UKC

Some of you may be aware of the pressures put onto Outdoor Education Centres now with a number of them already closed.
The latest one is Ogwen cottage which is run by Birmingham Education.
Not only will this be a huge loss to the young people of Birmingham but it is such a historical base to both Climbing and Mountaineering everything possible should be done to save it.
At the moment it is at a consultation phase until the 19th January. There is a website www.birminghambeheard.org.uk and until the 19th you can express an opinion by voting for option A to close Birmingham Outdoor edd all together, B to close parts of Birmingham Outdoor Edd including Ogwen Cottage and option C for Ogwen Cottage to be transferred to a charity and remain open as an Outdoor Education Centre with at least 51% of there clients coming from Birmingham and the rest from elsewhere in the UK.
If you do have any feelings towards this then please make the effort to vote.
I would like to mention I do not work there in any way but just feel we need to support centres like this.

In reply to Pete Potter:

Can you check your URL. really keen to find out more but link is dead. Copy and paste the full http

In reply to Mark Reeves:

worked for me - https://www.birminghambeheard.org.uk/childrens/outdoor-learning-service-rev... is the specific URL.

There's a downloadable word document

<rant>
why do people insist on putting downloadable documents into web pages? How difficult is to save as a web page. It's right there in the menu. Morons.
</rant>

In reply to pneame:


There is a proof for this:

Council = Morons
QED.

In reply to pneame:

If there's a consultation document I want to read in detail, I prefer downloadable, as I don't need to have a mobile signal/wifi to read it. PDF is better than Word, though.

Neil

In reply to Neil Williams:

There is a document to download and it is not very good reading. Each of the 5 out of the 6 centre BCC have made quite considerable losses. I am all for promoting the industry I work in but I am struggling to get my head round the figures these centres are losing, given the numbers of people they are providing outdoor education too.

In reply to Mark Reeves:
"Ogwen was budgeted to make a £15k loss last year but lost almost £182k."

Obviously I'm all for outdoor ed, but that's not sustainable is it.

In reply to jezb1:

I have to agree with you, when they only had 798 pupils through the doors as well!

In reply to Pete Potter:

Is Snowdonia over-served with Outdoors Centres? Seems so, sasly. Let Ogwen Cottage go and Plas y Brenin take up whatever slack there is.

In reply to Mark Reeves:

Part of the problem, of course, is that if they can't market to schools (which clearly isn't working out) then they won't be able to market easily to commercial sectors which increasingly want en-suite toilets and single rooms.

I'm quite surprised that the valuation is only 450k - I'd have thought at least 50% more. Regardless, beady-eyed council accountants are going to be saying "at least we can recoup the last loss if we flog it"

In reply to Chris_Mellor:

Completely different market/set of clients though