As the readers of the Reading Chronicle might expect, this is a good time of year to look back and reflect on what has been happening during 2013 in my Reading East constituency. But I will focus this on one of my big passions; education.
An enormous amount has been achieved in 2013 by anyone’s standards: Reading UTC has been built, opened by Prince Andrew, and is already a popular oversubscribed local school. Maiden Erlegh has applied to open a high quality free school in 2014, Bulmershe has responded to these challenges with great teaching, new leadership and a £6million building investment from the Conservative-led LEA underway. A big uplift for the prospects of young people in the eastern part of my constituency.
In the south of my constituency, the Government is investing £26 million in rebuilding Reading Girls School, it is also where the bulk of the extra £6.2 million of Government Pupil Premium money has gone to help our poorest children. In the north, Highdown Academy is back on track after a small wobble and hopefully will see it back to the upper reaches of the Ofsted ranking soon. The Heights primary School should be ready to open in 2014 and offer a terrific primary education to Caversham Heights children. It is interesting that all these improvements don’t involve Reading Local Education Authority. It’s almost as if the word is out that if you want to make progress in education steer clear of the Labour-run LEA.
Why? Because its performance for a long time, including 2013 has been utterly lamentable. Labour Cllrs and activists regularly write letters to the newspapers opposing many of the good things above – the UTC and Free Schools for example. But this week we saw the evidence of failure as the Dept of Education published figures that saw Labour-run Reading LEA in the bottom three nationally for 11 year old attainment with only 69 per cent reaching national level 4 status. Worse still, Ofsted judged our children’s centres as “unsatisfactory”. George Palmer Primary School “failed” so many times under the local LEA, that this year the Dept of Education took it out of the LEA’s hands and made it the Palmer Academy begin turning it around. Bad enough you might think, but the Labour-run Council was also written to by Liberal Democrat Education Minister, David Laws, because it was not doing enough to bridge the gap between attainment between rich and poor children.
I won’t even get started on the LEA’s failure to plan for extra children coming into the system and the fact it is left borrowing huge sums of extra money that the Council Tax payer will be paying for decades because it didn’t get behind free schools. These failures must not be allowed to continue but, much like the economy, Labour is incapable of putting it right because it cannot see where it is going wrong. Every parent must now consider how to stop the Labour-run LEA damaging the prospects of their child.