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Thursday, July 01, 2010
Councils
If anyone has a Council that isn't completely bonkers, could they please let me know so I can go and live there?
9 comments:
Fee
said...
Stay away from Edinburgh for the sake of your sanity.
Don't come to Sheffield either. The Council are re tarmacing the pavements whilst the potholes in the road just get yellow squares marked round them and left forever.
It's not lack of money that's the problem- it's lack of anybody in charge being bothered.
If you ever move to Moray I'll shoot you myself for the sake of your family. A council that wastes so much money, we have no budget eyt the HQ staff are getting brand new offices etc!
Don't come to Swindon the council has wasted money on a male public urinal and a non functioning WiFi system and chased the street traders out of the town centre. Yep they are bonkers all right!
Forget Bristol- we made the national press a couple of years ago when our council sent out leaflets to allotment holders advising them NOT to padlock their sheds in case the doors were damaged by burglers!
Come along now Mr Chalk. I can recognise a rhetorical question when I see one . . . . . . either stay in the UK and get a dog and a gun or emigrate to a sparsely populated country with a warmer climate and a decent health service
Don't come to Brighton and Hove. They're blocking us into our homes by stealth with ugly great communal bins. And it's like driving off-road when you're on 'em. AND they're forcing us to pay big whack residents' parking fees to 'save the environment' when they have a gasguzzler event on the seafront every bloody weekend. Then there's the Brighton Centre...
Aberdeenshire isn't too bad. Councillors and senior managers actually take notice of people, including mouthy loonies like myself who live in under-populated, low priority rural areas.
When I complained about the number of accidents on a bad bend, an inspector came out within a week and signage went up within a fortnight. When the budget permitted, within a year, remedial work was done to alleviate the worst of the problem.
When convoys of lorries transporting fill to a building site wrecked the unclassified side road that we live on, an inspector was out with 48 hours and the council is chasing the culprits to pay for repairs.
The Animal Welfare, Environmental Health and Planning officers I've dealt with have been decent. Some are a little over-focused on paperwork but they manage to avoid being petty fascists.
Education can be a bit loopy at times, speaking as both a parent and the husband of a secondary teacher. However, there are still enough sensible people scattered through the department to get things back on track. (And Aberdeenshire is far, far better than Aberdeen in this regard.)
The library service is poor, but I've not yet found a public library in the UK is anything close to good.
Of course, someone is bound to ask on what am I basing my comparison.
Well, in the UK I've experiences of North Yorkshire, Oxfordshire, Waltham Forest, and Lambeth councils. People should be able to guess which of those was worst. although two of the other three weren't too far behind.
Before that, I reported on local government, covering about half a dozen councils over the years.
9 comments:
Stay away from Edinburgh for the sake of your sanity.
Can you give an example of "bonkers"?
Don't come to Sheffield either. The Council are re tarmacing the pavements whilst the potholes in the road just get yellow squares marked round them and left forever.
It's not lack of money that's the problem- it's lack of anybody in charge being bothered.
If you ever move to Moray I'll shoot you myself for the sake of your family. A council that wastes so much money, we have no budget eyt the HQ staff are getting brand new offices etc!
Don't come to Swindon the council has wasted money on a male public urinal and a non functioning WiFi system and chased the street traders out of the town centre. Yep they are bonkers all right!
Forget Bristol- we made the national press a couple of years ago when our council sent out leaflets to allotment holders advising them NOT to padlock their sheds in case the doors were damaged by burglers!
Come along now Mr Chalk. I can recognise a rhetorical question when I see one . . . . . . either stay in the UK and get a dog and a gun or emigrate to a sparsely populated country with a warmer climate and a decent health service
Don't come to Brighton and Hove. They're blocking us into our homes by stealth with ugly great communal bins. And it's like driving off-road when you're on 'em. AND they're forcing us to pay big whack residents' parking fees to 'save the environment' when they have a gasguzzler event on the seafront every bloody weekend. Then there's the Brighton Centre...
Aberdeenshire isn't too bad. Councillors and senior managers actually take notice of people, including mouthy loonies like myself who live in under-populated, low priority rural areas.
When I complained about the number of accidents on a bad bend, an inspector came out within a week and signage went up within a fortnight. When the budget permitted, within a year, remedial work was done to alleviate the worst of the problem.
When convoys of lorries transporting fill to a building site wrecked the unclassified side road that we live on, an inspector was out with 48 hours and the council is chasing the culprits to pay for repairs.
The Animal Welfare, Environmental Health and Planning officers I've dealt with have been decent. Some are a little over-focused on paperwork but they manage to avoid being petty fascists.
Education can be a bit loopy at times, speaking as both a parent and the husband of a secondary teacher. However, there are still enough sensible people scattered through the department to get things back on track. (And Aberdeenshire is far, far better than Aberdeen in this regard.)
The library service is poor, but I've not yet found a public library in the UK is anything close to good.
Of course, someone is bound to ask on what am I basing my comparison.
Well, in the UK I've experiences of North Yorkshire, Oxfordshire, Waltham Forest, and Lambeth councils. People should be able to guess which of those was worst. although two of the other three weren't too far behind.
Before that, I reported on local government, covering about half a dozen councils over the years.
So I'm reasonably happy with Aberdeenshire.
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