Building Schools for the Future

I wanted you to know my position on Building Schools for the Future.

Our first challenge was to renew our primary school buildings. I am proud that our primary schools have now been rebuilt or refurbished. While buildings alone cannot transform our education, investment in our school buildings has been long overdue.

The task now is to rebuild or refurbish secondary and special school buildings.  I have lobbied government for £200 million to enable this to happen.

My priority is to ensure that proposals submitted to government are right for Stoke-on-Trent as a whole and are also right for the cluster of primary, secondary and special schools in the North of the city.

I have attended all the consultation meetings and feel stronger than ever that the City Council must not only listen to what people are saying but take their views on board and involve them in the agenda for change.

I think the whole constituency wants to embrace change and I want to see the energy displayed at the consultation meetings directed towards achieving proposals that we can all feel comfortable with and support.

Along with my two colleagues, Mark Fisher MP and Rob Flello MP, I am therefore writing to let you know that we do not believe that the SERCO proposals as currently submitted by Stoke-on-Trent City Council are the right arrangement for secondary education.

Simply closing all the schools and replacing them with larger schools with no regard for existing specialisms and communities is not the best way forward for Stoke-on-Trent.  The existing proposals also fail to provide detailed projections of the number of future students and places for them in their locality.

I have consequently been working with our city MPs and secondary head teachers to produce an alternative vision. This alternative includes maintaining existing school sites at Brownhills, Haywood, James Brindley and Saint Margaret Ward (Holden Lane remains in its own separate cluster).  We also want different arrangements for special needs education to those proposed.