3 June 2011

At last I have received a reply from my local MP, The Rt.. Hon. Sir Alan Hazlehurst, re. my idea for a nationwide scheme of one-to-one mentoring for children from deprived families. (See my letters to the Deputy Speaker of the House Of Commons, Sir Alan Haselhurst and The Prime Minister, 11 February 2011 entry) Quite rightly, Sir Alan passed my letter to the Secretary of State in the Ministry of Education and receives a long letter from Minister, Michael Gove. Sadly, he or his PA, totally missed the point.

Whilst agreeing with me that monitoring is a a powerful tool to help young people understand the world of work and the opportunities available to them, this minister referred me to the Education and Employers Task Force which the government recently announced as their Social Mobility Strategy. This Task Force,, amongst other things, is already developing Robert Heston’s, the BBC’s Business Editor’s Speaker for Schools programme, and Mr Gove suggests that I might consider becoming one of these speakers.

As I said to Sir Alan, although this in itself may well be a good initiative, it completely misses the point of my idea and frankly I cannot see a great deal of sense in me putting my name forward as a speaker to the group of local school kids who are probably already reasonably well-educated and motivated. So I may have one final attempt, by contacting this Task Force, to see if I can get them interested in my idea but I will not hold my breath fce a successful outcome.

A quiet day after the excitement of the children’s recent visit is and ‘my lovely’s’ birthday celebrations. Incidentally, I forgot to mention that the three grandchildren, accompanied by their parents, I imagine from their campsite, gathered round a mobile phone and all sang happy birthday to granny on the day itself. All very touching I wonder what the grandchildren will now call granny, obviously no longer’ ‘granny donkey’ now that Mouse, the donkey, has departed this world.

At last I have managed to find out where our Continuing Care application has gone to. Not from the district nurses who I have I rang up consistently over the past two or three weeks, without response, but by going direct to the person at West Essex PCT who is processing the application. Apparently there were problems with the paperwork which was not completed as required. The lady responsible for my case is hoping that she will shortly be in possession of the last piece of paperwork and that the case can be considered towards the end of this week. The only problem from our point of view is that it is now a number of weeks since the assessment was carried out and there is no doubt that I have deteriorated substantially in the meantime. So if we get turned down we may have no choice but to appeal. I have asked West Essex PCT to send me a copy of the regulations showing what the criteria is for eligibility for Continuing Care which they have kindly agreed to do. In the meantime we struggle on using our own resources.