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Andrew Burns

Children & Families still as bad - eTeam a shambles.

By The Basa ⋅ May 28, 2007 ⋅

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It seems that things down Children & Families way are still as bad and corrupt as before the election. Maybe the new Executive Member, Marilyn MacLaren hasn’t had time to get her sleeves rolled up and start sorting it out with the new Director.

A problem that seems to have been bubbling up over the past few months is the newly formed eTeam - seemingly it should be renamed the meTeam.

There has been some movement in the ‘eTeam’. Ruth Johnstone, the ICT Manager for Education campaigned within the department to have three seconded members of staff made permanent and was successful. These three ‘teachers’ are now permanently part of the ICT support unit in education, or the eTeam as it is now known. However, even although they do not teach in a school and a permanently office based, they retain teachers terms and conditions of service, including holidays! At least two of the three men freely admit they applied for the secondment to get out of the classroom but were not prepared to resign and retrain as something else. Instead they wanted to keep the long holidays and over £40,000 salary and play with their computers. It is well known too that if they do training of other teachers, the standard is very poor.

The eTeam ran a ’successful’ event at Murrayfield this week called ‘e-Live’. It was successful in their eyes, even though most teachers in Edinburgh didn’t go along to it, despite the first of the two ‘e-Live’ days being on a day when there were no children in school. To celebrate the ’success’, Ruth Johnstone ICT Manager agreed that the team should be treated to a meal in Dusit restaurant in Thistle Street at a cost of over £600 of taxpayers money. Not only that, the restaurant is part owned by Len Timson who iuntil recently was a member of the eTeam. He is now on secondment to Corporate Services department and involved in the replacement for the disastrous email system in education which the Herald and Post recently referred to in an article on the taxi drivers outing for disabled children.

So it looks like not only jobs for the boys but we will pass the expenses on to the boys as well. We’ll keep you updated on this eTeam thingy especially as the ELLP/CityConnect fiasco has still not sorted out yet - maybe ‘New Statesman Nominated‘ Andrew Burns is the only one in the Council who has any idea about this newfangled IT stuff.