I sat down to lunch half an hour ago and found a document on the dining room table - '21st Century Schools Engagement Document 2014: Four Wards' published by Cardiff Council. Rightly or wrongly this document has annoyed me. Perhaps I would have been better off finding some alternative reading material for lunchtime.
It seems to me, based on my 10 min flick through, to be a waste of time, energy and money. It is asking for feedback on potential school sites from the public. Several issues spring to mind with this process/ document but I'm principally annoyed, I think, because the document asks for feedback but does not contain the primary information that should inform the decision making process with regard to the location of the schooling facilities, namely the actual and anticipated geographical distribution of the children who will attend the school(s) and allied proposed catchment areas, which also needs to be informed by knowledge of the current facilities in place in the areas under consideration. Without this fuller information how can anyone express an informed opinion as regards possible locations?
Further, why involve the public at this stage and/ or in this way. The document is next to useless in its current form. What are the council's recommendations based on what should be their extensive experience, knowledge and research regarding each of the proposed sites and which option, in combination with other plans for primary education in Cardiff, also notably absent from the document, do they recommend and why? What is the point of asking the public what they think at this juncture when they do not been given the necessary information and guidance to allow any form of sensible decision to be concluded? Cart before the horse?
What I would be particularly keen to avoid are the mistakes made by the council in primary education in recent years - namely the situation with Ysgol Treganna which took (getting on for) 10 years to resolve.
In terms of my response to the council based on the scarcity of pertinent information in the document: I don’t really care where the schools are as long as they best meet the full requirements of primary education in Cardiff for now and the foreseeable future (which aren’t presented in the document as far as I can see).
It's a bank holiday weekend. The rest of the family are away. It's raining. My "To Do" list includes writing some blog posts and catching up with my Welsh studies so why not combine the two?
The vague plan is to write lots of Welsh learners content as a means of revising/ studying over the (long) summer holiday break after my current course has finished and also link this into a side project of mine (dysgwyr.co.uk). We'll see. Let's at least make a step in that general direction. I'm about to finish Cwrs Uwch 1 as delivered by Welsh for Adults of Cardiff University and I've been typing up my notes semi-regularly and plan to share in case they are useful to the wider community of Welsh learners. This will include vocab from each unit. This will normally be a subset of the vocab as presented at the end of each unit, the subset I thought at the time was not sufficiently secure in my memory.
I will add these vocab sets to Quizlet, to extend the similar, useful Welsh resources others have already submitted to the database.
I have lots of vague plans, however; we'll see how many come to fruition.
Anyway, Uned 1 ...