Hindley Green Community Primary School

Today was very special for me as an 8 year project to renew Hindley CPS on Thomas St officially opened.

The school is now in the Makerfield constituency having previously been part of the Leigh constituency so I was joined by Yvonne Fovargue MP and representatives from Wigan Council including Cllr Sue Loudon to officially open the new buildings and join with pupils, parents, governors and staff in celebrating this special day.

Andy Burnham responds to reports that school budgets have been hit with a last minute £155million cut

Michael Gove must immediately reinstate this money that schools were promised. They deserve better than the shambolic management of this Secretary of State. There is a growing state of chaos in the education budget as Michael Gove shuffles money around his department to put out one fire only to start another one somewhere else. Young people are bearing the brunt of his mismanagement.

Mr Gove’s claims to have protected school budgets and found more money for a pupil premium are increasingly laughable. From school sport to school buildings, Bookstart to EMA, he’s broken promises and got things wrong. And we still don’t know how he is funding his free schools programme. He needs to explain when he took the decision to claw back money that had already been allocated, and why Local Authorities are only finding out about it now.

Click here to view the report in today's Guardian.

Labour's Schools Policy Review Launched

This weekend, I announced details of Labour’s School Policy Review Group, entitled ‘What do families want from good, local schools? A comprehensive approach to raising aspiration and achievement.
 
A group of advisers have agreed to work with the Shadow Education Team to help them explore what families want from good local schools, and specifically:
     
· What knowledge and skills do the next generation need to be successful in the modern world?
· How can we continue to improve standards in English, Maths and Science, but also provide a balanced curriculum which meets the needs of all children?
· What influence and control do parents want over local schools and their own child’s education?
· How can we create the most professional and highest quality teaching workforce in the world?
 
The group includes mums, dads, governors, teachers, head teachers, business leaders and other experts in the education sector. They will be hearing from parents, teachers, children and others through public events and visits over the next few months.
 
Our schools were transformed in the last decade. Standards rose year on year with some of the highest ever results at every age. And we invested in our most valuable asset – 42,000 extra teachers who Ofsted called the “best generation ever”. Under-performing schools were turned around with well over a thousand brought above the basic GCSE benchmark.

But we didn’t get everything right. I want this review to explore how we can build on this progress by considering where we went wrong, where there is further to go, and where a changing world requires new approaches.

In recent years, results for the poorest children improved faster than the rest but the challenge remains to eliminate educational inequality. And as our economy changes, we need to make sure we are equipping children with the knowledge and skills they need to get on in the modern world.

There are difficult questions to explore, such as how we get the balance right between academic and vocational study, national clarity and local autonomy, and competition and collaboration.

My fundamental test for any education policy is if it will help all children to be the best they can be and help all schools to be good schools.
 

Tory led Government has distorted Labour's Academies Scheme

The Tory-led government has distorted Labour’s Academies scheme from one which improves the weakest schools to one which helps only the strongest at the expense of the majority of other schools.

Labour's Academies scheme offered greater resources, new leadership and a fresh start to schools which were struggling. The Tory-led government's Academies programme focuses the extra resources and freedoms that we gave to struggling schools on to those already doing well.

Labour worked to ensure that schools with high numbers of children eligible for free school meals and registered as having Special Educational Needs got the extra resources they needed to excel. The Tory-led government's Academies programme will mean local authority funds for these vital services will be cut to fund additional resources for the few.

This is part of Michael Gove's free-market experiment with our schools system. As ever with this Secretary of State he has got his figures hopelessly wrong, he promised over 1,000 new academies. Only a fifth of that number have come forward. That shows the real reservations headteachers have about this government's direction of travel towards a divided, elitist and competitive education system.

New league tables will have devastating effect on morale.

I am worried that Michael Gove’s new league tables will have a devastating effect on morale in our schools and create a new generation of failing schools.

Labour supports academic rigour, which is why we included English and Maths in performance tables and promoted an increase in the take up of separate sciences. But we also support student choice which this prescriptive and narrow English Bac will take away.

This Government preaches autonomy and choice, but its actions are top-down and backward-looking. Michael Gove’s message to young people – that they can study Latin but not ICT – show he is not living in the real world.

The Secretary of State seems intent on rubbishing the achievements of heads, teachers and students who will struggle to see the fairness in why they should now be judged on something they only learned about seven weeks ago.

You would think that Mr Gove had learned his lesson from recent U-turns he has been forced to make. But yet again we see him rushing through his changes at breakneck speed and with no consultation.

As a result, improving schools in some of the most challenging areas will see themselves plummet down the league tables – putting at risk all of the progress they have made. It will knock the stuffing out of them, particularly those that have worked hard to improve standards for all children and offer a mix of academic and vocational learning.