Edinburgh Sucks! | MacLaren, stop listening to Fraudster Rosendale and listen to the experts

Children & Families

MacLaren, stop listening to Fraudster Rosendale and listen to the experts

By The Basa ⋅ September 10, 2007 ⋅

This is a message to the LibDem led administration. Below is a letter that was published in the Daily Telegraph today and signed by 270 professionals, academics and children’s writers. It is time for the LibDems who spent a large majority of the last Council when they were in opposition taking swipes at Fraudster Rosendale and the Children & Families department to clear house in the leadership of that department because you know that they sprinkle a very liberal amount of lies and that culture of lies has permeated down to the ground level in some circumstances. It is time to listen to the ‘experts’ of the country not the liars and fraudsters that are trying to rip the heart out of this city’s children at OUR expense.

When making plans on how to re-organise our children’s education, make sure it is not to the detriment of our children who are the future of this city. One would hope that you will have now realised that the gloves are off as far as the parents of the city are concerned - we realise that there must be a re-organisation of the schools but the document that you produced to support that, with your SNP cohorts, is typical of a piece of sh1t that would have been produced by the previous administration. You’re officials are pretty much buggering you with great gusto and you are accepting it. It is not what you were elected for. If that is what we wanted then the previous labour administration would have done fine. Even the inexperienced SNP councillors sat round speaking shyte for a few days then they started passing it uncontrollably when they looked into their crystal ball for 2011 and did what any sensible political group would do and run for the bloody hills

Let our children play

Sir – Since last September, when a group of professionals, academics and writers wrote to The Daily Telegraph expressing concern about the marked deterioration in children’s mental health, research evidence supporting this case has continued to mount.

Compelling examples have included Unicef’s alarming finding that Britain’s children are amongst the unhappiest in the developed world, and the children’s charity NCH’s report of an explosion in children’s clinically diagnosable mental health problems.

We believe that a key factor in this disturbing trend is the marked decline over the last 15 years in children’s play. Play – particularly outdoor, unstructured, loosely supervised play – appears to be vital to children’s all-round health and well-being.

It develops their physical coordination and control; provides opportunities for the first-hand experiences that underpin their understanding of and engagement with the world; facilitates social development (making and keeping friends, dealing with problems, working collaboratively); and cultivates creativity, imagination and emotional resilience. This includes the growth of self-reliance, independence and personal strategies for dealing with and integrating challenging or traumatic experiences.

Many features of modern life seem to have eroded children’s play. They include: increases in traffic that make even residential areas unsafe for children; the ready availability of sedentary, sometimes addictive screen-based entertainment; the aggressive marketing of over-elaborate, commercialised toys (which seem to inhibit rather than stimulate creative play); parental anxiety about “stranger danger”, meaning that children are increasingly kept indoors; a test-driven school and pre-school curriculum in which formal learning has substantially taken the place of free, unstructured play; and a more pervasive cultural anxiety which, when uncontained by the policy-making process, routinely contaminates the space needed for authentic play to flourish.

A year on, the signatories of the original letter to the Telegraph are joined by other concerned colleagues in calling for a wide-ranging and informed public dialogue about the intrinsic nature and value of play in children’s healthy development, and how we might ensure its place at the heart of twenty-first-century childhood.

See all 270 signatories of this letter

It is time for this city to get on track and if we are paying someone in excess of ₤50,000 let’s make sure they are earning it and if they are not then get rid of the dead wood and bring in people who can do the jobs. We will be bringing information to light very soon showing the total disregard members of the Children & Families department are showing their political leaders, local volunteers and the families of the city and it is nothing short of disgusting. It is also on your watch.

No city job should be safe if the employee of that city doesn’t do the best job possible for the people of the city who pay them.We understand you may have been left a sh1t situation by the people who have had their noses in the trough for years but you all said in your pre-electioneering that you could fix it. So bloody do it!