School closures: Dance macabre with Parklands?

The medieval Danse Macabre is a performed allegory on the universality of death, with the personified figure of Death summoning representatives from all walks of life, from the highest to the lowest and from the aged to the children – to dance to the graveside.

Over the past two days we have been getting disturbing information from supporters of Parklands School (for special, special needs’), presenting what could be seen as a danse macabre for today, enacted in the council chamber at the meeting on 25th November.

In the council chamber on 25th November

When the meeting moved to the vote, this began with the putting of a Motion (to go to consultation) and an Amendment (to withdraw the proposals) followed by a series of Councillors choosing to make statements on how and why they intended to vote.

Councillor James Robb, also from Helensburgh, proposed an alternative amendment of ‘No Action’, which would have seen the proposals stopped dead in the water. He found no seconder so his amendment failed.

In making his proposal he noted that Parklands was very vulnerable and that the best route to fairness was to throw out all the proposals.

He was followed by Councillor Elaine Robertson whose justification of her own coming vote FOR the proposals can be paraphrased as being that a quick death was preferable to prolonged life. (Even for the perfectly healthy?)

Councllor Dance’s justification of her FOR vote

Councillor Dance told the chamber with absolute authority – such that suspicious cynics like ourselves never questioned – that she had been speaking to the parents and that Parklands had ‘voted FOR consultation’.

She then recommended all communities ‘to embrace consultation’. This somehow gruesome phrase oddly – and not inappropriately, echoed the words in the training manual provided by Mohammed Atta, the leader of the suicide gang who did for the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Centre. He advised them, as their planes approached the buildings and their own deaths, to ‘open your chest and embrace death gladly’.

Councilor Dance made it known that Parklands’ parents were simply tired of the school being under threat of closure, wanted to get it over with and wished to be part of the process of finding alternative arrangements that would suit them – like closing one of Helensburgh’s pools for periods and lifting the children into it, as a substitute for their current hydrotherapy pool.

She specifically refuted the (substantiated) allegations of mistakes in the proposals, parroting Cleland Sneddon’s misleading painting of them as ‘matters of opinion’. This is certainly an unusual description of mathematics and statistical analysis.

While, in this, we lost respect for Councilor Dance’s intelligence and the absence of due interrogation of the evidential basis of the proposals, we did not doubt the authority of her unequivocal statement on the wishes of the parents of the children at Parklands school.

But was it true?

However, in the last few days we have been contacted by supporters of Parklands school angry with us because we had reported that Parklands had accepted defeat.

We have been told that these people had not been consulted in this matter.

For Argyll has asked Councilor Dance how many of the Parklands’ parents she had spoken to before she made her unequivocal statement to the chamber; and what the process was by which Parklands ‘voted for consultation?’

What is circumstantially interesting is that, with Councllors Duncan McInyre and Bruce Marshall,  Councillor Dance is currently one of a triumvirate of  councillors attempting to drive forward the discredited Alliance.

This ‘agreed to go to consultation’ may have been a joint ploy in the chamber to try to swing the doubtful to vote FOR the proposals at this recent meeting.

We are aware that it was Councillor McIntyre who offered misleading information to his Alliance colleague, Councillor Mary Jean Devon before the vote by telling her – wrongly – that both of ‘her’ schools in Mull had ‘agreed to go to consultation’. A surprised Councillor Devon checked this out, discovered the negative, and voted AGAINST.

The public need to know how much foundation in fact lay behind Councillor Dance’s assured statement to the chamber that Parklands had ‘voted for’ the same thing.

Councilor Dance’s response to our enquiry

‘I have ongoing discussions with the Parklands parents but with reference to the School Review most parents attended my surgery on the 1st November and indicated that apologies for those who could not manage to be there.

‘I was asked to take forward their concerns and report back to them.

‘We met again the week before the Council meeting and I updated them on my thoughts and discussions I had had with other organisations and council officers in the meantime.

‘From these discussions it was agreed that I make the response I did on the day. You will recall that I indicated that I had met with the majority of parents but not all and I stated I was there to advocate for Parklands to be reviewed through a process of consultation.

‘Do not understand how you can think any vote was taken or that there was any formal meeting of any body, I certainly did not mention any such process.  I believe that one of the members who attended both get togethers is in fact the Chairman of the Parent Council.

‘Since the meeting I have contacted the parents and we will determine the date of our next meeting and how we intend to take our action plan forward, the substance of which was discussed at our earlier meetings.

‘It is well known that I have a particular interest in issues pertaining to disabilities and inclusion, I am an advisor to Jigsaw and Enable, and I welcome the chance to bring all groups together to give an informed, well constructed challenge to any suggestion that Parklands is not sustainable.

‘Hope this is helpful to your understanding of my representative role in this instance’.

Our response

We have no doubt that Councillor Dance said, verbatim, that Parklands had ‘voted for consultation’. We have a notebookful of verbatim quotations during proceedings – throughout which we never left the chamber – and this is there, as we reported it and in sequence.

‘Voted for’ is also not an expression we would have used as a shorthand version of a Councillor’s report that some parents were prepared to cooperate with a consultation process.

We also find the ‘advisory’ role of the Councillor in this instance an interesting one. It equates to Councilor Marshall’s (the third in the trio of current Alliance movers) unhelpful advice to Strone school that they would be advised not to write to Councilllors to express their views and to argue their case.

Moreover  – we have neither record nor recall that Councillor Dance qualified in any way her account of how many parents she spoke for.

Unfortunately, in a response to  a Freedom of Information request we made to Argyll and Bute Council, it appears that no recording was made of the proceeedings and that it is not their practice to do this.

It is certainly clear that contact was not made at a formal meeting of a Parklands parent council and this itself may be driving the disquiet in those who have made contact with us. We have no wish to be unfair to anyone but this circumstance does not seem all it was purported to be.

Schools like Parklands are vulnerable in so many ways that it would be distasteful, to say the least,  if their interests  – as they saw them – had been under or mis-represented in this instance.

A fellow Councillor’s view

Given that he had expressed specific concern for Parklands, is another Helensburgh Councillor and had proposed the alternative amendment which would have protected all of the threatened schools in a different way, we have just contacted Councillor James Robb and asked him for a statement – now received and quoted below:

‘The council in a majority vote has now decided the proposals are competent, factually correct and have educational benefit.

‘The presumption is now that the Council will close these schools subject to the statutory consultation process.

‘Given the outcry from communities and the challenges to the Council’s assumptions, what new evidence is likely to change the minds of those councillors who supported this as an acceptable way of balancing the budget?

‘In the end the vote became politically entrenched and the outcome predictable. It was not the Council’s finest day.

‘I was pleased, at a local level, to gain the support of Councillor Freeman in opposing these closures.

‘This education review is being done on a piecemeal basis. Primary schools, secondary schools, teaching assistants, pre-schooling are being addressed separately but not special educational needs.

‘There were only a small minority of councillors who thought the Parklands proposal was acceptable but that got lost in the politics of power.

‘Although Councillor Freeman and I did all we could in the circumstances, I still feel all councillors should have done more to protect this particularly vulnerable group of children’.

More tricks

The ‘politics of power’ to which Councillor Robb refers, are not yet over.

The trinity of Dance, McIntyre and Marshall have recently been making strenuous attempts to hound Councillor George Freeman out of the Alliance of Independent Councillors. The rules of the group – such as anything resembling ‘rules’ that can be operated amongst a ragbag of independents – are that members are free to vote as they wish. (Yes, but… there is a whip system.)

Anyway, this means that the three have had to find another excuse to try to push Freeman out and so they are evidently accusing him of inciting the crowd to violence against his colleagues after the meeting on 25th November. Bizarre.

The only question we have is why on earth Councillor Freeman would still want to be part of this group He has shown that he is very much better than  the company he has been keeping, in an intelligent grasp of the fundamental issue and in honour.

Having left the building before Councilor Freeman – with whom we have often been at vigorous odds, having waited for him to emerge in order to recognise the integrity of his conduct in the chamber and having spoken to him immediately before he went to his car, we bear objective witness to the vicious nonsense of this move.

Ironically, we have good reason to know that Councillor Dance has had a very equivocal loyalty to the Alliance for some time and has actively considered alternative arrangements.

Now, with the Alliance likely simply to be ‘allowed to govern’ for the time being, as an toothless minority administration, there are more posts to be shared around the in-crowd (hence the frightful in-fighting currently taking place) – so staying in the Alliance now offers the prospect of more lucre – sorry, more opportunity for dedicated public service.

To convey some sense of the discredit this shower are bringing on Argyll, we received a private email yesterday from a widely respected (and angry) non-political source who asked: ‘Is it because of the clearances that the gene pool in Argyll has been so degraded that you have a higher percentage of idiots than anywhere else?’

We need an election.