Tomorrow's Local Services scrutiny meeting should be interesting, given that the Cabinet Member has not only been sacked, he has also resigned from the Liberal Democrats, and therefore has no issues about going to the press. I'll be waiting to see who gets the Cabinet promotion now..

We're back on schedule again now after the August lull. I went down to Greenwich a couple of weeks back to look at recycling for a Transportation review- Greenwich has a facility for sorting dry waste (paper, glass, tins, and plastic) which looks really interesting. It's almost all automated sorting, with just a few human 'pickers' to help the process along, and it's a very impressive set up. Apparently we already do send some of our waste from Birmingham to another one of these facilities further north, but it would be a real boost to recycling levels here if we had one of our own (and it would also resolve the stupid problem of our recycled waste having to be transported around the country in order to be processed).

Last week I had the odd experience of going to an open evening for College High - odd because I haven't been to an open evening since I was a prospective pupil myself. College High is bidding to become a specialist Performing Arts school, so they held a launch event for the bid, an open evening and a parents evening all on the same night, so as to have as many people there as possible.The bid launch went well - the school has a strong record on Performing Arts, with students doing work with the RSC and other organisations, but they do need to raise £50,000 in order to go ahead with the bid, so I think this event will be the first of many. I didn't manage to get very far on my tour of the school - we started off in the Learning Support rooms, and as a SEN Governor I had so many questions that I only got to go to three rooms - on the upside I now have three invitations to go back and see the work in action, so it was a productive evening!