Calling all Dorset employers.
Exhibit for free at the North Dorset Schools Career Day. Showcase your key roles, apprenticeships, and career progression. Meet and engage with young people from years 8 to 11 from five Dorset Council area schools – your potential future employees. The twilight session is open to other schools, year groups and parents.
When – Thur 9 March 10am – 6pm
Where – The Exchange, Sturminster Newton
Register as an exhibitor now – http://ow.ly/JnEN50M0L25
The village of Shillingstone is rolling up its sleeves – a huge community effort is required to save the village church
Worshippers in Shillingstone could soon be looking for umbrellas and buckets; the roof of their parish church of the Holy Rood is in a worrying condition. Where tiles have slipped there is already a 20ft hole in part of it which has had to be covered with tarpaulin to protect the church’s north aisle.
The Parochial Church Council (PCC) has called in architects and other experts to assess the damage and risks. Their verdict is the need for a complete re-roofing of this ancient grade 1 listed building dating back to the 12th century.
The estimated bill the village faces?
In the region of £340,000.
Major fundraising efforts are now under way to enable the first phase of works, which is estimated to cost some £140,000 and must go ahead as a matter of urgency.
Phase two, the main part of the roof, is expected to require the additional £200,000.
A place for a thousand years
An appeal has been launched, grants are being sought, and fundraising events are being planned. Appeal leaflets have gone to every household in Shillingstone and to as many people as can be found who have had connections with the parish in the past; perhaps through the former girls school, Croft House, the village school, those with family links, and former villagers who have moved away.
PCC treasurer Anne Powell says: ‘It’s a daunting prospect, but I am optimistic that the money can be raised to hold the weather at bay for another 100 years or more.’
PCC member Ray Suter said in a message appealing for villager’s help – in cash or kind: ‘Our Parish Church has served as a vital meeting place for a thousand years. Not just for worship but for a millennia of Shillingstone’s weddings, baptisms and funerals as well as national celebrations.
‘During war and peace it has served as a place for private prayer and thanksgiving. The church bells have rung out across the village to celebrate notable events down the ages. Our ancestors are buried around our church and their graves are a precious reminder of how much they contributed to the village we now call home. It must be unthinkable that we could lose this precious, historic building which has been loved and preserved by so many.’
Before any work can begin on the church roof, however, the small matter of the bats has to be resolved! Experts have said there are, quite rarely, at least four different varieties of these protected mammals present, all of which have called Shillingstone church their home for years.
As the Love Local Trust Local Awards night approaches, founder Barbara Cossins looks back at where it all began – and why
When the Love Local Trust Local (LLTL) journey began in 2018, it was because I was so fed up with hearing visitors at our Open Farm Sunday say they wanted to support the British farmer – but didn’t know who to trust any more.
This was the time of some food mislabelling scandals, alongside the story that fake farms were appearing on ‘own brand’ products on supermarkets shelves. Some supermarkets have faced legal challenges over the practice.
Cheap imported meats were – and still are – coming into our country labelled with the Union flag because the item has been re-packaged or processed in the UK, not grown or reared here.
It’s all so misleading.
We British farmers need to stand up, get ourselves heard and explain the important facts about farming and food production to the general public and the people eating these foods.
Hairy Bikers
The new series of The Hairy Bikers Go Local has become an unexpected ambassador for everything our LLTL food label and movement stands for. The series is all about what is grown and produced locally in each county around the UK, helping viewers understand what comes from which part of the UK and at what time of year. This is something LLTL have talked about before.
The series is also highlighting the importance of trusting local businesses producing excellent food and drink close to where you live.
Music to our ears!
One of the key objectives of LLTL has always been to help tell the stories of local Dorset food and drink businesses, letting people know where they are and how to buy their products. Social media has been terrific for spreading the word of what our hardworking Dorset producers are doing.
Roll on awards night!
During the 2022 judging, I’ve had the pleasure of hearing so many wonderful stories. I’m still meeting fantastic new producers and learning from them. We will be celebrating their achievements on
Thursday 9th February
with a gala dinner at
Kingston Maurward College in Dorchester.
I would like to thank all our sponsors – especially Laura and Courtenay at The BV, who have been supporting LLTL from the very beginning.
Next month we will be showcasing the award winners and in the months to come we are delighted to be sharing their stories.
Three students at Clayesmore School are celebrating after they all received Oxbridge offers.
Seth, who now has a place to read German at St Hilda’s College, was quick to say that none of the friends felt confident in their applications: ‘We were all expecting to be rejected. Reaching the Christmas holiday was a relief, but then it was a very long wait!’
‘It was a really long, hard process, and you have to do it on top of your already-packed A level studies’ says Tamsin, who was offered a place to read Chemistry at Hertford College.
‘By the time we had done everything we could and it was out of our hands, we were shattered!’ agrees Evie, who is thrilled with a place to read English at Balliol College.
So what made them stand out from thousands of applicants?
‘It’s not as predictable as you’d think’ says Tamsin ‘another Chemistry student in my year got the same predicted grades as me, does as much extra-curricular activity as I do, and yet they weren’t offered a place.’
‘I think it’s a lot to do with you as a person, how you come across in an interview’ agreed Evie ‘most students should have the same level of subject knowledge and the part of the personal statement that allows for describing your extra-curricular activity is tiny. It never even came up in my interview.’
‘Nor mine’ agrees Seth, ‘but I think that all my extra activities and my job in Tescos have built me as a person, and that’s what shines through. I was originally applying for a different college, and it was suggested I’d fit better at St Hildas – it was more of a personality fit, and it was absolutely the right decision.’
Tamsin added ‘I don’t think they’re looking for specifics so much as an inquisitive and can-do attitude. I actually said in my interview – which was filled with impossibly hard maths – that 2×1 equals two, so they’re obviously not looking too hard at the interview specifics!‘
Thank you Mr Carpenter
Do the teenagers all have a firm career plan mapped out?
‘Journalism, or perhaps a documentary maker’ says Evie. Tamsin added, ‘You’ll end up in politics, you’ll be great!’
Seth is aiming for a probable career as an academic, following a traditional Masters-PhD-lecturer route, though he acknowledges he’s also drawn to education as a career.
Tamsin cheerfully admits she’s open to what the future holds ‘Chemistry often leads to law or politics, as it aligns with the analytical thinking, but I’ve no fixed ideas yet.’
Were the Clayesmore staff keen to push the teenagers on to the Oxbridge route from the start?
‘Not in the least – we had to ask for it!’ says Evie
‘The school have been amazing.’ agrees Seth. ‘Absolutely no pressure, but once we decided it was the right plan they just scooped us up and supported us the whole way.’
‘We couldn’t have managed without their amazing support’ says Tamsin. ‘I’m not even an English student, but Mr Carpenter (senior deputy head and English teacher) gave me so much time and help. He even let me take over his office to practice in the week running up to my interview.’
‘Mr Carpenter was amazing!’ Seth and Evie exclaim simultaneously in agreement.
Clayesmore are proud to be a school that doesn’t focus on a traditional academic route, but instead ‘celebrates future thinkers, makers and creators’. Other student’s have offers from Durham, Warwick, Exeter, Nottingham and the Royal Agricultural University, to name but a few, with an excitingly diverse range of courses including History, Nursing, Architecture, International Festival and Events Management, Journalism, Fashion Marketing and Management and Global Sustainable Development.
Jo Thomson, head of Clayesmore, says, ‘As ever, I’m incredibly proud of all our pupils. Their success is a direct result of their hard work and commitment, and their teachers’ unwavering belief in every single student’s potential.’
Visit Springhead’s first open gardens of the year – as well as having the chance to wander around the lakeside gardens you will be able to see some of the many named varieties held at Springhead as you enjoy the beautiful drifts of snowdrops.
The gardens will be open from Monday 6th until Sunday 12th February from 11am to 3pm.
In addition, the gardens will be open on Saturday 18th February from 1 pm until 4.30 pm as part of Shaftesbury’s annual snowdrop celebrations (times are of course weather dependent).
Entry to the gardens will be free but donations would be appreciated. Light Refreshments will be available throughout the day on Saturday 11th and Sunday 12th provided by, and in aid of, St Andrew’s Primary School, Fontmell Magna.
Dogs on leads are welcome and there is assisted wheelchair access.
6th-12th February, 11am to 3pm and 18th February 1 to 4pm
For more information email [email protected] or call 01747 811853.
With our national newly-sanitised view of ‘Countryfile-d’ farming, complaints about animal welfare are on the increase, reports Andrew Livingston
British winter is synonymous with sideways rain, muddy fields and non-existent grass. We humans may hate it, but the livestock across Dorset doesn’t really notice the inclement weather. For millennia, animals have lived on the picturesque pastures of our county all year round.
Unfortunately, for a lot of the public, winter farming in the UK doesn’t match the glossy Countryfile version of farming they like. Because of this, bodies such as the RSPCA, the APHA (Animal Plant Health Agency) and Trading Standards get a seasonal influx of complaints.
‘Things just don’t look very good when it’s constantly raining and the fields are muddy,’ says Neil, manager of the Animal Health and Welfare team for Dorset Council Trading Standards.
‘Most calls that we get from members of the public are well meaning, but entirely unfounded – the welfare of the animals is fine. It just doesn’t look particularly pretty.’
With the high volume of complaints Neil and his team can receive, they have to trust their judgement with a lot of the local farmers.
‘We do probably visit the vast majority of them, but it’s a kind of risk assessment basis. If we know the farmer and we’ve been going there for a long time, we can deal with it via a phone call initially, just to see if there is a problem? Are they aware of it? Quite often that can resolve it.
‘To give you one example, we had a complaint about sheep in a field where a number of them were lame. It was a good sheep farmer that we’ve known for many years and we don’t have any welfare concerns with the farm, so rather than waste limited resources going out for a visit, we phoned him and he freely admitted, “Yes, I know that they are lame. I’m desperate to do something about it but at the moment the ground is too wet to get the handling system out there to get them in the crush to sort the feet out.”
Mistakes have been made
Neil has been with Trading Standards for 30 years but isn’t from a farming background. He was moved ‘kicking and screaming’ into animal health because the previous manager wanted to go back to mainstream trading standards work.
‘While I haven’t got a farming background myself, the people who are in the team that actually go out and do the visits understand farming and farmers, who are very different from the usual business owners that I had was experienced in dealing with.
‘I freely admit I’ve made mistakes before – I’ve been out in the field with cows in the pouring rain. They looked bedraggled and miserable and thin. So I got a vet out to look at them with me the following day. Of course, by then it was bright and sunny, and the cows looked completely different!’
Neil has had to deal with a vast number of complaints about one farm in particular – Maiden Castle Farm. The farm includes the Maiden Castle hill fort, and although it is owned by the Duchy of Cornwall, it is John Hoskins who is the tenant farmer with his wife and son.
‘We have Maiden Castle hill fort within the farm itself,’ John explains. ‘And with it we get some 50,000 visitors a year. As well as tourists, we get all the general public from Dorchester coming to walk their dogs. And we get all sorts of complaints at this time of the year.
‘We have cattle grazing behind an electric fence with stubble turnips and feeders with hay and straw in. But of course it’s wet and muddy, and all [the public] think is that the animals should all be living indoors.’
John is quick to make the point clear that even though their downland farm is open to the elements, their cattle are hardy and have managed to live outdoors for 5,000 years.
Oh no, it’s definitely dead
With the constant footfall over his land, John and his family have had to deal with complaints either to Trading Standards or direct to their face.
‘A year or two back we had a cow calving. We keep an eye on them all the time when they are calving and this lady stormed up to my wife and said “you’ve got a cow with its body all coming out”.
‘‘I suspect it’s calving,” my wife said. “Oh no, it’s definitely dead. There’s steam coming out”.
When my wife got there, a calf was born, struggling to get up but alive and well. And my wife said: “Look, what you saw was the pre birth coming out”. But the woman would not have it.’
John is grateful to Neil and the Trading Standards team who act as gatekeepers. He says: ‘They know where we are. And [Trading Standards] actually come out, not on a complaint, just to see what we have on stubble turnips, or what cattle we have grazing.
‘And if somebody rings them, say two days in a row, saying, ‘John has got a sheep with a bad foot’. If on the second day we haven’t done anything, Trading Standards will call me and say, “John can you go and see about that sheep? It’s on the Castle” and we respond.’
It’s a well-trodden path to talk about how farming is portrayed in the media. Unfortunately, what the general public sees is either unrealistic ‘Countryfile farming’ or alarmist hidden camera footage on the news or social media showing the one per cent of farmers who mistreat their animals..
Neil has for the last six years been on the board of management for the Dorset County Show. He is a believer that educating the next generation is key.
‘The show has got a separate charity called Fabulous Food and Farming and its purpose is to promote agriculture. One way we do that is to invite school groups out to farms. We provide them with visits and we also provide funding for the transport to get them out there.
‘Good farmers are very keen to show off farming and the importance of what they’re doing. It’s difficult to get the public out and interested, but we can do that through things like the agricultural shows.’
The odd rogue
Maiden Castle Farm hosts a local school throughout the year to try and help educate children. They have even converted a calf house into a classroom.
John Hoskins says: ‘We have a local school here once or twice a year just to show them what’s happening on the farm.
‘Everybody’s looking over our shoulder to see that we do things correctly and 99 per cent of farmers do that or more. But there’s always the odd rogue farmer that lets us down.’
There was a recent case of one of these ‘rogue’ farmers in the county, who ended up being prosecuted (Dorset farm fined £52,000 for causing unnecessary suffering– The BV, Nov 22) – and this is why Neil doesn’t want to discourage the public from picking up the phone if they are worried about the welfare of any livestock they see.
‘It is incredibly rare that we have to go as far as court action. On a complaint visit, we always try and work with farmers to improve things. It’s a collaborative process that involves visiting, advising, giving an improvement notice if necessary and making sure that’s complied with.’
The local ‘rogue’ farmer in question had been having visits from Trading Standards for ten years and he was found to be doing the bare minimum.
‘We regard court action as the very last resort. We will always try to work with the farmer and their vets to make improvements. But ultimately, if things are ignored or things get to an unacceptable level, then we will be forced to take action.’
John Hoskins felt that the farmer in question was let off lightly.
‘It was disgusting. I can tell you, every farmer who knew about that wished he’d had a heavier sentence. Every single farmer you spoke to said he was a disgrace to our industry.’
But Neil has dealt with a lot of these cases of poor animal management and he understands that causing harm is rarely anyone’s intention.
He says: ‘In most of these cases I would say there’s an element of the farmer having mental health issues that, in turn, result in their animals suffering.
‘We’re always mindful of that. And again, if we’re aware that the farmer’s struggling himself, we try and get him support through charities like the Farming Community Network.’
If you see an animal you believe to be in distress, please contact the correct authority. For agricultural animals such as pigs, cattle, sheep, goats and poultry contact Dorset Trading Standards.
If you have concerns about the welfare of domestic animals such as cats and dogs please
contact the RSPCA
Following a local outcry based on inaccurate information, BV editor Laura spoke to Luke Rake, principal of Kingston Maurward college about the rumours
News that Kingston Maurward College has removed apprenticeships from its course offerings, with immediate effect, recently reached local media. This caused a number of inaccuracies to be shared locally. The BV spoke to the college principal Luke Rake to discover the truth behind the potentially harmful rumours that were causing his phone to ring.
‘Apprenticeships at the college have been in decline for some time.’ Luke says. ‘The numbers are down partly because the numbers of young people in the county as a whole are going down, but also because more and more students are choosing full time education. Simultaneously, our full time agriculture student numbers are growing.
‘We have also seen a reduction in the number of employers offering to take on apprentices, mostly due to the way the government made changes to the systems. It has basically become more onerous for smaller employers and so the numbers went down.
The other major factor is the funding itself. We got to a point where the college was losing a huge amount of money running apprenticeships.
‘The funding has been reduced significantly over recent years. For example, in the farming sector, there were government-imposed changes a few years ago. Previously we received £10,000 a year for a farmworkers apprenticeship; this was moved to a stockpersons apprenticeship. It’s basically the same course, but now we get just £5,000 for it.
‘In addition to which, 20 per cent of that funding isn’t operational money during the course of the provision – we only get it if they pass, when they complete the course, which could be 18 months after they start.
‘Financially, it just doesn’t work. The land-based sector nationally was furious over the changes, and land based colleges across the country for a while refused to run the new farm-oriented apprenticeships because of the change in funding. In the end, they decided (quite rightly): “It is needed in our area, we can manage to run it, we’ll just have to do it at a loss”.
Rural challenges
‘So now, unless you’re doing apprenticeships at real scale – hundreds of them, and we weren’t, we had 65 apprentices when we made this decision – it just doesn’t work.
‘We were effectively having to subsidise every apprenticeship we took on from other parts of the college. Had we continued, in the next 12 months we would have lost roughly £150,000. That’s money which could have been spent on, for example, staff pay – we haven’t made a cost of living award to our staff for two years, purely because we can’t afford to. The college, like almost all further education colleges in England, is in a difficult financial position, and our first duty is always to the survival of the whole. Therefore, as a loss-making entity, we had to let apprenticeships go.
‘This is also a specifically rural challenge. If you have an apprentice working for Rolls Royce, you probably have 40, 60 maybe 100 apprentices all in one place – which means you can teach them all in one place and assess them all in one place.
Here, we might have one apprentice working on a farm near Sturminster Newton, one the other side of Gillingham, one at Evershot, one near Dorchester … and they all need visiting regularly, they all need assessing individually. So the sheer mileage costs and practicality involved was a major challenge.
‘It’s not unique to us, it’s a challenge for any rural provider – every local family knows that rural people struggle because of the additional cost of living in a sparsely populated area.
No one left behind
What happens now to the young people currently mid-apprenticeship? Are they simply left to start again?
‘Not in the least. Those who are close to the end of their course will be finishing off with us. ‘Those who are at an earlier stage in their apprenticeships are still employed, that doesn’t change, but the provider responsible for their training will either be Bicton College if they are in the west of Dorset, or Sparsholt College if they are in the east and north of the county. Both are high-quality land-based colleges, and every single student has had meetings with staff and employers. We have worked very hard with both colleges to ensure those learners are looked after.
‘In a couple of cases students have decided they would actually prefer to stay at Kingston Maurward, and have moved on to a full time programme, which means they’re coming here three days a week instead of just one.’
Poor timing?
Could this not have been put in place before the school year started in September?
‘It’s something we have been discussing for a while, but apprenticeships do not have a school year – they can start at any time, and roll continuously. There is no natural break, so whenever we had made this decision, it would have been difficult. Ultimately, we didn’t want to close the apprenticeships, but our main responsibility is to the financial security of the whole institution. It was a regrettable, but entirely necessary, thing we had to do.’
All the good things that are coming to the Exchange in Sturminster Newton in March 2023.
See the poster below
For tickets to any of these events contact the box office on 01258 475137 or book online at https://stur-exchange.co.uk/tickets/
Guild Anderson is a successful Tisbury based kitchen designer and maker employing 25 people in its Tisbury design studio and Hindon based workshop.
We design and make kitchens, pantries, boot rooms and high-quality interior joinery for country houses across Wiltshire, Dorset, Somerset, and Hampshire.
We are looking to employ a workshop helper to undertake a broad range of tasks to support our busy production team.
THE ROLE
The role is five hours a day,(suggested 10am to 3pm, though this is flexible), five days per week. Tasks include:
The role is a fantastic opportunity for a retiree or someone seeking part-time work, and will suit someone who:
PAY
Salary: £11 per hour
APPLY
If you would like to apply for the role, please email [email protected] or call Andrew on 01747 820449. Alternatively you can apply directly online here – https://bit.ly/bvAPWorkshop
© Bluebean Publishing Ltd
