Downing Street Says » Citizens Juries

The Prime Ministers Spokesman started by telling the assembled press that the Prime Minister and Ed Balls were visiting Bristol today to open a £24million state of the art secondary school. The school is one of 180 newly built or rebuilt projects and 36 academies opening this school year – and comes on top of 1,100 new primary, secondary or academy schools and 27,000 new and improved classrooms built since 1997.

The Department for Children, Schools and Families had set up the event, which would be bringing together 40 – 50 people. The discussion was part of a wider programme of consultation for a new Children’s Plan.

Asked how the people taking part had been selected, the PMS said that 40-50 people had been brought together. Those invited had been selected by a variety of methods. The school had provided a list of pupils and teaching staff who would participate.

The Department for Children, Schools and Families added to this with a door-to-door recruitment programme within a two-mile radius of the school itself and provided a list of community stakeholders to take part in order to make it as representative of the local community as possible.

In response to the suggestion that the visit was no different from any other visit to a school, the PMS said that it was a very structured event. It would be deliberately representative of the local community and a series of questions would be asked about specific issues. These questions would be discussed with parents, students and community figures.

Asked what would be discussed and what would the event feed into the PMS made people aware of the Government’s Children’s Plan consultation. The event would be on camera enabling people to see for themselves what would be discussed.

When asked what sort of questions people could expect the PMS suggested several questions including the following; "How would you keep young people out of trouble?" and "What is the Government’s job when it comes to supporting people and should they be doing anything else?"

Asked who would be facilitating the event, the PMS reiterated that the DCSF were running the event and had consulted with a range of experts. The PMS went on to say that for this particular event, Opinion Leader Research (OLR) had been chosen to organise things and to pre-empt any questions on the issue, Deborah Mattison was no longer an employee of OLR and had no contractual relationship with Downing Street.

Asked whether OLR had been chosen through a completely open tendering process the PMS confirmed that they had been.

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» Thursday, September 6, 2007

Citizens Juries

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