Short-term thinking is political opportunism
OVER three years ago the Liberal Democrats planned secretly to abolish three posts within the Sheffield City Council Tourism Department, as part of their potential budget suggestions.
This weekend thousands of visitor from India, and the Bollywood film industry, descend on our great city to celebrate the successes of such a fabulous film industry.
Imagine the chaos the city's Tourism Department would now be in dealing with this top prestigious world event, if Coun Scriven had had his way and had cut these posts, and further Tourism Department posts.
Again we see limited short term thinking being applied by the Liberal Democrats, to the important issue of our teenagers' education. We see political opportunism for the immediate issue, without thinking through what they are suggesting to a much bigger problem than just two secondary schools being merged in the North West of the city.
There are, in England, over 250,000 empty places in secondary schools.
Imagine you are a Head Teacher in a thousand place secondary school.
All the evidence points to the fact that within a couple of years your school is only going to be three quarters full. You'll lose 250 pupil places. Assuming each child is worth 3,000 to the school, your budget is going to be 750,000 lower.
Assuming the average cost of a teacher for a year is 30,000 this Head Teacher will have 25 fewer teachers in his/her school.
The reality is that by keeping these two schools open, both eventually, for economic reasons, will not be able to offer all the subjects at examination that they presently offer or have offered in the past when full.
Two schools merged on one site, with a new 25 million building and resources, fully staffed, full to overflowing with pupils, offers the best potential to our teenagers not the limited opportunist policies of a political party that has no discernable philosophy or real substantive policies.
Why does this city have the best basketball teams and ice hockey teams in the country? Our teams play in state of the art sports facilities.
Give people the best facilities and they perform to the level of the facilities.
Give Wisewood/Myers Grove a 25 milliom school building and our teenagers will perform to a higher level.
Coun Scriven think bigger than the immediate opportunist issue for the benefit of all our city teenagers.
Phil Proctor
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Weather for Sheffield
Saturday 26 May 2012
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Temperature: 9 C to 21 C
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