PETERBOROUGH LABOUR PARTY

Hundreds of pupils in Peterborough do not get place of choice

In Peterborough there is trouble and disappointment for many as the Conservative council have closed too many neighbourhood secondary schools and now we face a shortage of Places in the Peterborough Parliamentary Constituency. The Conservative Local Education Authority have admitted taht 400 pupils have not been given their parents choice of secondary school.

·                         Labour is committed to raising school standards so that every parent has a good local school to send their children to at the end of their primary years.

·                         Last year in England over four in five children (82 per cent) got a place at their first choice school, while 94 per cent secured a place at one of their top three choices. The situation remains worse in Peterborough despite more and more government funding as the Conservative council have made things worse despite record finding. How on earth have they managed this.

In Peterborough children have been offered places that are not local with too many from the Peterborough constituency being told the only place available is south of the river in North West Cambridgeshire, this even included children from far away as Thorney last year

Labour Parliamentary Candidate for Peterborough Ed Murphy is calling for the conservative administration to get a grip of the situation and if necessary let other authorities run the education services in Peterborough. he said:

“The Government have provided increased funding for Peterborough but the conservative council have made a mess of finances running a deficit budget and losing on investments. I am concerned that the Conservatives considered taking away devolved schools budgets and not passing on the full 5.1% allocated for our schools. Perhaps it would be better if other better performing and more capable authorities such as Cambridgeshire or Lincolnshire were to take over the role of the education authority. We could make savings by reducing senior councillor’s salaries and having fewer directors on four figure fees and salaries. The Tories can not continue to do nothing to address the problems. The present budget outurn and plans for the next three years are precarious to say the least. The most recent response has been to announce hundreds redundancies, but there is no budget allocation to fund any redundancy payments. The Conservative councillors closed five secondary schools and now consequently have a serious shortage of places available in the Peterborough Constituency, pupils have to travel too far and some are not getting into a local school at all or are waiting months.

“Over recent years the Peterborough Conservatives have run the council like some second rate shoddy business financed by attempts to flog off our green spaces and school sites to friendly developers. A Labour education authority would ensure that every parent has a good local school to send their children at the end of their primary years. That is why we have a relentless focus on raising school standards and why we are investing heavily in new buildings and other school improvement programmes like the National Challenge.  It is a shame that the Peterborough Conservative council administration has been closing secondary schools quicker than we are investing in new ones.

The increased national funding for new schools is there to improve education and this is made really difficult when Conservatives in Peterborough demolish flog off existing school sites such as Bretton Woods and John Mansfield. Conservative Councillors at PRC also backed the scrapping of A levels there and we have many sixth formers now going to other towns to study.

"The Schools Admissions Code has transformed the fairness of the system. We now have a fairer school admissions process where it is illegal to discriminate on the grounds of race, parent's income or occupation or on the basis of an interview with the Head. 
"These two things - making every local school a good school and a fair admissions system - are step by step what we have been doing over the past 11 years and we have been trying to accelerate in the past two years.

"But it is never going to feel fully fair to parents if they can't get their child into their first choice school and this is the case for too many parents in Peterborough today. More than eight out of ten parents get their first choice but until every school is a good school and there isn't a concentration of oversubscription in some, then there are going to be disappointment, so there is more to do.

"I will continually look at the admissions code so that in areas where there is over-subscription, the fairest possible arrangements are in place. I intervened two years ago to change the boundary for the Thomas Deacons Academy when the Conservative administration had promoted a racist admissions policy 

·                         Ed Balls Labour Education Minister has asked the Schools Adjudicator to make clear in guidance and in the Admissions Code that twins should not be split up when parents do not want them to be.

·                         Labour's Admissions Code outlaws unfair practices like interviews and application forms which ask details about parents' marital status or occupation.

·                         We are committed to ensuring that all parents have a choice of good local schools. Today there are too many schools in Peterborough with less than 30 per cent of pupils achieving five or more GCSEs at grades A*-C including English and Maths – and this has dropped in the last two years. Nationally and in surrounding Counties the result have been getting better and better.

·                         The Tories oppose Labour's strategic approach to school improvement through National Challenge and they do not support our efforts to enforce the Admissions Code. The shadow schools secretary Michael Gove recently called for a ‘first come, first served' system where parents can put their child's name down at birth to guarantee a place at the state school of their choice. (Source: Daily Telegraph, 6 February 2009).