Our main points

The Forum wholeheartedly supports the flexible, inclusive service currently offered by Holmlea.

We shall attempt to briefly outline our objections to our proposal to provide you with an insight to our plight:

1. The Consultation period of six weeks appears rushed and does not give cognisis to the strength of feeling within the community.
2. The cost- savings given by the Council relate directly to the loss of the Teacher, and are flawed. The lost member of staff would require to be replaced by a CDO to maintain current staffing levels, at the cost of approx £16,000 per annum.
The lost member of staff would be redeployed within the region. The “adaptation costs” referred to in the Council document are not listed.
3. The Consultation Document attempts to justify the proposal in terms of extended hours of service and increased opportunity for working parents. In itself, this is superb. In reality, the admissions policy for child care in Glasgow essentially excludes a huge section of service users from eligibility to extended hours of service.
4. The majority of Merrylee Nursery Parents require core hours (2.5 hours per day), term time only, and therefore, the “distinguishing feature” of this proposal is not a service required by current users, and certainly does not present as an “educational benefit”.
5. Offering extended hours without increasing the space available or the staff numbers will reduce the actual number of children that can attend the nursery. This is in an area that currently has an under provision of nursery places.
6. Cutting the official links between the nursery and Merrylee school/OLA will compromise the move from nursery to local school. It is recognised that many of the children who use the Day Nursery do not come from the catchment area, and do not attend the local schools. This directly contradicts the Council’s 5 year plan to provide nursery places “within buggy-pushing distance”.
7. The two services (Holmlea and Merrylee) offer two very different services, and operate very different hours. The joining of the two will lead to disruption within the child’s day, loss of continuity of care, and compromise the current stability and quality of service currently provided by both establishments.
8. The loss of the teacher is most definitely not an educational benefit, and will reduce the quality of the service.
9. The reasons given for the merger are poor buildings, under occupancy, cost savings and to increase attainment of the children. All these are untrue and therefore there is no rationale behind the merger.

Our aim is to maintain the two services as they are, both benefitting from the new build environment, but running as two separate entities, and both served by the current cohort of staff. In other words, we do not oppose change per se but we ask the Council to revert to the original plan to ensure ALL children’s opportunities are maintained.

We have received significant support from Councillors within our constituency. Most significantly, perhaps, Baillie McInally has provided us with a written statement in which he agrees with our opposition. However, we are very concerned that, while local councillors may vote against the proposal for our Nursery Class, Labour Councillors from other areas may vote to pass it.

As you know education has always been a voting issue, and where people feel their children’s opportunities are compromised, they will very much make it a key decision in their voting. Councillors throughout the City will be judged at the next election not only on how they vote in April, but also on how effectively they lobby their fellow councillors to oppose the proposal for Merrylee Nursery, and the others threatened by these proposals.