County Council Cutting Transport Services for Children with Learning Disabilities

I was approached by a parent of a girl with learning disabilities who had been advised that his daughter had been chosen for change in the transport service to school. The child attended the Beehive Centre and currently has a school bus pick her up from home and drop her back at home at the end of the day. The new proposal seeks to pick children up for a point that may be a mile away. Initially the proposal identified children in year 7 who had only just started school and some wheelchair user children. These actions led many parents to believe that no proper individual assessment of children's needs had taken place for the scheme.

The proposal is to implement this by 4th November at a point when pick up and drop off will be heading to darkness. This rushed timescale creates real difficulties for parents who have to work really hard to try and get some of these very vulnerable children into a change of routine.

I am arging all parents who are in this situation to make a request for reasonable adjustments. You can do so using a template email here. This will preserve rights under the Equality Act. Reasonable adjustments do not have to be considered if they have not been requested. If they have been requested, those making the decisions are obliged  to consider them and would need to evidence that process used to make the decision as to why the request has been grated or refused in the event of any challenge.

If you haven't done so already please sign this petition to try and get the council to reconsider this plan.

Race to the top - we're concerned - should you be?

It's over two weeks since I and the Chair of Weelingborough Black Consortium wrote to the Chief Executive of Northamptonshire County Council  about our concerns about the consultation on improving educational achievement, "Race to the Top". It's disappointing that there's been no response.

They appear to make statements comparing free school meal (FSM) with non-FSM kids (p. 3) and then leap to talking about specific groups within that – white ‘working class’ boys and looked after (p. 6).

There is no evidence that white FSM are the lowest achievers in the area. Nationally Gypsy/Roma are the lowest achievers, even if you only look at FSM kids. FSM is very misleading when described as ‘working class’. Most working class people do not qualify for free school meals.

Senior academics in this field, Professor David Gillborn, Dr Nicola Rollock, Dr Paul Warmington (University of
Birmingham) & Sean Demack (Sheffield Hallam University) present the following analysis:

"The best available data demonstrate clearly that working class pupils, in all ethnic groups, achieve less well on average than their middle class peers. However, the current debate is skewed by a focus on the smaller inequalities of achievement between working class children in different ethnic groups. The broad image of ‘White working class’ failure reported by many commentators is based on data that describe the low average
attainments of those in receipt of free school meals (FSM). This is a crude indicator of family poverty and does not capture the everyday meaning of ‘working class’: most people who think of themselves as ‘working class’ would not be placed within the FSM group in educational statistics."

The County Councils own Equality Duty Report for 2014 states: "Most ethnic groups results track just below national averages when compared to national results by ethnicity. Exceptions to this include ‘Pakistani’, ‘Indian’, ‘Other-Black’ and ‘Mixed: Black/ White African’ where results indicate these groups are achieving slightly above the national comparator" and graphs show that national trend that demonstrate lower acheivement for African caribbean, Somali, and Gypsy/Roma/Irish Traveller pupils, is clearly present in Northamptonshire.

When the County Council is publishing evidence which contradicts the proposals in the consultation document questions have to be asked as to why this approach has been taken. For freedom of information requests it is clear that no Equality Impact Assessment took place and this consultation was conspicuous by it's lack of engagement with Black communities in Northamptonshire where had these proposals had clear evidence this could be presented and the proposals justified.

If you feel strongly about this please sign the petition on the matter here

Zero Hours Contracts

 

"What are zero hours contracts?" asked someone at the Northampton Borough Council Diverse Communities Forum.

Despite the media storm over the past couple of days, it still seem that people don't necessarily notice how badly exploited those desperate for work can get.

Where I work zero hours contracts have been an issue to giving advice on discrimination for the past four years or so. In the past if a company offered work but said that they couldn't commit to how many hours they could give, applicants would perhaps take the role but look for something a lot better pretty quick. With little availability of fixed hours for people with little skills or little experience in particular in retail, service and logistics zero hours contracts are the only option for many. For those on benefits it presents a descent into revising and re-revising claims that can take weeks to process leaving a trail of debts and payday loans along the way. It offers no security and presents a situation where employees are hanging on a string.

My daughter worked for Sport Direct on a zero hours contract last year. Assigned a 6am to 10am shift, she was often asked to stay until 4pm or 6pm at in the evening. People feel obliged to say yes because they fear the work drying up. This will always place people with caring responsibilities or those disabled people who need more flexible working environments for them at a disadvantage.

Most crucially, zero hours contracts can hide a multitude of poor employer behaviour. A few weeks ago Magda and her husband Chris came into the office. Magda worked for a company that provided cleaner for local hotels. When Magda applied for and got her job, both she and Chris were pleased that it wasn't agency work and that it came with a written contract. Magda had a history of ill health and so had asked for lighter duties as reasonable adjustment which her manager agreed to. Every week Magda would get a call advising her of the shifts that she should undertake. Although lighter duties were given in the first few weeks, after a while Magda found herself being asked to do more and more heavy work, until one day she fell ill after her shift. She was taken to hospital where she was told that she had suffered a miscarriage. Although, she didn't know that she was pregnant this came as a big emotional blow to Magda and Chris. Chris called her manager and told him what had happened and re-stated his wife's need for light duties. It was agreed that Madga should be assigned to a different hotel where this was possible. She was working with a new team and after a few days another member of staff came into a room where she was cleaning and said that the rest of the team had noticed that she was only being given light duties and felt that she was being treated this way because she was Ukrainian. The woman that said this to Magda was White British and she said that the other team members would be setting up a campaign to get her out. Magda went into another room and called her manager who told her not to worry and that he would sort it out. Magda left her shift that day upset about what had happened. Then suddenly, she no longer received calls advising her of the hours to work. When Magda asked her manager about this he just advised that there was no more work for her. Magda and Chris came to Northamptonshire Rights and Equality Council for advice and brought in the Magda's contract. They read thorough the contract and said, that surely something could be done as it didn't state that it was a zero hours contract. However since it didn't state any hour in the contract there was not obligation for her employer to give her hours given that she was not given the same consistent number of hours over a period of time.

It's clear in this situation and in many others that we have seen that zero hours contracts is a key safeguard to employer who either wish to discriminate or support others who discriminate as happened with Magda.

Magda and Chris's names have been changed to protect their confidentiality.

In the fast lane with a whole load of crashes around

I was presenting a statement signed by about a dozen Black and minority ethnic groups and 80 individuals at the Northampton Borough Council Overview and Scrutiny Panel tonight. The statement was developed by Voice 4 Change with input from NREC and Council for Ethnic Minorities. The first shocking thing about the experience was the paucity of Councillors in attendance. Although the weather was dire it was traversable and clearly myself and several other members of the public had made the trip out. Having elected Councillors the least that they can do it to actually turn up and represent you or in this case listen to you.
The statement was not news. It was basically the articulation of the frustration that many Black groups have had with not achieving any resource from Northampton Borough Council. The Council’s position is that the applications made by the Black and minority ethnic organisations were simply not robust enough to get through the scoring framework. One could argue a very similar argument used by 21 Oxbridge Colleges here.
The other big news is about the cuts released by the County Council so far but so far very little detail exists on what this means for specific communities. It’s all very well stating that bus route subsidies will have to be re-negotiated but to look at this effectively with an equalities eye, it is really important to identify which ones we are actually talking about and which communities that they actually serve. In the mean time things that were seen as important for vulnerable members of the community now seem to be put on hold