Letter: Schools claim is uneducated

Correspondent • Published 29 Apr 2010 10:00 0 Comments

Over the last 12 years, Reading's Labour council, with the support of the Labour Government, has spent £125m rebuilding the crumbling schools it inherited from the Tories.

The John Madejski Academy is new, as are The Avenue, George Palmer, Norcot Nursery, and Caversham Nursery and almost every school in Reading has had substantial investment. Now Tory candidates Alok Sharma and Rob Wilson (Chronicle, April 22) are misleading parents by promising "a whole new generation of good small schools".

This must be some sort of joke? The investment required for "a whole new generation of schools" would be many times greater than the £125m Labour has spent, and George Osborne is planning to cut spending on schools, not increase it. Maybe the Tories believe this new generation of schools will somehow be funded by parents working with private companies. Not many parents have access to that sort of money either! And as the chair of the Reading Governors' Association I can assure them that very few school governors want to get into that sort of fundraising; they just want what is best for their existing schools.

And where would Mr Sharma and Mr Wilson build these schools? An all-party group of councillors, with heads and outside experts, looked a couple of years ago for sites where new schools could be built to meet the needs of our growing population, and there weren't that many empty sites around!

What the Tories are offering is shockingly unrealistic, and they ought to be ashamed of themselves for that, and for their total failure to acknowledge the huge progress that our schools have made while the Tories have been in opposition. If this is the best they can do, long may they remain there.

Peter Kayes, College Road, Reading

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