We in West Lothian Education Services could really only smile at the rather petty and unnecessarily caustic comments made by the anonymous “Phoenix User Group” (Letters, June 19). The minor skirmish between Nigel Paine of the Scottish Council of Educational Technology and those authorities who chose to go with Phoenix is the business of the respective adversaries and no one else. It is certainly not a conflict that West Lothian Council has any interest in whatsoever.
Equally, the manner in which West Lothian carried out its comparative evaluation of SCETWorks and Phoenix is the business of West Lothian Council and not one other single soul. At no time has West Lothian made any remarks of any kind about other authorities’ decisions regarding their choice of schools’ administrative system. The simple reason is that we are not in the least bit interested in the business decisions of our colleagues elsewhere in Scotland.
We made our choice in good faith. The “idiosyncratic” evaluation was carried out in the way it was for very good reasons, reasons which we will be happy to share with anyone remotely interested in them. I doubt that we’ll be knocked over in the rush for such information.
I wonder if the senior managers in the authorities named in the Phoenix User Group are happy to have members of their staff impugning the decisions of professional colleagues elsewhere in Scotland.
John Connell Policy development manager West Lothian Education Services Bathgate
