Author Archives: Cambridge Town Owl

Quite a turn-around given over a decade ago I was urging organisations to make use of all things online. But with new and revamped community centres opening, how can we ensure they are used in the midst of our cost of living crisis? Especially if social media reach is much more limited than before? ThisContinue reading “Will we see more door-to-door leafleting by local campaign groups as social media fragments?”

…But is is the job of The Government to ensure that local councils and other responsible bodies are properly funded to carry out the necessary maintenance. On that front, ministers haven’t just failed. Because failure implies making an effort to try and succeed in a task. And I’m not seeing nearly enough evidence of that.Continue reading ““It is not the job of the Dept for Education to maintain school buildings…””

The Care Quality Commission graded maternity services as requiring improvement in the face of understaffing – but ministers are preventing the hospitals and local government from dealing with those problems by maintaining restrictions on local taxation and a broken structure of governance See the headlines here. You’ll have seen the headlines in the national newsContinue reading “Addenbrooke’s and The Rosie are facing challenges they have no powers to deal with”

How do you familiarise very busy local residents with how their town/city functions when they don’t have time to engage in consultation events or workshops? I needed to get out of the house earlier this evening so went for a short wander as the shadows started lengthening and bumped into one of my local councillorsContinue reading “Bitesize briefings for busy burgesses?”

Trying to prevent more taxpayer-funded research from gathering digital dust in a forgotten corner of the internet I’ll try and keep this short because all-day brainfog which may mean I have to cry off the Stourbridge Fair later. This follows on from my own proposed local pilot workshops in that I want to see howContinue reading “The Citizens’ Curriculum – a forgotten Government pilot scheme?”

I’ve got to the stage where I’m just going to go for it, see who turns up, see what they say, and see what the feedback is. If you browse through my blog and the entries of the past few months you’ll have seen a lot of talk about citizenship and democracy learning. This nextContinue reading “Pilot workshops: Cambridge – how our city functions”

Listening to a local primary school teacher earlier today – someone who has known me since I was a toddler, I found out that Cambridgeshire is doing great things on all things citizenship and PSHE at primary school level. Yet this hasn’t fed through into GCSE citizenship entries. What’s missing? In 2022 only 145 entriesContinue reading “How can Cambridgeshire libraries support democracy-learning? And how can we support our libraries?”

The papers for the CPCA’s Skills & Employment Committee meeting have been released – and there are a host of questions that arise from the papers linked to my blogposts over this summer. But as the standing orders only allow one question per person, I’m inviting readers living in Cambridgeshire & Peterborough to pick upContinue reading “Public questions to the Combined Authority on adult education & lifelong learning – can you help?”

Attempts to educate the general public on ‘citizenship’ from a central government perspective are doomed to fail – especially if it doesn’t help people solve local and day-to-day problems. That’s my take-away from the social and contemporary historical reading around the subject area. Of which I’ve done more than is sensible. But it’s in myContinue reading ““Citizenship? Sound’s great! What’s for tea?””

I’m not going to go into detail on this because I made my point at the local elections in 2023. But for those of you who are following developments… See the Cambridge Independent at: There are over 500 pages of papers to read Which is why in my previous blogpost I made the point aboutContinue reading “Cambridge road user charge becomes peak-time C-charge as inflation hits other GCP projects”