Guy Kingston's Blog (5)

For the benefit of people new to the campaign, here's a bit of background info: There are two primary schools in Long Ashton: Birdwell and Northleaze. Each has a pupil capacity of 210, consisting of seven 30-pupil classes, one for each year group. Between them, the village schools can accept up to 60 Reception class pupils each year. However, in 2008 twenty three Long Ashton children were denied a Reception Class place in the village. This is a trend forecast to worsen over the next few… Continue

An email last week from a NS District Councillor commented: "Jeremy Blatchford's defence about the difficulties in predicting number for reception class seemed very weak. Generally, there are pretty good indicators from health data. ... "I was surprised to hear about the scale of the problem and surprised about the lack protest from your elected members." Continue

The Clevedon Mercury has also published a decent length piece today: Click Here. Cllr Blatchford is being very disingenuous. Whereas it may be technically true that so far only one child is being sent by taxi to Pill the fact remains that 23 children didn’t get a place in Long Ashton and are having to go to school elsewhere. These kids are still being transported… Continue

More press coverage - this time in the Evening Post: Click Here Please add a comment to the article - the more comments they get, the higher they will rank our story for future coverage. Guy Continue

On behalf of LASCG I spoke at a full meeting of North Somerset Council this evening. Rather than engage the council in a futile debate based on procedure, process, clauses and budgets I went for the human interest approach. You can find the text of my speech here. Continue