East London News A Force for the community…
A £50 SHOPPING VOUCHER is being offered as a prize to encourage parents and carers in Tower Hamlets to complete a Council’s survey.
The online survey is open to all parents or carers of depending children or young people and the Council estimates that it will take you ten minutes to complete. The Council promises that your information will be kept confidential – but it will generally inform some of their policies.
As is usual with Council surveys, you can’t get an overview of the survey – you have to answer each page of questions in order to progress to the next page. We have therefore gone through the survey to find out for you what it asks.
The survey asks for some information about you, as a respondent, and how many children you look after – their ages and where they go to school. It then goes on to consider what issues might be important to you (your health, wealth, job, housing and relationships) and your children (bullying, homework, suitability of friends, sexual activity, crime).
The survey asks where you get information about services which parents need and goes on to ask about how you feel as a parent over the larger issues such as monitoring your children’s use of the internet or a phone. There is a fairly long section on how you relate to your child’s school, and then it goes on to ask how easy it is for you to find out about health eating, alcohol, smoking and similar topics.
If you have ten minutes to spare, you could complete the form and try to win the shopping voucher. However, there is a concern that the questions are very general. The answers would make, in general, a good starting point for developing Council policy. The answers should give the Council the general pointers they need: whether parents are more worried about smoking or misuse of alcohol could guide the Council about what to concentrate on.
However, experience suggests that sometimes the Council uses broad statistics to justify something it was going to do anyway, or over-reads significance into the statistics. A council that runs down its own day care nurseries by refusing to admit new children from the waiting list – and then complains the nurseries are no longer viable because they are under-used – is capable of anything.
•To take the survey, go to:
Tower Hamlets Parents and Carers Survey
•Read more about it:
Biggs backs down on pay for young workers
Biggs moves to close nurseries
