[Updated below 9th January] He just can’t help it.
Argyll and Bute’s Education Director, Cleland Sneddon, seems unable to play a straight bat.
Just after midnight on Monday 8th December – at 00.49 on 9th December, as our publication log confirms and which leaves it with a published 9th December dateline, For Argyll published the following article – Argyll and Bute Council seriously misleads Holyrood Education Committee.
This piece took both barrels to manifestly deceptive written ‘evidence’ submitted to the Scottish Parliament’s Education Committee by Mr Sneddon, on behalf of the council.
The written ‘evidence’ and the very different documented facts
In a fundamentally misleading narrative, Mr Sneddon radically misrepresented Argyll and Bute Council’s – his – attempt to close no fewer than 26 rural primary schools in the area in one go, over a period in 2010-11.
25 of these were eventually sent to statutory consultation by one vote at one of the most fiercely dramatic council meetings Argyll has seen – and with a determined squad of bannered school campaigners outside – on 25th November 2010 – waiting from early morning until the meeting finished in virtual darkness.
The rest of the saga is another story, but this phase of it ended on 5th January 2011, at a special meeting of council requisitioned by the SNP group of councillors.
Councillors convened to hear the verbal presentation of a report circulated to all councillors in advance, by Sandy Longmuir, Chair of the Scottish Rural Schools Network [SRSN].
This report forensically demonstrated the legal non-compliance of the closure proposals, which had, regardless, been sent to statutory consultation; the profoundly flawed nature of just about all aspects of the closure cases presented by Mr Sneddon; and his editing of evidence [which led in a very different direction] falsely to reassure elected members of the soundness of an element of his argument.
When we say that we had never seen so unable a set of proposal papers for anything, we can justify that judgment from hard and documented evidence – and so can the Scottish Rural Schools Network team, who have seen very many school closure proposals.
With the SRSN report circulated in advance and with its team having conducted tutorial sessions with some conscientious elected members on matters like GAE calculations, the special council meeting on 5th January 2011 began with the Education Director throwing in the towel.
While maintaining the virgin irreproachability of his proposals, they were all nevertheless withdrawn from consultation, with some schools having already had their formal consultation meetings.
Then the meeting moved to hear Mr Longmuir present his report.
Mr Sneddon’s and the council’s priorities were solely focused on face saving.
They produced a confection of nonsense to account for withdrawing the complete suite of closure proposals – and did so before the SRSN report was formally heard.
The fact that it had been circulated to members and senior officers well in advance, with the weight of its impact leaving indefensible the feeble proposals, could be shrugged off so long as the retreat formally came before the presentation of the report.
So the withdrawal of the proposals had nothing whatsoever to do with the SRSN report. That was simply graciously heard by the council and dismissed. OK?
The substantial cost of this wholly avoidable failure, which included significant fees paid to a series of external consultants, was never mentioned and has never been calculated although requests to see the total involved have been made.
Indicative behaviours arising from this summary
This saga was presented in Mr Cleland’s ‘evidence’ to the parliamentary education committee as follows [and the emphases are ours]:
‘…the Council undertook a review of its school estate and identified an initial long leet of 26 primary schools it wished to conduct an informal consultation on with communities to explore school mergers.’
2.2 Following a further review of the proposals this long leet was reduced to a short leet of 12 proposed school mergers on which the Council proposed to conduct a statutory consultation in terms of the Schools Consultation (Scotland) Act 2010. The consultation commenced on 3rd May 2011 with an intended end date of 30thJune 2011 and the programme of public meetings for each school commenced in May 2011.
The fact here was that the so called ‘short leet’ was a new and different list produced in the Spring of 2011 by the new Education Spokesperson, Councillor Ellen Morton, who openly called it ‘my list’. It was a new and second attempt to close at least some rural Argyll schools – and two on the list of 12 were schools already shut.
The other facts were that the 25 schools – on the so-called ‘long leet’ – had been sent to statutory consultation on 25th November 2010; and that the programme of public meetings for schools on these 25 schools under consultation had already begun, with some meetings held before the 5th January 2011 retreat took place.
The Sneddon statement to the parliamentary committee that ‘the programme of public meetings for each school commenced in May 2011′ is another deliberate misrepresentation.
The matters above demonstrate:
- the embedded tendency of Mr Sneddon to treat evidence with joyful creativity;
- his and the council’s obsession with technical face saving to cover defeat and exposure – as with the transparent management of the order of the agenda items at the meeting on 5th January 2011.
One more MO
There is one further incident from the Argyll and Bute school wars of 2010-11 that is germane to what we are about to lay out.
2010-11 was a superheated period in Argyll, with hyperanxious parents and 25 communities facing the loss of their schools; with the closure attempts being railroaded through the stages of the process on the back of demonstrably unable proposals and in the face of serial exposure of the flaws in those proposals.
Parents and communities suffered indescribable stress in the face of a council persisting, as this one did, in forcing along proposals known and shown to be legally non-complaint and fundamentally error strewn. We can best illustrate this level of stress by the fact that when, a year later in March 2012, the Rural Education Commission visited Argyll on it evidence collection tour, parents from two schools broke down in tears at the memory of the pain and the consuming anger of that time.
The Scottish Rural Schools Network was no less that a saviour to such communities – experienced, highly capable, knowledgeable and very well informed, their integrity patent, willing – voluntarily – to offer research, analysis, advice, support and substantial personal time in the case of flawed closure attempts.
The Argyll Rural Schools Network then formed, under the aegis of SRSN and quickly proved highly able, energetic, resourceful. Mathematically, theoretically and conceptually capable, they made serious inroads in exposing the poverty of competence of the council’s closure proposals.
For Argyll worked night and day, at that time, in support of the schools campaigners and of of the work SRSN and ARSN were doing – and they were all working the same mad hours. The sustainability of their communities was wrongly under threat.
One long night, emails circulated fast: ‘Seen this?’ It was a small hours [or thereabouts] press release from Argyll and Bute Council to the media, ranting irrationally and abusively against the Argyll Rural Schools Network – which had just landed some direct hits on the waterlogged closure proposals.
It had been written in the night and sent out, not through the council press office but personally by Cleland Sneddon.
The ‘he’s at it again’ headline?
Here is a timeline.
For Argyll published its critical scrutiny piece on the written ‘evidence’ Argyll and Bute Council had submitted to the Scottish Parliament’s Education Committee at 00.49 on Monday 9th December 2013.The article was very widely read.
We heard late the following day, 10th December, that the council had issued a ‘clarification’ letter on its evidence to the Education Committee.
We found the letter in question on the Committee’s website. It was no more than the sort of self justificatory sleight of hand effort we have come, wearily, to expect.
But it was dated ’7th December’- the Saturday, two days before we had published our analysis of the misleading ‘evidence’ submitted. [Does this seem familiar?]
This was not the electronically recorded email receipt date, which was missing – but unusually, unprecedentedly even, a typed date at the head of the text of the email. Who normally does that? Why would anyone do it, when the time and date of an email are electronically embedded?
With Mr Sneddon’s modus operandi well known to us. Remember the manipulation of the agenda order so that the withdrawal of the unable closure proposals was effected before the responsible SRSN report was formally presented to the meeting on 5th January 2011? We wondered. Was he ‘at it’ again – at the same face saving which appears so routinely to obsess him?
In this case he would seem to have voluntarily ‘clarified’ his ‘evidence’ for the Education Committee before our article had been published.
7th December was a Saturday. It was highly improbable that staff at the Scottish Parliament were at work, receiving such emails and responding to them promptly in what would have been weekend time, as Mr Cleland was said to have been claiming.
We decided to test the matter.
We submitted FoI requests to:
- Argyll and Bute Council, asking for the date and time of sending of Mr Sneddon’s ‘clarification’ email to the Education Committee;
- and to the Education Committee, asking for the date and time of receipt of the ‘clarification’ email at the office of the Committee’s Clerk – to whom it had been sent.
We have heard nothing from Argyll and Bute Council but yesterday, 7th January 2o14, we had a response from the Scottish Government.
It said: ‘An e-mail falling within the above criteria was received on David Cullum’s machine at 9:07 on 9 December 2013.’
So our highly critical article was published at 00.49 on that day.
Its tags included: ‘cleland sneddon, education director, argyll bute council, scottish government,education committee,scottish parliament,written evidence,misleading,school closures, schools act 201o,closure proposals,withdrawn,long leet,short leet,statutory consultation…
It was quickly quite extensively read – even at that time.
As demonstrated above, Mr Sneddon has form in working at night to send out statements on matters where he feels personally exposed – as with the swivel-eyed press release mentioned above, that abused ARSN.
The text of this email of his was – unusually – manually dated 7th January, two days before we published our article.
The Education Committee Clerk’s office nevertheless recorded its receipt as being at 9.07 on the morning of Monday 9th January, over eight hours after the article was published.
Shades of 5th January 2011?
This is a senior officer who, on documented performance, cannot be trusted; who is obsessively revisionist in the way only bureaucrats can be, convinced – and not wrongly – that it is not what you did or what happens that matters but what you say y0u did and what you say happened – and better still what you write down that happened.
The revisionist imperative was a clear driver of the fictionalised ‘evidence’ to the Holyrood Education Committee
But even in as small a matter as a ‘found out’ article, for someone who is routinely caught out, it seems still to have been worth a swerve to disconnect cause and consequence.
Note: For those interested, here is a link to the text of the SRSN report to Argyll and Bute Council – as circulated in advance in the electronic pack for elected members for the special meeting on 5th January 2011.
9th January update
We have just had a response from Argyll and Bute Council to our FoI request as to the date and time on which Cleland Sneddon sent nis ‘clarificatoin; email to David Cullum, Clerk to the Scottish Parliaments Education Committee.
The response says: ‘The email from the council to the Education Committee of the Scottish Parliament and possibly direct to David Cullum, Clerk to the Education & Culture Parliamentary Committee which carried a letter from Executive Director for Community Services, Cleland Sneddon to Mr Cullum was sent to David Cullum on 09 December 2013 at 09:07.’
This corresponds to the Scottish Government’s response to the FoI we had submitted to them, asking for the date and time off arrival of the Sneddon email.
We note the careful wording of the response from the council, which would appear to leave open some wriggle room for an Mr Sneddon to try saying that he had emailed his communication in to the Council offices on Saturday 7th December, for it to be sent out by staff to Mr Cullum; and that it had therefore had to wait until the Monday morning for staff to send it off.
Such a procedure would be utterly alien to Mr Sneddon’s known modus operandi. This is the officer who himself sent off a late night press release in which he injudiciously clubbed the Argyll Rural Schools Network and willfully distorted the meaning of a passage in an inappropriate research paper.
For Argyll gives notice here, should such an excuse be tendered, we will ask the Information Commissioner to institute a technical investigation at the council.
We note that the phrase in the FoI response above – ‘and possibly direct to David Cullum’ – suggests that the evidence available to the FoI staff in making this response is less than complete, which would not be the case had the email been sent by a staffer.
