethnic minority achievement and speech and language impairments.
The cuts would equate to a more than 80 per cent cut in the department and mean they would make up nine per cent of the total amount of job losses that CCC are planning within this consultation document.
Since the economic spending review both the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister have stated on numerous occasions that these cuts would not effect the most needy children in our education system, but as you can see this is clearly not the case.
Being realistic this service expected some cuts like most public service departments.
However cuts of this magnitude reduce a vital children’s service from a highly dedicated, highly skilled team providing excellent support to children, parents and schools to nothing more than a lip service department where the quality of service they will be able to provide will be far, far from the service these individuals require.
ALAN GOODWIN
Whitehaven
The Whitehaven News,
Whitehaven, 2nd December 2010.
Dear Sir,
As a befriender with West Cumbria Dyslexia Association I should like to endorse the views in Alan Goodwin’s letter to the Whitehaven news. He has put the matter very well.
Our association runs a drop-in session at Lakes College on the first Tuesday of each month, and we also spend a number of hours on the telephone talking to anxious parents. So we deal with the results of Children not receiving the necessary specialist help, and we are very upset at the prospect of an 80% cut in specialist teaching.
Consider this. A child who cannot read cannot do the work set by the teacher. Almost every subject is based on written work. If a child cannot read that child cannot spell or write either. How do you think he or she will react? Either the child becomes introverted and anxious (is sick before going to school for a spelling test for example), or he/she becomes difficult, disruptive, distracts the other children in some ways, or indeed refuses to go to school at all. It becomes a downward spiral. In later years the results can become even more dangerous, for 72% of our prison population have some kind of literacy difficulties.
Now we know that prison is expensive and not the desired outcome of our education system. We also know the way to help these children in the early years is to help them succeed instead of fail, and that is by specialist teaching input early on. Extra reading practice is not enough for specialist learning difficulties. Believe me, I know on both a teaching and a personal level. We are building up trouble and misery in future years by cutting the means of helping our children to succeed.
I appeal to the authorities to reconsider, and ask parents involved to express their dismay by writing to Julia Morrison, Director of Children’s Services, Cumbria County Council, Portland Square, Carlisle.
Yours faithfully,
A G Mackenzie
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