The Education and Lifelong Learning Group

As the pace of change appears to accelerate and the number of new initiatives increases remorselessly you may gain, through the reading of this report, a sense of the challenge facing us and – hopefully - a sense of continuity and stability. A sense of progress too as the Group steadily increases its level of performance on several fronts.

New buildings have opened or are at an advanced stage of development in different parts of the County Borough and our capital programme, with its stretching horizon, has already identified new builds for the future. We continue, resolutely, to apply our scarce resources to those areas of the service in greatest need and there is an increasing appreciation of the importance of our Group’s services to economic and community regeneration. Standards of attainment in our schools continue to improve and more of our children in greatest need are benefiting from our increased investment in frontline services. Key services have been strengthened – fieldwork teams and the adoption service are good examples.

It was also pleasing to receive external confirmation of the quality of our services. Following the Wales Programme for Improvement reviews, most of our service units were deemed to be excellent followed closely by a smaller number considered “sound”. Our various external regulators consistently highlight an improving trend. Our largest single service – schools - is consistently receiving glowing reports. It is now unusual to receive a school inspection report where the term “very good” or “good” doesn’t predominate. All the staff in our schools deserve the highest praise as do those, centrally employed, whose main aim is to support the learning process.

2002/03 saw the long prophesied demographic change beginning to affect our youngest age groups. This phenomenon will demand courageous decisions similar to many taken over the last year.

The next few years will test our mettle. Can we make significant progress when resources are scarce? Of course we can! Working with and through our existing partnerships, sticking to our main priorities and insisting on being faithful to our values guarantees success.

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