Co-operatives in Education

Sarah Newton Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd October 2013 Westminster Hall

[Steve Baker]

They had very good PR. A couple of things struck me. First, they did not trade on credit, so people did not get into debt to consume, which is an interesting lesson for present times. Secondly, they made a surplus. They did not like to call it a profit, but they realised that they had to make a surplus over time, and doing so enabled them to succeed. A lot of interesting language was involved in that conversation, and I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his information.

In April 2010, Cressex community school became part of the Cressex Co-operative Learning Trust. I remember my first visit to the school after the election because I encountered a defiant spirit of autonomy and independence. There was a whisper of forced academisation because of its results, but there was fierce determination to remain a co-operative because of the way that the co-operative structure allows all parties to be engaged across the community.

The proper context of the results includes the selective system. As a Conservative in Buckinghamshire, I am expected to support selective education, but a whole tier of students at Cressex has been taken off to another school, which naturally depresses the overall results. There is no denying that Buckinghamshire county council is one of the most affluent in the south-east, but a high proportion of Cressex students and their families experience levels of disadvantage equal to those in northern cities. Nearly half of Cressex students live on estates that are among the most economically disadvantaged in England, with areas of entrenched poverty and low skills. The proportion of families with experience of higher education is below the national average and the proportion of children living in overcrowded households exceeds the national average. More than half of students have been eligible for free school meals in the past six years and are entitled to the pupil premium.

Although Wycombe has an ethnic minority population of around one fifth, 80% of the school’s pupils are from minorities and the school now receives increasing numbers of students from eastern Europe. Crucially, about three quarters of the students do not speak English as their first language. That is the context for Cressex school, and that is the challenge to which it must rise.

[Sarah Newton (Truro and Falmouth) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate. Deprivation is found not only in urban areas. There is considerable deprivation in remote rural communities such as Cornwall. In areas such as the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall, we have often found co-operative trusts to be a good way of providing education to deprived remote communities where there are lots of small primary schools that face challenges in delivering high-quality education. Does my hon. Friend agree that the model can work for a broad range of communities throughout the UK?

[Steve Baker]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I will come to the success of the model elsewhere, but I am aware that it has been a rip-roaring success in Cornwall. I originally come from Cornwall, which reminds me that we tend to focus on our own constituencies. There is rural poverty in Wycombe, but the rural part of my constituency is generally the better-off part. We still live in times of considerable inequality throughout the country and in our constituencies, and that focuses the mind.