Dorothy Thornhill bans parents from Watford playgrounds
Dorothy Thornhill, Mayor of Watford, has decided to ban parents from council playgrounds -two specific playgrounds, rather than all – due to fears over paedophilia, claiming that it was
a positive decision to safeguard children, by ensuring that all children left at a supervised play session are only left under the care of qualified CRB checked and legit staff.
This was her original defence of the ludicrous plan – backed up with the assertation that she was merely enforcing government policy. This was then branded “a joke” by Ofsted – as only those who are working with children, not to prevent parents from being with their kids.
Not very surprisingly, Dorothy took fright when it was picked up by the national media and she realised that she was going to have to explain herself. So she deleted her original post – though her tweets still had links to it! This post was later re-made after it had been reclaimed from the ether.
Dorothy now had to change her reasons as she must known – or was then told – that her original excuse was fallacious. She then spent her morning working out how best to spin it (presumably at the cost of Watford taxpayers) and came back with the so-called “real story”. Which is almost a complete reversal of her original post.
No mention of Ofsted or CRBs or protectiong kids from paedophiles now, but rather this ban was put in place because “a handful of parents have been staying on, not just dropping their kids off” and that “staff that run the facility felt that the presence of these parents was hampering their ability to supervise the kids properly”. If that’s the case, these so-called “play rangers” (what a stupid name) aren’t properly trained.
This is a clear case of local government jobsworths. Dorothy Thornhill decided to ban parents because she’s illiberal, picked the currently popular “everyone’s a paedo until proven otherwise” line and ran with it, obviously not expecting to be challenged.
But she has – and has been roundly criticised for the fool she is (serously, I don’t think there is a single non-Lib Dem person who supports her in this, something I’ll come to in another post). And it has even been suggested that this may ensure that the Lib Dem’s won’t win Watford at the general election. Which would be good.
You are not actually reporting this very accurately are you. One wonder for what reasona Watford Tory would choose to misrepresent the Lib Demposition on this given the Tory smear campaign (and legal case) that made the headlines a few months ago.
Specifically parents have been asked. As Watford Council made clear
“Contrary to reports in the media, Watford Borough Council has not banned parents from public parks and playgrounds in the town!
The press have inaccurately reported what Harwoods and Harebreaks are; they are not open public facilites. They never have been. They are closed, fully supervised facilities.
They are no different to other fully supervised facilities, like schools, playgroups or nurseries – where adults are not allowed to stay.
Parents and carers are, of course, welcome to bring their children safely into the sites and settle them in.
If parents aren’t happy leaving their children – there are lots of other options open to them. In the town, there are 4 community centres, 5 children’s centres, over 40 areas of park and playgrounds, as well as a museum, two libraries… These are also free to attend and open to everyone.”
Far from banning parents from parks or play areas, they have asked parents who drop their children off at a supervised playscheme not to hang around afterwards. I used to work for a Tory council on a chidlren’s playscheme and the poliocy was identical to this, but of course we (Lib Dems) didn’t try to make political capital from it because that would ahve been playing politics over an issue of child protection.
Nich, these are areas run and paid for by the council – with Watford taxpayers money. They have decided to ban parents not because they were getting in the way of the playing but because they wanted to “safeguard children”. The other reason came later, AFTER the media storm started.
Read Dorothy Thornhill’s first post (which was deleted and then put back after I caught her out) and then her second. A complete change. She lied about it being “government policy”, trying to avoid being blamed and pass the buck to the government for her decision.
There is simply NO ISSUE OF CHILD PROTECTION – Ofsted have called this “a joke”. Unless these “play rangers” are totally incompetent, they should be able to manage it with little difficulty.
I’m a supporter of adventure play – as a Scout Leader I could hardly not be – but Watford Borough Council are wrong to ban parents from playgrounds especially when they don’t even know why they’re actually doing it!
I am one of the parents that was staying at the facility, because my child, is under five, four and half to be exact…..
The prerequsite always was that a parent/carer should always be around, if your child was under five, so to suggest, that parents just started hanging around for no reason is not true……
I will provide a link to the ofsted report conducted in 2007 that sums up, what this adventure playground is all about, everything else is just spin, to get oneself out of hot water
http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/oxcare_reports/display/(id)/30504
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