North Area Committee: Thursday 27 January

The first North Area Committee of 2011 is coming up soon.

As far as I know there is no planning so the meeting will be starting at 7.30pm at the Manor School on Arbury Road.

As well as the Open Forum, a chance for you to raise any issue you wish with your local councillors, it looks likely that we will have items on...

• Local police priorities
• We hope someone from Tesco to talk about issues related to their stores
• Information about the UK census, which is this year
• A regular item on community grants.

We will also be looking at how we can improve local participation in decisions that affect the North Area. The hope is to extend how many people get involved in making decisions on public services.

We hope to see you there!

Orchard Park to Riverside Cycle Scheme

I have been emailed with details of the possible Orchard Park to Riverside Cycle Scheme. This involves changes to the cycle route on Arbury Road from King's Hedges Road.

The changes would be on the stretch outside St Laurence's school, and on the stretch outside the front of The Manor.

The County are consulting on the proposals and would like comments by post, email or phone before Friday 10 December 2010. The results will go to the transport Area Joint Committee on 24 January 2011.

More details and a PDF of the leaflet and explanatory notes are available from the County Council's project website.

North Area Committee: 25 November

The next North Area Committee is next Thursday, and the agenda is due out later this week.

The meeting will be at the usual venue, The Manor (School) on Arbury Road. We will start at 6.30pm with planning, and the main agenda at 7.30pm including the Open Forum: your chance to ask councillors about local issues.

I'll try to post more details when the agenda is published, but you will be able to get it from this page on the City Council website.

Give new head a chance!

Yesterday I wrote a letter to Ed Balls, the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families concerning the recent announcements about "closing" any school with less than 30% of children gaining certain qualifications.

The Manor School in King's Hedges missed this target by 1% last year, and we all hope this figure will improve under the new headteacher.

However what schools like the Manor need is support and not to be labelled as "failures" in public. The GCSE pass rate is a single measure, in others Manor does better. It has the second highest value add in the County and has amongst the best sustained improvement in KS3 figures nationally according to the Government's own figures.

Deciding to take action on one figure and one figure alone is a recipe for disaster: schools will have an incentive to exclude pupils on academic ability rather than behaviour. This is when Cambridgeshire's out of school education is already at breaking point.

Valuable work with the most vulnerable students will not be taken into account.

As I said in my letter to Mr Balls: I hope that the package of changes will work to raise opportunities for children in King's Hedges, but I fear that the measurement chosen and the public branding of schools will be counterproductive.

Details of the Liberal Democrats education policy can be found in the education section of the main party website.