By Andrew Gray
This May, I was delighted to once again be elected to represent my home ward of Shinfield.
One of my greatest motivations to become a councillor was to improve the lives for young people in our borough. It is something I care deeply about.
Since the widespread academisation of schools in recent years, the control local authorities have over the running of schools has diminished, in favour of more centralised, national oversight.
Councils still have huge responsibilities for children with special educational needs and those in care, but this increasingly requires working alongside schools which sit outside of the local authority model.
This is why, to improve the futures of children in the borough, we need real change at a national level.
Fourteen years of Tory austerity has damaged our schools. Teacher vacancies are at an all-time high, an issue which needs to be urgently addressed if we are to provide high- quality education for everyone across the borough.
Only a Labour government can provide the much-needed change the borough is crying out for.
Michael Gove’s vision for education was to develop a free market system, where schools would compete, be ranked in national league tables, and judged on single word Ofsted judgements.
In the current recruitment crisis, it is evident how this vision is failing our children.
Where a school faces challenges, they can easily fall into a vicious cycle of school league tables, Ofsted judgments and recruitment issues.
As a councillor, I want to see every school in the borough thrive, and the Conservative’s vision of school competition just doesn’t work.
That’ s why as a local authority, we need a Labour government that will bring in education policies that will benefit everyone.
A Labour government will scrap one word Ofsted judgments that can cause school leaders and teachers so much stress and extra workload.
Labour would also deliver mentoring programmes to new senior leaders to help them navigate the challenges of school leadership to ensure they are fully supported in their journey.
Along with recruiting 6,500 new teachers, these simple changes would help teacher and leader retention so schools have the stability they desperately need to secure the future of our schools.
As a teacher in the borough and a councillor, I don’t just want my students and my school to flourish, I want every child wherever they live in the borough to have access to great educational opportunities.
Councillors can have some influence on this, but real change will be underpinned by transformational national policy.
In May we saw that our borough wanted change. This year, there were more Labour councillors elected than ever before in the history of Wokingham borough. But an even bigger change our community can make will be to elect a Labour government in July; to change the course of the futures of the young people in our borough for the better.
Cllr Andrew Gray is a Labour councillor for Shinfield on Wokingham Borough Council
