Special needs

There was a piece in yesterday's Guardian about how Ofsted abruptly closed a special needs residential facility - St. Christopher's in Bristol - more or less dumping the 25 or so customers on the streets, leaving relatives and Bristol social services to pick up the pieces.

From this distance, it is hard to see how the needs of those customers have been best served by such closure. Surely it would have been better to parachute a few people in to look after the place on an interim basis while some long term solution was worked out?

Again, from this distance, one wonders if Ofsted is not chucking its weight about with little thought for consequences which it will not have to worry about. I associate to the bad old days when some social workers were said to have hired a helicopter in the course of a quest to identify and root out satanic abuse...

The sign in the snap above appears to say that the place was established in 1945, so one might have thought that in all that time a sensible relationship might have grown up between the owners, the social services and, more recently, the hived-off regulators. Perhaps the regulators should have been chucking their weight at the owner (reference 1), rather than at the people on the front line.

Gmaps turns up a suburban road with a number of such houses in it, with satellite view suggesting more buildings in what were the gardens. See reference 2.

While the owner offers interior shots which are far more modern and purpose built looking, plus several what might be called estate agents' shots - that is to say shots which do not give a very true & fair account of what is on offer - to use a phrase from the world of accountants.

PS: I might add that I do have some experience of provision for special needs. I do know what the insides of such places are likely to look like.

Reference 1: https://www.the-aurora-group.com/. Which includes an easy to find pointer to the Ofsted report of an inspection of 11–13 December 2018. 'This is a school that requires improvement' - but nothing too horrendous on a quick skim. But, according the Guardian, not the most recent report.

Reference 2: https://www.google.co.uk/maps. Ask for 51.4761658,-2.6146195.

Reference 3: Aurora St Christopher's School, Westbury Park, Bristol, BS6 7JE.