This Council meeting will be held virtually in order to conform with current guidelines regarding social distancing. Normally requests to speak at this public meeting are required by 9 am on the day preceding the published date of the meeting. However, during the current situation and to facilitate these new arrangements we are asking that requests to speak are submitted by no later than 9am four working days before the meeting i.e. 9 am on 7 July 2021. Requests to speak should be sent to Deborah.miller@oxfordshire.gov.uk together with a written statement of your presentation to ensure that if the technology fails then your views can still be taken into account. A written copy of your statement can be provided no later than 9 am 2 working days before the meeting.
Where a meeting is held virtually and the addressee is unable to participate virtually their written submission will be accepted.
Written submissions should be no longer than 1 A4 sheet.
Minutes:
Council received the following Petition and Public Address:
A Petition from Mr Canio Santoliquido requesting an urgent review of Oxfordshire County Council's Adult Social Care Contributions Policy.
Council referred the Petition to the Corporate Director Adults and Housing Services for response.
Ms Carole Thomson, spoke in relation to Agenda Item 10 (Review of Scrutiny Arrangements) as the Chair of the Oxfordshire Governors’ Association, OGA, which had been established in 1995, and useful to the council since then for liaison purposes and as a conduit for appointing governors to various consultative groups and panels, some statutory, others not, that had facilitated the work of the council.
From 1995 onwards apart from a short gap, the County Council recognised the Governors’ Association through a non-voting position on the Committee dealing with education. In 2001 legislation introduced Parent Governor representatives onto Scrutiny committees, whose role was to represent parents but not governors. In 2013, the committee dealing with education changed from Children’s Services to Education Scrutiny Committee, due to the high workload for the committee. She was therefore surprised at the proposed structure to have a single People committee with such a large area of responsibility, incorporating not only all of Children’s Services, but also adult services. Acknowledging that it was a decision for Council to make, she made the following points which she hoped would inform the discussion.
Alongside the Governors’ representation there had been a representative of the Council of Teachers’ Organisations’ or COTO on the Scrutiny committee with responsibility for education, this representation had provided useful information about the reality of working on the front line in a school. COTO believed that previous minutes had demonstrated that not only had this been an important part of the democratic process but had also ensured that all continued to work collectively for the best educational outcomes for our children.
The Committee had not been short of work or debate as an education specific committee and also she believed that constraints on officer time had created some challenges for the work of the committee, so she hoped the necessary support to help prioritise such a wide range of legal and moral responsibilities had been comprehensively considered in developing this proposal.
One amongst many major education challenges the council currently faced related to the High Needs Block of the Dedicated Schools Grant, which was neither balancing the books nor providing universally good levels of support for the Oxfordshire children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities, even before you considered the long term impact of the pandemic and the massive disruption to the education and well-being of children in schools across Oxfordshire.
She urged Council to ensure that whatever structures and committees were agreed, that the educational needs of the majority of children and young people were not overlooked in addressing the needs of the highly important, but relatively small groups of children that were particularly vulnerable.
In Annex 2 of the Additional Papers at Paragraph 3 there was reference to additional voting members of the committee, from which Councillors might assume that the role of COTO and OGA would seem superfluous. She pointed out that none of those roles have been filled in recent years, there had been no diocesan representative since May 2017. Similarly, there had not been a single parent governor representative for the past twelve years, apart from a short interlude of less than 18 months between 2016 and 2018. In practice it was always very difficult to find parents who could attend daytime meetings when they were already juggling domestic responsibilities and working lives, particularly as no mechanism existed for them to consult the parents they were supposed to represent. The academisation agenda has introduced additional challenges for the county council in meeting their responsibilities for all children and has reduced significantly the pool of potential parent governor candidates.
She urged the Council to consider continuing to invite Governors’ Association and COTO representation to relevant discussions that impact all of the schools in Oxfordshire.