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School Funding (Wyre Forest)

I am very grateful for that intervention. My hon. Friend is an example of just how good the education system in Wyre Forest can be: he has come from Kidderminster to Westminster and has done very well as a newly elected Member of Parliament. He raises a very interesting point. The school was initially endowed by Harry Cheshire, a local philanthropist, and due to changes over the past few years it is now called Baxter college. I shall certainly take up that issue with the headmaster; I know that my hon. Friend is very keen on this campaign. The idea was to have a learning village that contained not just Baxter college and St John's primary, but Wyre Forest special school. That school would have accommodated, on the same site, the unusually large number of special needs children that, for historic reasons, we have in Wyre Forest, alongside regular pupils. The three linked proposals that I have described demonstrate an economy of scale that I hope the Minister would welcome, but the vision of the Baxter learning village not only encompasses value for money, but just as significantly teaches the importance of inclusion to all pupils on the site. The special needs school must go ahead irrespective of BSF or any other building programmes for the more regular schools in Wyre Forest, and the county council has therefore had to divert funds to that important resource. That has had knock-on effects elsewhere in the Wyre Forest school building programme. The council has found money from its own resources to build a number of schools, but has had to cancel the rebuild of a further three primary schools: Franche primary school is suffering a split site and the significant dilapidation of its estate; St Oswald's has manageable problems but is facing a bulge in entry and desperately needs two new classrooms; and Cookley primary is in a class of its own. I would like to talk about Burlish Park and Cookley primary schools together. These two schools, for me, epitomise all that is good and all that is bad about the primary schools in Wyre Forest. That we are asking teachers and staff to work in these conditions is appalling. That they are doing so, and doing as good a job as they can, is a testament to the incredible dedication of the teaching staff that I have met both at these and at other schools across Wyre Forest. The two schools highlight the appalling problems that we face locally. Burlish Park was built as a first school, but it is now taking children from nursery to year 6. Some 470 children have to take lunch in not one, or two, but three sittings. There is nowhere to accommodate children on wet playtimes. Classes are taken in a corridor alongside gym and dance lessons. The school's pupils cannot congregate together in one go. The staff room is too small to accommodate even a small proportion of the staff, who have to prepare for lessons at home using their own IT equipment. Seventy female staff have just two lavatories between them. We always say that it is not buildings that teach, but teachers. However, if a teacher has to queue for 20 minutes to use the bathroom, that causes classes significant problems. When looking through the school's 20-page urgent maintenance schedule, the head teacher and I totted up more than £1 million of urgent maintenance work in just three or four pages. The school is derelict. Cookley has similar problems. The school is based in a Victorian school block and so is arguably better built than the 1960s block at Burlish Park, but its accommodation problems are just as bad. A series of classes in corridors and the building's antiquated layout meant that the school only just received a provisional pass from Ofsted. That was because the safeguarding provisions were far below standard, but Ofsted was prepared to pass the school because it was due for a rebuild. We can only assume that it will be very unhappy if the situation is not resolved. These two schools illustrate how the good-will elastic band can be stretched only so far. Staff and parents have had their good will stretched just about as far as it will go. With the cancellation of the rebuilding programme, the light at the end of the tunnel has been extinguished, and that is unfair. In Bewdley, the high school has had a partial rebuild, but there are dilapidation issues, as well as safeguarding issues where the school grounds back unguarded on to the fast-flowing River Severn. Wolverley high school has its own portakabin village, but these temporary classrooms are rotting and need replacing imminently. The schools that I have described make up the 11 schools that have been hit by the BSF cancellation. However, Wyre Forest is even unluckier than that. The five secondary schools are part of a wider consortium of schools known as the ContinU Trust, a collegiate trust comprising Wyre Forest's five secondary schools, two secondary schools from Bromsgrove and Kidderminster college. At this point, I must declare an interest as I sit as a governor at Kidderminster college. Through the college, the trust was to have built a new learning centre on one of the redundant middle school sites, but the project was cancelled in the past 18 months or so as a result of the Learning and Skills Council funding fiasco, in which 144 colleges across the country lost their funding. That loss only adds to the accommodation problems in Wyre Forest. I am here to plead Wyre Forest's case on two principal issues: capacity and dilapidation. Across Wyre Forest, 23%—nearly a quarter—of pupils are in temporary accommodation, and that rises to 50% in some of the schools that I have mentioned. Teachers do not have basic needs met to allow them to prepare for classes. They do not have sufficient IT provision or quiet work areas and resource rooms where they can gather their thoughts. They are not given sufficient space to be able to rest in staff rooms, where staff can outnumber available chairs by 10 to one. There are not enough bathroom facilities for female staff, although male staff seem to be doing very well, because there are fewer men, and there is at least one lavatory per man. Pupils are taught in corridors in many schools. There is little or no storage space for equipment. Many pupils lack sufficient, safeguarded outside spaces. The wider estate is dilapidated. Given where Wyre Forest featured on the priority list—it was part of wave 6a of BSF—the school buildings have generally not been maintained. That was done on the instructions of the county council and, ultimately, the Department for Education, to save resources for the new rebuild. The dilapidation is quite acute, and the cost of carrying out essential maintenance work is immense. The economies of scale in the building programme still to be carried out are a huge incentive to undertake all the remaining building works in quick succession and to use joint sites, as I described earlier. The plans put forward for Wyre Forest are exciting and incredibly well thought through. Failing to deliver at this late stage would be to lose an incredible opportunity for a comprehensive, district-wide schools building programme. Officers at Worcestershire county council will work with civil servants at the Department for Education, and they will put a comprehensive and excellent case for Wyre Forest. As I said, I am incredibly grateful to Lord Hill for his meeting last week, but, in my closing words, I ask the Minster to reinforce the message that we are trying to deliver. There is acute dilapidation in the estate and a severe lack of space for staff and pupils. We want the opportunity to deliver excellent value for money through economies of scale by completing the work started almost a decade ago and delivering 21st century schools for Wyre Forest.