KIRKLEES Council is proposing to cut the already sparse educational opportunities for children with special needs.

If these proposals are accepted, there will be 20 fewer places in special schools, and 56 children with problems in mainstream schools will have their essential support taken away.

This is a perverse and unjust proposal and should be reversed before it can do any damage.

Families of children with special educational needs have to fight every step of the way to get a suitable education for their children.

They have to fight a reluctant education department to get their child’s needs recognised, then they have a further fight to get them assessed.

This proposal would mean that more children will be left struggling in class and more teachers left frustrated because they are unable to cope with providing extra help to some children.

The cumulative effect of this will be misery for everyone involved. The hopes of parents who are currently worried about their child’s problems in school and who are seeking help will be dashed.

At a time when people’s jobs and livelihoods are being lost, a 3½ – 4% cut in special educational needs provision may seem, on paper, a reasonable sacrifice to make. No doubt Cabinet members will use this argument.

We are all experiencing a national crisis but we are not all bearing a fair share of the burden.

All schools have been affected by cuts including children with problems. To target them a second time is, in my view, clear discrimination. Councillors should take notice of a growing public resentment against injustice and try to carry the electorate with them.

Vulnerable groups like disabled children make tempting targets for politicians.

All councillors, including both the public spirited and the self-serving, respond to any threat to their council places.

During the period of consultation parents, family and friends of children with special educational needs could let it be known that their voting choices at the next election will depend on councillors rejecting the present proposals.

Send a message to your councillors and hope that conscience and integrity will win over the party whips.

Ernest Potter

Lindley

Second rate country

ALAN Brooke suggests that we have no choice but to come out of the EU (Mailbag, December 9).

If there was any arrogance at the summit last week it came from David Cameron and not Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy. I was embarrassed by his antics.

Cameron has jeopardised our manufacturing industries just so that he could appease his Euro-sceptic party members and look after his friends in the City.

You can only wonder what the other leaders in Europe must think of us.

David Cameron has turned his back on Europe when we should be at the centre making new policy. He should be speaking up for our interests. This is the only way that we can get the most out of Europe.

You have to ask yourself why it’s the members of the Conservative party, the Tory press and their friends in the City who are pleased with this deal and want us out of EU.

They want less regulation from Europe so they can make us work longer for less with smaller pensions.

Europe will come out of this crisis stronger and fitter, and we will be a second rate country isolated and looking on from the side lines.

Seventy years ago we had a Prime Minister who had the courage and the vision to intervene in Europe when they most needed our help, and that, Mr Cameron, is what I call the Bull Dog Spirit. It’s nothing to do with turning your back and walking away from our friends in Europe.

TB

Cumberworth

New way of thinking

THE problem with the European Union is that if it ever gets its act together – and the signs are against this – it will take decades for a real sustainable EU to emerge.

Therefore I believe that David Cameron has done the right thing for the time being in keeping us out of these uncharted waters.

Indeed it is about time that the UK started to find its way again in life and lead by example, not in the slipstream of a non-innovative strait-jacketed EU.

We have time now, therefore, over the next decade to really study our future on the periphery of the EU.

But whatever thoughts emerge in terms of a future national development strategy, a high technology export-led future economy must be our priority.

The City (of London) has to be totally behind this. Shuffling money around will not be enough, because the City will be steadily marginalised with Frankfurt taking an ever larger slice of the action.

As it does so, more British institutions will have no alternative but to move out and to the new economic centre of the universe, South-East Asia.

Now is the time to start completely overhauling our economy, setting it on foundations of technological supremacy.

We have the brains to do it. Do we have the will? And will the City get behind us?

Dr David Hill

World Innovation Foundation, Golcar

Easy pickings!

COULD we have the camera van travel up and down Clement Street in Birkby not just Blacker Road, preferably morning and evening for at least a month?

I feel sure Clement Street is where the most money in fines will be made. A little gold mine for Kirklees Council!

We take my grandchild on foot via Clement Street as do the many other parents each morning.

We watch parents bringing their children in cars and they will sometimes park literally in the middle of the road to chuck their children out, because they are too lazy to park 200yds away and walk up.

The teaching staff can only do so much to police this notoriously bad area.

I have a bone to pick with the camera van: as a disabled family we use taxis quite a lot to go into town.

The problem for us and other pre-book taxi users is getting acute. Most of our drivers are great and try their best to drop us and pick us up wherever they can, but they live in fear of the dreaded camera van. Just one £30 fine can neutralise an entire day’s work.

What we need are designated pick up/drop off points in various streets of the town centre, where taxis are guaranteed not to get fined.

Apart from this I am camera van friendly and think it is the best thing since sliced bread.

As a postscript might I suggest a zebra crossing or at least an island on St John’s Road opposite the mouth of the snicket and near the cafe, where a great many parents and children going to Birkby Infant and Nursery School have to take their lives in their hands to get over the road safely?

Bruce Hanson

Birkby

Still overcrowded

IN A recent Examiner, Dewsbury MP Simon Reevell welcomed the news that there will be more carriages on the Leeds to Manchester Northern Rail route which runs through Huddersfield.

If Mr Reevell used the chronically overcrowded trains that link Leeds and Manchester via Huddersfield he would know that these trains are operated solely by Trans Pennine Express who are to receive no extra carriages but must soldier on with their two- and three-coach trains, as the Ministry of Transport will not authorise extra carriages for this route.

Although Northern Rail does operate hourly stopping trains starting from Huddersfield to both Leeds and Manchester, they do not run through.

Most of the 60 extra carriages are being allocated to the Airedale and Wharfedale lines which already have four coach trains, and these generally do not suffer from overcrowding.

Overcrowding is not just a problem at peak periods but extends well into the evening.

Indeed recently I could not board a train on a Sunday evening at Leeds to travel to Huddersfield because the train was packed out ‘Japanese style’.

I suggest Mr Reevell takes a leaf out of his colleague’s book and like Colne Valley MP Jason McCartney go sample the potentially dangerous and chronically overcrowded trains.

If he did, no doubt he would lobby for more carriages for the Leeds to Manchester via Huddersfield route.

Trevor Briggs

Scapegoat Hill

Banner mystery

I WONDER if anyone can help solve the mystery of the disappearing banner?

Every year we attach one to the railing in front of Huddersfield Library to let people know where to get Cards for Good Causes charity Christmas cards.

Earlier this week it disappeared, we can’t blame the weather as it was firmly attached with cable ties so would’ve had to be cut off.

What use this banner is to anyone is a mystery but I’d love to hear the answer!

Mrs Patricia McCaffrey

Marsh

No imagination

I HAD occasion to walk through part of Oxley Park, the new Persimmon development in Scissett, and was appalled.

In my view, the properties that have been built, apartment blocks and houses, display not an iota of imagination, originality or design flair.

It would appear that any plans have been taken from a safe, dusted off and adapted in order to produce an homage to Soviet bloc developments.

Mike Roberts

Skelmanthorpe

Brilliant concert

WITH my wife I attended the Honley Male Voice Choir Christmas concert, at the Town Hall and as J B Priestley would say, ‘annually every year’.

I must say this year it was the tops. It was brilliant. Along with the Cory World Champion Band it was a truly a marvellous concert. Christmas starts here.

Stephen Pickup

Huddersfield