Building Schools for the Future - scrutiny to continue - Brooks

12.00.00am BST (GMT +0100) Thu 26th Oct 2006

Councillor Jeff Brooks, who chairs the Overview & Scrutiny Commission - the body that holds West Berkshire Council to account for its actions - has welcomed the news from Council Leader Graham Jones that he and the Education Portfolio holder have begun visiting West Berkshire's secondary schools as part of the Building Schools for the Future selection process.

West Berkshire Council will receive money from central Government to rebuild one of the district's secondary schools. The school will be selected by the Council's Executive at a special meeting in the near future.

Councillor Brooks commented:

"I am pleased to see the Leader of Council taking a more active role than we are perhaps used to seeing from him and I look forward to hearing back from him when he has completed his tour of West Berkshire's secondary schools. I am pleased to see that, belatedly, Councillor Jones is involving an outside consultant to ensure that the schools believe the process is transparent. I have yet to see any terms of reference for this consultant. In the meantime I will continue to scrutinise the selection procedure to date and gather more data."

Concerned by a decision to remove Building Schools for the Future from a recent Executive agenda, Councillor Brooks added:

"We are seeing important items hiked off the agenda of regular Executive meetings and needing to be pushed through 'Special' Executives, as urgent items. This is damaging to the council's relationship with the West Berkshire public, not to mention completely bypassing the Council's accountability mechanism".

Note to Editor:

Items designated 'urgent' and brought before a Special Executive are not subject to call-in, therefore the Overview and Scrutiny mechanism can be avoided.