Inaccurate And Misleading ? - Gwynedd Council - Ysgol Abersoch

Cyngor Gwynedd Council's Education and Economy Scrutiny Committee met on 21/10/21 to discuss the closure of Ysgol Abersoch. The decision to close the small school in December has caused much tension between locals and the council.

Concerns have been raised that the majority of the consultation process has happened during the Covid19 pandemic and that the council's report was inaccurate and misleading...

The Cabinet Member for Education, Cemlyn Williams, is confident the process has been fair.
Can the same be said of other processes the Ed department has been involved with ? Are critical reports being sat on by this department, too ?

With the meeting going nowhere, Councillor Judith Humphreys proposed sending the matter back to the Cabinet.  This did not go down well and an amendment was raised by Dewi Roberts, Councillor for Abersoch, who asked for the matter to go before full Council to hear the views of all Councillors.

Things then became a little surreal. During the vote on referring the matter to full council - one lay member seemed to freeze and stated she did not know what to do and asked for help. Democratic services had to intervene saying she could not be advised how to vote. The lay member voted against referring to full council and the amendment fell by the one vote.

The proposal to send the matter back to Cabinet - from whence it came - was passed.

The webcast of the meeting can be found here - https://gwynedd.public-i.tv/core/portal/webcast_interactive/610141

 

 

 

 

Cyngor Gwynedd Council CEO Apologises For Children's Services.

In June 2019, we received a letter of apology from Dilwyn O Williams, Chief Executive of Cyngor Gwynedd Council.

Mr Williams confirms the department has accepted the recommendations as stated in the Ombudsman's 2019 report.

He then apologises to us all as "a family on behalf of Gwynedd council for all the failings that have been noted within the Ombudsman's report". 

He goes on to apologise on behalf of the Children's department for the delay in providing a response to our complaint.

Mr Williams then apologises on behalf of a senior manager. He writes that the officer has asked for "his sincerest apologies to be passed to us as a family and his reassurance that this was not his intention to offend you as a family".

The Chief Executive adds - "Furthermore, I would also like to apologise for the failure to review *the* Child In Need plan" and ends asking for acceptance of "this sincere apology."


The letter is short and gives no detail of the failings of the children's department and its complaints department. Nor does it mention the behaviour of the senior managers in their treatment of the Independent Investigator in order to whitewash and sanitise the final, final Report.

Now a month later the CEO was in attendance at the Cabinet meeting of the 23rd July, 2019.
This meeting was to receive the Children and Family's Annual Complaints Handling Report, authored by Marian Parry Hughes. Mrs Hughes report contains anoma lies just like the last report (and the one before that and the one before that) but that is for another post.

The Cabinet member with responsibility for the Children's SS department, Dilwyn Morgan, had been sent a copy of the Ombudsman's report for his attention and consideration in June but at the time of writing has not replied. Nor did he attend this meeting where he should have presented the Report.

The Chief Executive made no mention of his letter of apology to the meeting nor did he reference the Ombudsman's report. He did make reference to the Ombudsman on a couple of occasions but not in regard to the report.

The meeting can be viewed here -
https://gwynedd.public-i.tv/core/portal/webcast_interactive/434961
(Copy and paste the address into your browser)

As I write there is a problem with the english translation feed so it is only available in welsh but I am confident that this will be fixed shortly.