New additional needs school - destruction of Auchenharvie playing fields
Posted: Fri Sep 30, 2016 5:33 pm
North Ayrshire Council hope to build a new school for children with additional needs, which will replace the various additional needs schools dotted around the local area. If this represents an improvement in the quality of education and care received by additional needs pupils, then I applaud the Council for deciding to spend more money this way (OK, they’re not actually spending more money, because the Council admits that the centralisation of the various additional needs schools will result in the Council spending hundreds of thousand of pounds less on additional needs children!).
This new school is going to be built, it’s just a question of where. NAC had originally identified 10 possible locations for the school, but they decided, without proper public consultation, to choose ‘Auchenharvie’ as the location. Various employees of the Council have been explicit about the fact that the school is planned for the PLAYINGFIELDS at Auchenharvie. Officially, the Council is pretending not to know where at Auchenharvie the school will be built. This pretence is presumably designed to rob the community of the chance to object early and effectively to the destruction of their town’s sporting facilities.
Another unfortunate tactic they’ve used to discourage the community from objecting to locating the new build on playing fields is to ask a ridiculously leading consultation question. They ask:
‘It is proposed that a new Additional Support Needs School (for children and young people aged 2-18 years) be built, at a site, adjacent to Auchenharvie Academy, Saltcoats Road, Stevenston. Do you agree with the above proposal?’
Instead, there are really two questions that they should be asking: 1) do you think a new additional needs school should be built and 2) should we build it on playingfields in Stevenston. They’ve purposefully conflated the two questions to make it difficult for the community to object to their playing fields being developed. That is, the Council has implicitly framed the whole consultation as a discussion on whether a new additional needs school should be built (a proposition everyone would agree with). In reality, it’s simply a debate about whether a new school should be built on playingfields or a new school should be built in a different, more socially sensitive location (after all, there are 9 other suitable sites for the school identified by the Council).
This is statistically one of most deprived areas in Scotland, North Ayrshire has more obese kids than anywhere else in Scotland and North Ayrshire is consistently identified by empirical research as having the worst quality of life in UK. Destroying sporting facilities in such an area is just perverse. And the particularly sickening thing is that destroying community playing fields is in large part just a way for the Council to save money (they own the land already, so they don’t need to buy it before building the school).
The online consultation runs until 4th November. By ticking a box, those who support the school being built on the playing fields at Auchenharvie can ‘agree’ and those who support it being built elsewhere can ‘disagree’. A small ‘comments’ box is provided if respondents want to elaborate on their response.
http://www.north-ayrshire.gov.uk/counci ... ision.aspx
This new school is going to be built, it’s just a question of where. NAC had originally identified 10 possible locations for the school, but they decided, without proper public consultation, to choose ‘Auchenharvie’ as the location. Various employees of the Council have been explicit about the fact that the school is planned for the PLAYINGFIELDS at Auchenharvie. Officially, the Council is pretending not to know where at Auchenharvie the school will be built. This pretence is presumably designed to rob the community of the chance to object early and effectively to the destruction of their town’s sporting facilities.
Another unfortunate tactic they’ve used to discourage the community from objecting to locating the new build on playing fields is to ask a ridiculously leading consultation question. They ask:
‘It is proposed that a new Additional Support Needs School (for children and young people aged 2-18 years) be built, at a site, adjacent to Auchenharvie Academy, Saltcoats Road, Stevenston. Do you agree with the above proposal?’
Instead, there are really two questions that they should be asking: 1) do you think a new additional needs school should be built and 2) should we build it on playingfields in Stevenston. They’ve purposefully conflated the two questions to make it difficult for the community to object to their playing fields being developed. That is, the Council has implicitly framed the whole consultation as a discussion on whether a new additional needs school should be built (a proposition everyone would agree with). In reality, it’s simply a debate about whether a new school should be built on playingfields or a new school should be built in a different, more socially sensitive location (after all, there are 9 other suitable sites for the school identified by the Council).
This is statistically one of most deprived areas in Scotland, North Ayrshire has more obese kids than anywhere else in Scotland and North Ayrshire is consistently identified by empirical research as having the worst quality of life in UK. Destroying sporting facilities in such an area is just perverse. And the particularly sickening thing is that destroying community playing fields is in large part just a way for the Council to save money (they own the land already, so they don’t need to buy it before building the school).
The online consultation runs until 4th November. By ticking a box, those who support the school being built on the playing fields at Auchenharvie can ‘agree’ and those who support it being built elsewhere can ‘disagree’. A small ‘comments’ box is provided if respondents want to elaborate on their response.
http://www.north-ayrshire.gov.uk/counci ... ision.aspx