Councillor reply to letter

IN response to this week’s letter from Mrs Karen Goude (which I happened to spot on the website before the print edition is due.)

Mrs Goude’s letter is certainly a robust and valiant response to the article published by the Wisbech Standard last week. The only trouble is that Mrs Goude is responding to things that I have never actually said in the context in which they were helpfully published.

Mrs Goude castigates me because she thinks that I have “never actually read the Ofsted reports concerning the school.” In reply, I would point out that she has never actually read the origin of the comments that last week’s Wisbech Standard edition published, or the fairly extensive response I immediately posted on my blog to clarify once I saw how the newspaper planned to spin it. If she had, she would have been better informed as to the (in my humble opinion) misleading nature of the article.

I won’t drag the whole issue on again except to point out that I have never at any point said that Thomas Clarkson Community College is “failing” nor made any negative comment about the local school at all save that I did not presently plan to send my own son there. Which, as the kind lady rightly points out, is a decision my wife and I are perfectly entitled to take.

Most of the comments that the newspaper published were fished from an ongoing discussion which had moved to comments about education nationwide. When the two separate pieces of debate (posted on different days entirely) are stuck together they are misleading - perhaps because they make a more dramatic story that way? I’d invite Karen Goude to read my blog response, or to contact me and I’ll post her a copy. I’d also like to congratulate her on her new role as governor.

COUNCILLOR STEVE TIERNEY

Via e-mail