Trafford Council has not banned any child from any school trip

Cllr Matthew Colledge is Leader of Trafford Council and responds here to Nick Seaton's article yesterday suggesting that Trafford Council had banned middle class children from school trips.

May I respectfully suggest that Nick Seaton tries to get his facts right in future before writing items such as  ‘Trafford Council bans middle class children from school trips'.

One is tempted to say that with friends like this who needs the Opposition!  As the Leader of Trafford I can unequivocally say that at no stage has any child, from any background, been banned from taking school trips in favour of another child by my authority. 

In 24 of its schools Trafford is successfully running a government scheme that enables children from deprived backgrounds to access weekend and school holiday activities, such as football clubs, which are open to any child, regardless of their socio-economic background. Free school meal provision is being used as the easiest way of determining which children qualify for the scheme.

However, these activities are open to ALL children and children from ALL backgrounds are making use of them.  In Partington, an area classed as heavily deprived, an activity was quickly booked up by a rush of children from ‘deprived backgrounds’ coming forward to fill all the available spaces. With the activity over subscribed and therefore full other children, both with and without free school meal provision, were unable to take part – hence the origins of the story.

Trafford is trying to put on more activities to soak up the increased demand that this scheme has produced, so that as many children as possible can take part.  At no stage did anyone at anytime preclude or ‘ban’ any child from availing of an activity, it was simply a case of first come first served.

Turning Trafford around

Cllr Susan Williams, leader of Trafford Council, is proud of what she and her team have achieved. But they want the Government to leave them alone to get on with it.

In 2004, Trafford Metropolitan Council became Conservative controlled after 9 years of Labour control. In those years, it had gone from ‘Council of the year’ in 1999 to being judged as ‘weak’ by the audit commission by 2002. Before taking control of Trafford, we had done some extensive work with local residents to ascertain just what the top priorities were for them and this yielded no surprises- crime, education, improvements to roads and pavements and improvements to our town centres.

However, inheriting an organisation that had managed to go through £19m of reserves in 2 years, mainly to prop up overspends, was going to require some serious financial management from day one, both to be able to deliver on our priorities and to rid the organisation of the culture of mismanaging its budgets in driving forward the efficient delivery of services. Financial efficiency and management was the number one corporate objective for me, as without it nothing could be achieved. 

A rigorous system of budget monitoring was introduced very quickly, as was a review of senior management structure. As I saw it, there did not appear to be a structure in place and I therefore suspected that in terms of accountability, roles and responsibilities were probably ill defined. This turned out to be correct, as did my suspicion that there was no performance management or monitoring in place.