Tories fail local pupils

“We need to clear out of the way the argument about grammar schools. It has been a chain around our necks.”

So said, the current Prime Minister, David Cameron in 2007. And alas it seems our Medway Tories are proving it to be true once more.

Our dogmatic and ideologically pure Tories are reverting to type. As this blog predicted the Medway Conservatives, short of actual policy substance on education are once again banging a false drum on grammar schools.

No one has threatened the Medway Grammar schools, not one parent anti-group has been established and not one member of the opposition is even remotely interested in having the debate. Under 13 years of a Labour Government they remained; strengthened even, as per-pupil investment was increased.

The irony of the Medway Tory charge is the only people to attack the grammar schools in recent years have been the Conservatives themselves.

David Cameron stoked the row over grammar schools in 2007, when he attacked those that keep talking about the schools as engaging in “ideological self-indulgence” and claimed that he was “determined to move on from a sterile debate about building a few more grammar schools”.

The Prime Minister argued: “Parents will not forgive any political party’s ideological self-indulgence on education, at a time when 355,000 pupils are failing to get five good GCSEs, including English and maths.”

Cameron has a point on this. Whilst the Medway Tories are happy to naval gaze on the schools which are doing well, they are ignoring the real problem schools in the area, primarily those who are failing one third of pupils under the age of 11 years old.

The issue of education in Medway is not on the grammar school system; let parents make their own minds up on this without any prodding from local politicians.

It is on the failure of a number of some secondary modern schools and a high number of primary schools.

Whilst Medway Conservatives moan about a non-issue they control a Local Education Authority which occupies the bottom of the Primary School league tables in England and Wales

These results are damning indictment on the Conservative administration and the state of education in Medway, and points to a failure of the LEA to adequately support poor performing schools to ensure they improve there performance.

Almost a third of our pupils are failing to achieve the results they deserve despite years of per pupil funding increases from government.

The Tories are trying to fabricate a totally false debate whilst they are taking their eye off the ball on the failing schools.

If this issue proves anything it is that right wing dogma is not only damaging for Medway but it morally reprehensible because it fails those young people who should be the focus for the Council.

Medway Conservatives are being 'ideologically self-indulgent' and for that they deserved to be kicked out in May.