Letter for publication: school places rebuttal
Cllr Reuben Thompstone (letters 10/7/14) is trying to pull the wool over people’s eyes concerning class sizes in infant schools. The Department for Education figures confirm the numbers I previously published, that 1,343 children are in larger sized classes over 30. I suspect his number reflects the fact that so many of Barnet’s schools have been forced out of the Local Education Authority system into the Conservative’s mishmash of academies and free schools and the like, so the Council can wash their hands of them- and so he only counts the few that remain, rather than all the schools in the borough.
Class sizes have gone up since Conservative Education Secretary Michael Gove removed the maximum class size rule introduced by the last Labour Government.
As for extra places and investment in schools, Cllr Thompstone conveniently overlooks the fact that much of the major investment in our schools was through the resources I secured when I was Hendon’s MP from the then Labour Government, for example in Deansbrook, Hasmonean and St Vincent’s.
The rapidly coming challenge is for secondary school places: if the Conservatives had not abolished Labour’s “Building Schools for the Future” programme when they took power in 2010, we would be in a much better place than now, to meet this looming issue.
Andrew Dismore
Labour parliamentary candidate for Hendon
79 the Burroughs
NW4 4AX