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by Lib Dem team on 5 June, 2010
Samuel Linton tragically died following an Asthma attack at Offerton High School on 4th December 2007.
Stockport Council (which covers Offerton, for those reading this from outside the area) has been working to learn the lessons and work with schools to make sure a tragedy like this never happens again.
We discussed it at our Children and Young People’s Scrutiny Committee on Wednesday.
A new policy has been written. It includes good advice like the need for schools to phone an ambulance right away in a medical emergency, to ensure the paramedics can get to the child quickly and to have spares of things like inhalers held in the school office.
Training has been given. There have been two training sessions so far and 112 of Stockport’s 117 schools have attended.
Councillors were concerned that five schools hadn’t yet attended the training, with a couple suggesting they should be forced to.
That raised a challenging issue schools and local authorities are facing up and down the country: who’s in charge?
The answer is that the schools are in charge, pretty much. The Council simply doesn’t have the power to force schools to attend a particular training session- it’s all about partnership.
The really interesting, and challenging, question is how things will develop as we get more academies – as the Government is working for. Those academies may be completely divorced from the local authority.
To use this example, rather than the local authority working with schools to develop a new policy, give training and implement it, will every school develop their own? Or will schools buy in a policy and training from a private company? Or perhaps voluntarily come together to do the work?
It can certainly be done, but it’s not yet clear how it’s going to work when there are lots of academies (at the moment we just have one in Stockport) and it’s not clear whether the outcome will be better or worse than how things work now.
2 Comments
I guess that academies will sort out their training needs in the same way that independent schools have done for years. When I was teaching in a local independent school we used to have staff training sessions, usually instigated by the head/bursar/nurse/special needs dept.
More to the point, in a year or two will all new staff in the schools which have attended the training be brought up to speed?
Glyn – I hope it can work that way and cost no more than centralised training from the local authority – will be interesting to see.
For this training, each school sent one or two key members of staff, so I hope that they will pass on the key points to other staff members, both present and future.