Support for Left-Behind Children

Lee Anderson Excerpts

Tuesday 7th July 2020 Commons Chamber

[Lee Anderson (Ashfield) (Con)]

First, I want to say a big thank you to all the staff and pupils in schools in Ashfield and Eastwood who have been brilliant during this pandemic: they really have gone the extra mile.

I welcome the Government’s continued commitment to increase investment in our education system, and I also welcome the £1 billion covid catch-up fund, which will help children who have lost teaching time. The national tutoring programme will allow disadvantaged children in Ashfield to access high-quality tuition, which is so important for their development and to give them a better chance of doing well in the future. The extra £1.5 billion to fund additional pension costs for teachers also means that more of the education budget can be directed to the frontline. There can be no doubt but that this Government have the best interests of our children at heart. All this is great news for the schools in my area, such as the brilliant Kingsway Primary School, which I visited recently, that has gone above and beyond to keep open.

Last December, seats such as mine in the midlands and the north turned blue for the first time in decades or for the first time ever, and with that came significant challenges. One of the challenges for me and other Conservative MPs in places such as Ashfield is that some schools have been ignored by previous MPs. They have gone under the radar, with no one to shout about them at the highest level. However, the good news is that in Ashfield we now have a Conservative MP—an MP who went to these very schools, as did his children. My family and my friends went to these schools, so it is personal for me, and I am going to do my best.

Only two thirds of young people in the Ashfield area attend a school judged to be good or outstanding, whereas the figure for Nottinghamshire is nine out of 10 young people attending a school judged to be good or outstanding. I believe that even in some of the most deprived areas schools can thrive with the right management and leadership. It is a bit like the NHS, in that it is not always about throwing endless amounts of cash around: get the right management and dedicated staff, and our schools can flourish.

There can be no better example of this than Leamington Primary School in Ashfield. This school overall serves a disadvantaged area of my community, and it was languishing in the satisfactory category, but it has been transformed since being part of the Flying High Trust. The school has now been rated good, and it is having a tremendous impact on children’s lives. This school was not the first choice for many parents, but now there is a waiting list. The credit for this goes to the headteacher, Kaye McGuire, and the Flying High Trust, which is one of the highest performing primary multi-academy trusts in the country.

With great leadership and hard work, anything is possible—Leamington Primary School is proof of this—but where there is poor management and poor leadership, with no intervention from local MPs no amount of money can make a school successful. So I welcome all the extra investment, which will undoubtedly help the young people in Ashfield get a better education. I would like to thank the Secretary of State for Education for visiting Ashfield recently, and I would also like to thank the Minister for School Standards for agreeing to meet me to discuss how we can improve educational standards in Ashfield.