'Single School' is better and how can rural Belton be 'urban'? ; Letters

TWO linguistic oddities intrigued me in last week's Echo (March11).

The first was the front-page headline 'One-through schoolspledge'. 'One-through'? Surely a misprint, I thought, as the phraseappeared both meaningless and ungrammatical.

But no. On reading the relevant article, I discovered that thisterm (whether hyphenated or not - the Echo itself seemed undecided)is used as an adjective or adjectival phrase qualifying a schoolsystem and meaning 'single-school' during a specific period, in thiscase for ages 11 to 19.

Via the internet I dug further and unearthed a local campaignwebsite called the 'One Through School Campaign' (no hyphen), butwith the page title 'OneThroughSchool' (no hyphen, no spaces!).

Delving even deeper into cyberspace, I uncovered theLeicestershire County Council document to which this campaign is aresponse, where the linguistic wizards of County Hall seem to havecoined the phrase 'through schools' (no 'one'), meaning exactly thesame thing. Perhaps they're parroting central government... but atthis stage, I lost heart.

Time for an English lesson, I think! 'Through' can be anadjective, but as it's also a preposition (e.g. 'he achieved itthrough school), the phrase is ambiguous and should be avoided.

Inventing a hyphenated compound adjective to apply to a schoolsystem where there is no change of school is fine, but 1) it mustuse a hyphen and 2) it must make sense. So 'One through' is plainwrong. 'One-through' is pretty awful. 'Single-school' is better.

The second oddity cropped up in the Letters pages.

'DCW' of Nanpantan quite rightly queries the classification ofBelton as an 'urban' area, going on to explain that this may resultin the loss of its pharmacy.

What raised my eyebrows was the suggestion that the determinationof whether a settlement is 'urban' or 'rural' is the responsibilityof the NHS!

And, lo and behold, a spokeswoman for Leicestershire and RutlandNHS confirmed this bombshell. By now my geography graduate's hackleswere also raised. I must have looked like a hedgehog on heat. Oncemore to the internet...

This seems to be traceable to Regulation 31 of Part 2 of TheNational Health Service (Pharmaceutical Services) Regulations(2005), which does indeed appear to grant the local NHS Primary CareTrust the breathtaking power of determining whether an area is ruralor not. That this is nonsense appears to have escaped the notice ofboth the legislators and the NHS.

Government archives are awash with papers attempting to nail downwhat is urban and what is rural (the sort of pointless projectthat's been swallowing up our taxes), but a reasonable stab was madeby the Department of Geography, Environment and Development Studiesat Birkbeck College, University of London, in 2004 and it seems tohave gained some acceptance in government. It suggests that an urbanarea is one with a population of over 10,000.

I understand Belton is home to about 750 people. It's not urban.It's rural.

The mistake seems to have been a linguistic one. The legislationmentioned above gave the NHS the responsibility to 'determine'whether an area is rural or not, when it probably meant 'identify',the criteria having already been determined by others: not medics,but geographers.

Richard Guise Cradock Drive Quorn