After the first flurry of Committee meetings at the start of September it hasn’t exactly gone quiet - people are still very discontent with the state of their roads; Highclere Road still floods; Barleymow Lane is still hazardous for pedestrians; the Vehicle Activated Sign near Warbury Lane is still not working; the Old Library is still an eye-sore. And more beside.

Alight!

One small miracle did happen over the Summer, though I did not notice it until the darker evenings: the light column replacing the one outside Beaulieu in the Chobham Road has come on. 

 J

I’ve been trying to get it fixed for getting on for five years  - it was one of my first pieces of ‘casework’ after I became a Councillor, and has been a constant reminder of how powerless (literally!) Surrey seems to be when faced with EDF

Youth Services

I’m also involved in some ‘task groups’. One is concerned with the future of Youth Services in Surrey. Things have got to change - progressive underfunding is weakening the good work that does happen; while some buildings, such as Lakers on Goldsworth Park, remain very underused. There would have been more cuts, including reducing the number of staff even further, if an extra half a million pounds had not been found at the last minute from some ad hoc corner of last year’s budget.

The Youth Development Service can’t do everything, and may be best specialising in the intervention work its staff do very well.

There remains Surrey’s obligation to take a lead in making sure there is a good ‘Youth Offer’ of positive activities, even if it does not provide them itself. 

There has been a study over the summer of what Surrey’s Youth Service does, and what young people want. The results were unsurprising: more safe places to meet, more interesting things to do, better transport to reach them.

The Youth Petition

What I’d like to see happen in Knaphill and Golsworth West is summed up in the wording of the petition which Cllr. Olly Wells will be taking to the next Local Committee meeting:

We the undersigned ask the Woking Local Committee to endorse the view that Surrey County Council should take a full leadership role in providing more ‘places to go and things to do’ for young people as part of the overall Youth Offer within Surrey. We ask that underused youth centres and school premises are regarded as a resource that can be ‘brought to the table’ locally in partnership with authorities such as Woking Borough Council and with Voluntary organisations to provide a wide range of positive activities for young people out of school hours, with affordable access by public or community transport. In the Knaphill area, we request that a Youth Offer be developed which includes:

·        Lakers Youth Centre open regularly at evenings and weekends as a ‘youth hub’ and including youth café style provision.

·        Youth café style provision compatible with its present use being developed at Woking Youth Arts Centre                                                 

·        An additional ‘drop in’/youth café facility on the Brookwood Hospital estate and within walking distance of any new housing.

·        More sports opportunities for all local young people using existing school facilities and recreation grounds.

We have several hundred signatures so far, and could easily have gathered more.

It’s all happening at the Library …

The new Knaphill Library has also absorbed some time and effort, though generally in a fun way.

I was the only person at the First Thursday book group to totally enjoy ‘The Devil Wears Prada’, but we had a good conversation. Not wholly about the book. Actually, not much about the book.

I’ve also stood in a couple of times this month leading the Rhymetime session for toddlers (with their mothers) on Friday morning. Fortunately the mothers generally know the rhymes and actions better than I do, and only want someone to put together a running order and keep them together. But this morning I introduced one of my favourites - ‘There was an old woman tossed up in a basket’ - which is sung to the tune of Lillibulero.  They (the mothers) did now know it.  I tried to sing.  Apologies are due to all present.  

Apologies are also due to all readers of the upcoming Goldsworth Park News. There is going to be a talk at the Library at 4.30 on Saturday 11th October - not the 18th of October - about tracing your family tree. This will be given by a speaker from the Surrey History Centre. Admission will be by ticket, for a small fee to cover the cost.

If you are interested in genealogy and would like to share your knowledge and experience with other people, there’s scope for a group to meet more often in the library - where there’s also the draw of being able to make use not only of the computers, but of Surrey’s subscription on your behalf to services such as Ancestry.

We’re also still hoping to form a second, daytime book group, and have more sessions on Local History.

Looking forward

 Serious political notes will return with the next Full Council on the 14th of October, and I expect outcomes from the JAR to be getting clearer in the next weeks. In the meantime, I will put together my notes on another very sore issue - the adoption of roads on the Hospital Estate in Knaphill - where the complexity of the situation seems almost overwhelming, especially in present economic conditions with developers changing and permutating their names faster than management consultants!

Still here, and very chuffed to have been on the Liberal Democrat Voice short-list for best new blog of the year (hence the rather fun graphic above).

I didn’t win - the excellent The People’s Republic of Mortimer swept the board with Best New Liberal Democrat Blog, Liberal Democrat Blog of the Year, and best Liberal Democrat posting.  It’s a bit of a blogger’s blog, reminding me of Sf Fanzines of the past, and quite unlike my own rather puritanically limited information-before-opinion approach on this website. To use someone else’s joke, people who like this sort of blog will like this blog - check it out!

There were a few quiet few days a week or two ago, and if I look back in my diary there are gaps, so that I could almost wonder how I filled my time - but I know I have not been sitting around doing nothing! Some of the more serious business has got written up already, but less strictly political highlights included:

• The Beaufort School Fete, with our new Head Teacher showing her Australian roots by taking personal control of the Barbecue.
• The Surrey County Harp ensemble concert at St. Mary’s in Saunderstead, when we had our first go at playing the theme tune from ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ in concert. A world first for this arrangement: not a piece of music you’d associate with a group of 30-ish harps, but we all enjoyed it, and the audience didn’t walk out! (At least not before the end of the concert.)
• The Knaphill / Brookwood ‘In Tune’ community engagement event held at The Vyne. A good number of people there, with three discussion groups set up from topics chosen by those attending, as well as the exhibitions in the hall. But whether anything will come from it I wouldn’t like to say - there was a similar meeting at Goldsworth Park last year. Opinions got written up, and I guess it’s all part of keeping the pressure up to get the facilities people in the community want.
• Ian Wakeford, the local historian, gave a talk at Knaphill Library about Knaphill’s history, with pictures of the village from the past. The idea was to draw in people who could perhaps be involved in setting up a history group at the library - all the seats were full, so it looks as if the interest is there. For anyone interested in helping, the next ‘Friends of Knaphill Library’ meeting should be on 26th of June at 7.30 - but details will be in the library.

Last week had a ‘Schools and Learning’ Committee meeting as well as the ‘Children and Families’ reported on at some length below - but there is more to be picked out from both of them, which I’ll try to do before long.

Next week is Full Council, and the following week (Monday 23rd) Woking Local Committee. If you live in Woking, the deadline for written public questions is mid-day this coming Tuesday. Any Woking resident can just turn up at the Council Chamber from 6.00pm to 6.30pm for Public Question Time, when you’ll have the opportunity to raise issues, though the session is informal and not minuted.

A lot has happened since the 10th of April and my last round-up of events. It’s not all been Thursday’s Local Elections - there have been quite a  number of meetings, and a fair bit of ‘casework’.

CA / JAR

 The Inspectors have been and gone, and there’s even been time for another meeting of the Member Advisory Group. (Are the Officers advising the Members? Or vice-versa? Or both? In practise I have experiened mainly the first.)

I am still trying to get to grips intellectually with the CA / CPA system of inspection well enough to write about it. The finished version will get published here Real Soon Now, but in the meantime the draft has been acting as a stumbling block each time I open up this web site’s admin area. However I will continue to work on a members-eye-view, because if you’re interested enough to have got past the acronyms and read this far, you probably want the gory details. In so far as I am allowed to give them.

Woking Youth Council

Woking Youth Council had its AGM on the 22nd April. It usually meets in the Council Chamber, but this time the sixteen or so youngsters taking part had to make do with a Committee Room.

You have to be 11-18 to take part; I was there as an observer on behalf of Surrey County Council’s Local Committee. While there is help from Woking Borough Council and Surrey’s Youth Development Service people, the young people themselves Chair meetings, take minutes, and have a Treasurer to keep track of the money.

There is real money for them to keep track of, and in quite reasonable quantities, coming from Woking Borough Council and from the Youth Opportunities Fund. The sorts of things they can use it for are to support activities for young people in the Borough - in the past, the Youth Council has run ‘Uproar’, a music event with young local bands.

There is also training available to them, for example in how to Chair meetings, and a residential team-building weekend was being finalised.

If you or someone you know is interested in taking part, there is some more information and an on-line application form on the Woking Borough Council website, at  http://www.woking.gov.uk/community/children/young/democracy/wokingyouthcouncil

The Woking Youth Council is now coming up to its fifth anniversary, and it is really good to see how there are now a body of experience within the group that allows its young members to take part constructively and also confidently; guided by adults but not, I think, dominated by them. 

The Children and Familes committee and the Schools and Learning Committee have had further meetings. One of the most interesting items was about ROCPA. Please excuse me if I drop in here the short section I’ve written about it for the GPCA news. (And also please excuse the lack of uniformity of font this causes. One day maybe I’ll work out how to make this software sing and dance. Perhaps.)

ROCPA: Raising of the Compulsory Participation Age 

ROSLA, in 1972, was the Raising of the School Leaving Age, so that it became sixteen. Now the Government is saying that from 2015 all 16 to 18 year olds will be required to participate in some form of education or training. In April’s Schools and Learning Committee we heard how Surrey County Council has started planning for this, since the responsibility for commissioning and funding 16 – 18 education is moving back to the Local Authority.It shouldn’t be a matter of keeping unwilling youngsters longer at school, but of widening the opportunities available, both in terms of college-based vocational training and helping employers provide worthwhile learning opportunities to young people while they work. Easy enough to say, but this will be an enormous challenge to carry out effectively. One committee member asked about ‘refusers’. How can you force youngsters of this age into school or training? Would dropping out in itself turn them into young offenders? The Officer presenting the report recognised that this would be a disaster, and ROCPA had to be developed in a way that would appeal to young people, ‘so that there are routes that mean young people are not forced out of the system.’

            As the Chairman said, ‘this is going to be enormous – it’s starting to bubble up.’ And we’ve none too much time to get it right, once you realise that the first children to be affected by it are already in Year Five.

The Friends of Knaphill Library met on April the 24th. We’ve got two of the group’s original target activities underway. These are a well attended Book Group, and Friday morning mother-and- toddler ‘Story Times’ and ‘Rhyme Times’ during term time. These are now so successful that if many more people come, there will have to be a (free) ticket system. I’ve been involved with both activities, as one of the reading group, and as a  ’stand-by’ person leading Rhyme or Story time when the (really super) regulars aren’t available. Friday 25 was my first Rhyme Time, which I thoroughly enjoyed preparing and presenting. It quite takes me back to my long-ago career with the BBC, and the glory days of once producing the legendary Listen with Mother!

Next on the agenda for the Friends is Local History, though we’re not sure what would be popular in terms of starting a group up. The hope is that this will brings in new, enthusiastic people to go on developing  the use of the library as a community resource.

The Easter Break has been more broken than usual. Two-week Spring school holidays in Surrey start two weeks after Easter. Easter ifself attracted Good Friday and Easter Monday as days off, giving an extended weekend. 

The pattern varied across the country - in Cornwall and Hereford, both of which I’ve visited over the last couple of weeks, there’s been the conventional holiday around Easter; but this means that teachers and children are now facing an extraordinarily long Summer term, just about twice as long as the Spring term before it.

Staff at Beaufort Community Primary School on Goldsworth Park had a less than peaceful Easter weekend, since only a couple of days beforehand word came through that an Ofsted inspection would take place as soon as they returned, on the Tuesday and Wednesday of Easter Week.

I have been a Governor at the school for over ten years, and am currently Vice-Chair of Governors, and felt the same sort of concern as when my own children went into the exam room - everything ought to be fine, but you can’t help being anxious!

More about the Inspection and its results in a later posting.

Knaphill Care held a coffee morning at The Vyne community centre. This had a dual purpose - to attract more helpers, and to give something back to existing volunteers, who could enjoy manicures and aromatherapy provided along with the coffee!  I was invited along because I had been instrumental in getting the (very modest) funding needed for the event through Surrey’s Local Committee. 

Over the last few years a network of local voluntary organisations of this sort have built up - here in the West of Woking we also have St. John’s Care and Goldsworth Care.  

Other meetings have included an Informal Local Committee session looking at schools across Woking with help from the Local Education Officer, John Ambrose. John and his team know the schools in their area very well, and offer support to schools and to parents. They can help when when problems crop up that can’t be resolved within the normal school procedures, from advising on resolving disputes to helping a school cope with serious emergencies.

The service is paid for by schools and by Surrey County Council, but parents can contact them directly. The telephone number for the team covering Woking, Runnymede and Surrey Heath is 01483 518106 

I’ve also been involved with the Corporate Assessment / Joint Area Review which is an Ofsted-writ-large grading Surrey County Council as a whole, and also assessing Social Services, including those provided by other organisations,  across the County. 

I’ll come back to this later, along with the Beaufort Ofsted.

Issues that people have brought to me this month have included:

• Problems with road lights
• Concern about the quality of the provision of transport for children with Special Educational Needs - in brief, there is a code of conduct, and Surrey needs to be told if contractors do not keep to it!  We also need to be told if it is not adequate.
• I confirmed again that bus stops are the concern of Surrey County Council, but Bus Shelters ‘belong’ to the Borough Council. This is in the context of the bus shelter at the end of Nursery Road, which was accidentally demolished some time ago, I believe by a bus.
• I have found a School Governor for the currently open position in a Knaphill primary school - but if you are interested in this sort of voluntary work either here or anywhere in Surrey please contact me and I’ll put you in touch with Governor Services for more details. You can then, if you wish, fill in a form to let you be considered for vacancies as they come up. 

Concessionary Bus Passes: April the First came and went, and I haven’t yet heard the full outcome. Changes were being made up to the last moment - the press release that went out from Surrey immediately beforehand brought the news that all Boroughs and Districts except Surrey Heath had then decided to keep the 9.00 am start time, and drawn back from moving to 9.30. 

The problem with a web site is it goes stale. Looking at the report on Full Council a full eleven days ago is less inspiring now. Even for me.

Formal committee and Council meetings come around in a cycle; in between times there is a drift of meetings, information gathering, and ’casework’. So whenever there is nothing major to report back on, I’m going to bring together a number of these bits under the ‘I’m Still Here’ banner to give some account of what I am doing as a Councillor when not at Council meetings.

It will just be a taster - some things are confidential, some just too fiddly or tediously political to include.

Earlier in the week I visited one of Surrey’s childrens’ homes. County Councillors are in the strange and rather disconcerting position of being ‘corporate parents’ to Surrey’s Looked After Children, which is quite a responsibility.  I was impressed by the staff and the way these children were being cared for. I will come back to write about what we still need to do for Looked After Children fairly soon, but all is far from dark and gloomy.

The Knaphill Residents Association AGM was on Wednesday - a very well organised and well attended event. It was my week for residents’ meetings, because the next evening was the Goldsworth Park Community Association committee meeting - open to all residents of Goldsworth Park - at Goldwater Lodge.

Before the GPCA meeting was the ‘Police Panel’ meeting for Goldsworth Park, when the Neighbourhood Specialist Officer, PC Richard Martin, and his team of Police Community Support Officers held one of the regular open meetings with residents to discuss local issues. Some of the points made:

• There is a ‘Designated Public Place Order’ now in effect on Goldsworth Park (but not the immediate area of Waitrose) which allows the police to remove alcohol from anyone in that area - though they do say this doesn’t mean your wine will be confiscated if you decide to have a bottle with a picnic on the recreation ground.

• There has been a successful plain-clothes operation around the lake and shopping centre over half term. There were no arrests for anti-social behaviour, but a number of youngsters haved had their names and addresses taken, and some parents have been visited.

You can find more details of local policing on Goldsworth Park at:

 http://www.surrey.police.uk/neighbourhood.asp?area=WKGP

I’m also a member of the Management Committee of a Pupil Referral Unit, which had its termly meeting this week.   

Some other concerns

The bus-bollards in Knaphill are still playing up. I contacted SCC about this, the bollards  were mended, and I was told that the mechanism had been altered so that it should be less sensitive - but I notice they were down again today, and cars were driving through. I will follow up again.

Details of an over-large tree that Serco have not dealt with to the satisfaction of those living closest to it have been passed on one of the Borough Councillors to chase.

I am still looking for a Governor for one of the Primary Schools in Knaphill. This is because County Councillors have the opportunity to nominate ‘LEA Governors’ to the Governing Bodies of Community Schools on their ‘patch’. LEA Governors don’t need to have existing connections with that school, only the potential to be a good ’critical friend’ to the school, both supporting and, in the nicest possible way, holding to account the school’s management.

Governors with specialist skills and knowledge outside education can be very valuable. Someone with a good grasp of finance, or knowledge of building can help the Governing Body make better decisions. So can someone who will just sensibly and tactfully bring a fresh point of view into the school.  

If you live in the west of Woking and would be interested in finding out what being a School Governor involves, please contact me on 01483 871909