Tuesday 9th June
Children’s Services Scrutiny Committee. 7pm, room 4B, which smells of old carpet and whatever they serve in the canteen on Tuesdays. I’d been doing deliveries until half five – nothing dramatic, no dhal incidents, though I did have a tense moment outside the Harvester when I recognised the bloke from the sorting office – so I was running on a sausage roll and goodwill.
I’d skimmed the papers on the bus. Eleven pages of acronyms I mostly couldn’t decode, a budget monitoring report, and something called an “EHCP Timeliness Update” which I assumed was good news on the basis that it had the word “update” in it, which usually means progress.
It does not mean progress. An update, in council language, means: here is why the thing that should have happened has not happened, formatted as a table.
There were eight of us round the table plus a council officer called Phil, who had the look of a man who has explained the same thing to seventeen successive committees and has decided this is simply his life now. The chair is a woman from the Lib Dems called Margaret, who runs the meeting with the crisp efficiency of someone who has read the papers and suspects nobody else has. She was right about that.
Phil talked us through it. EHCP – Education, Health and Care Plan – is the document a child with special needs is supposed to get, legally, within twenty weeks of assessment. Twenty weeks. In Mardon, the average is currently thirty-one. Across England it’s similar. The system is, in Phil’s careful language, “under significant pressure”. One of my colleagues, Kevin, asked if pressure could be reduced by “streamlining the assessment process.” Phil explained, gently, that the assessment process exists to make sure children get the right support. Kevin nodded as if this had answered his question. It had not answered his question.
I was, if I’m honest, drifting a bit. It was warm in 4B, and I’d been on my feet since two. Then Phil said something that brought me back. He said: currently in Mardon, there are forty-three children of compulsory school age with an EHCP who do not have a school place. They are educated – the phrase he used was EOTAS, Education Otherwise Than At School – at home, mostly by parents. The council provides what support it can, which Phil’s expression suggested was not enough.
Forty-three. I did what Sharon does. I sat there and I did the maths, except it wasn’t maths, it was just the number forty-three and me trying to understand what it meant as a thing rather than a figure on page seven.
I know what it means as a thing, actually. Not from this committee, but from the Crown. Dave – not someone I’d call a friend exactly, more a regular, one of the Friday crowd – has a grandson. Callum, seven years old, Down’s syndrome. Dave’s been on about the tribunal for months and I’d been half-listening, the way you half-listen to someone’s car trouble when you don’t drive the same model. Waiting lists. Assessments. The right placement, the nearest one being twenty miles away and the transport not being funded. Dave’s daughter doing paperwork at midnight. I’d been nodding and then forgetting, because it wasn’t mine to carry.
Sitting in 4B, I carried it for a minute.
Margaret asked if committee members had questions. Kevin asked about the streamlining again. Someone else asked about the budget variance on page nine. I didn’t ask anything, which Margaret probably logged as me not having read the papers, which is fair.
Came home at quarter past nine. Sharon had left me a plate. I told her about it – the forty-three, the twenty weeks that becomes thirty-one, Phil and his expression, Kevin’s streamlining. I told her about Dave and Callum, which she knew about already because Sharon actually listens when people tell her things.
She went quiet for a moment. Not her usual quiet – not the silence that means you’ve said something daft or I’m choosing not to engage with that. A different one. She asked me one question – what age does it start, the assessment – and when I told her anytime from birth really, she just nodded and took my plate to the kitchen.
More on that later.
Thursday 11th June
All my postings on local Reform groups asking for HGV work have achieved the square root of f*** all. I know it should be “ask not what the party can do for you, but what you can do for the party” but … yours truly is brassic, hacked off at not being able to make the changes I was voted in for, and the honeymoon is well and truly over.
So I asked Darren for a meeting, and he agreed to come to mine this morning, which we had to have at 10, before the lunchtime rush for fast food deliveries begins.
Once the coffees were made, we sat down.
I’d barely opened my mouth with my concerns, when Darren took over and I mentally crossed off on the bullshit bingo card a few expected phrases:
“Rome wasn’t built in a day”
“It’s a marathon, not a sprint”
“There’s a lot to get to grips with”
“We’re playing the long game”
and a few others.
Right now, it seems that the Party is focusing on the Makerfield by-election, and wants as little as possible “distraction” – Darren’s word – from local councillors. Since last month, nearly 100 have jumped ship – or been pushed – so it’s “keep calm and carry on” – yes, he actually said that, and I was half expecting him to say “live laugh love” for an encore.
“We’re depending on you, Mike,” Darren said, and for a moment I believed him, but then he got up to leave, doubtless to attend to his mobile that had been buzzing like a dying fly for the duration of the 20 minutes he felt I was worth. “Keep at it, old son, we expect great things.”
And he was off, and then my mobile told me that I had to get to McDonald’s before the breakfast service was over. The group WhatsApp is quiet nowadays, I think we’re all terrified of either saying the wrong thing or finding out that one of us already has – so for now, the delivery app is my true master. How did it come to this?
Next episode here >>> or you can see all episodes in ‘Mike’s Diary’ series
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