I’ve been a bit busy for the last couple of days with work, but while I have, a blistering post seems to have slipped under the radar from the best blogger in Walsall, The Plastic Hippo. Walsall folk will be aware (unless they’ve been living under a rock) that the Children’s Services department of Walsall Council has had a tatering from Ofsted, branding the department as ‘inadequate’, leading to resignations, recriminations, and a whole shower of bullshit from Walsall’s political class.
The Express & Star consequently suffered journalistic incontinence all round after finding out that the replacement head of department is costing ‘£1000 a day’, including a fat commission for a recruitment agency. Sadly, in all the backslapping over its investigative journalism triumph (well, they had to get one right eventually, by the law of averages) and the tawdry finger pointing from the opposition, it’s taken the leading light of Walsall’s online community to actually do some investigation into the quality of the head of department’s replacement – which makes grim reading.
So, to get this straight; the local press stopped looking at the issue once they’d scored the magic cost figure, and the opposition Labour group would rather nitpick, fingerpoint and continue their bickering with independents. Meanwhile, it takes an amateur blogger recently back off his holidays to ask the really important questions.
Welcome back to the Walsall Council reality distortion field. If you care about Walsall, please read this.
If you read nothing else this week, please, just read this. Blistering. Click on the screen shot to visit the Hippo’s blog and read the original.