Giving Every Child the Best Start in Life

Rachel Gilmour Excerpts

Wednesday 16th July 2025 Commons Chamber

[Rachel Gilmour (Tiverton and Minehead) (LD)]

The best start in life means a good education; good education means a good school; and a good school necessarily means a learning environment in which children can thrive. Tiverton high school in my constituency should not be an exception to that, but because of the decisions of successive Governments, it has been. I will focus my remarks on the plight of that school, and perhaps it will serve as a microcosm and an example to which other members may well relate in the communities they represent.

Upon visiting Tiverton, one could be forgiven for being sucked into a sense of complacency, with the rolling hills and period buildings in and around the area. Yet hidden there are serious pockets of deprivation, economic and social poverty, and we can feel it. Tiverton high school has been promised a rebuild since 1999—yes, that is 26 years ago—but time after time, successive Administrations of different stripes did not deliver, reneging on those promises.

Since my arrival in this place, I have pushed relentlessly to secure a concrete commitment on Tiverton high school’s rebuild. Indeed, I was filled with optimism because in November last year, the Department for Education confirmed Tiverton high school’s inclusion in the school rebuilding programme, with work set to commence as early as April 2025. Finally, it seemed that the Government had grasped the nettle. Finally, they had heeded the calls, for they had grown impossible to ignore. It was going to happen, I thought; perhaps this was it.

The long-standing promises of a rebuild, which dissipated each time, have meant that Tivvy high, as we affectionately call it, saw routine maintenance and refurbishments fall by the wayside. A culture of “Keep calm and carry on” set in, with the anticipation that the cavalry, or the diggers, would arrive to get the rebuild underway.

The 1970s sports hall is riddled with asbestos, rendering it entirely unusable for many months of the year and depriving students of essential physical education. To make matters worse, the school was built on a floodplain, which is a crucial detail that is blithely skipped over and which was not acknowledged in the pre-assessment conducted by the Department for Education. The Environment Agency has also reported the regular flooding of multiple school buildings to be a risk to life, particularly if someone is under five foot. That is utter madness in 21st-century Britain.

The school is dilapidated and not an environment that is at all conducive to learning. Instead, such an environment leads pupils to feel unnurtured, thrown on to society’s scrapheap and simply forgotten about. What kind of message does that send to children? If the Department for Education rowed back on the promise of a rebuild, it would be not just a political misstep but would see a whole community shunned again. It would be a cruel volte-face. To be clear, we are talking about the hope of a community that has been strung along for a quarter of a century being reduced to a line in a ministerial briefing.

They say that politics is the art of the grey, and I will not walk away empty handed on this. I am absolutely sure of that. After all these years, the community needs this pledge to be honoured.