Showing posts with label Lisa Nandy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lisa Nandy. Show all posts

Thursday 1 September 2016

Progressive Alliance Panel at Green Party Conference

Friday 2 September, 18.30-19.45
Progressive Alliances: The case for cross-party working and why it could be a game-changer for the Green Party

This session will explore the various options that collectively get called a 'progressive alliance'. It will launch a new book on this, “The Alternative”, which has been co-edited by 3 of our panellists. Signed copies will be available for sale afterwards. It will also launch the Green House report, The Green Case for a Progressive Pact, which will also be on sale at the event.

Chair - Zoe Williams has been a columnist on the Guardian since 2000 - previously, she wrote a column for the London Evening Standard.  In her ceaseless endeavour to smash the patriarchy, she contributes to various magazines and news weeklies, including Marie Claire, Glamour, Good Housekeeping, Red and Grazia.  Broadcasting includes Question Time, the Daily Politics, The Politics Show and Newsnight for the BBC; Dispatches and the Channel Four News for Channel Four; a paper review for Sky News; and appearances on the Today programme, Any Questions, Woman's Hour, PM and the World Tonight for BBC Radio Four. She was 2014's Restaurant Reviewer of the Year, 2013's Print Journalist of the Year for the Speaking Together Awards, 2011's Columnist of the Year at the Workworld awards and is author of three non-fiction books, Get It Together: Why We Deserve Better Politics, The Madness of Modern Parenting and Bring It On, Baby.
Rupert Read chairs Green House (www.greenhousethinktank.org ). He co-authored Green House's report on prospects for a progressive pact and was the Green Party parliamentary candidate for Cambridge in 2015. 
Caroline Lucas was elected as Member of Parliament for Brighton Pavilion in 2010. She served as leader of the Green Party of England and Wales from 2008 to 2012. From 1999-2010 she served as one of the Party's first MEPs and represented the South East region until becoming the UK's first Green MP in 2011. 
Neal Lawson is Chair of the good society pressure group Compass and was author of All Consuming (Penguin, 2009) and co-editor of The Progressive Century (Palgrave, 2001). He serves on the Advisory Board of We own it!, is a Contributing Editor of the social democracy journal Renewal which he helped found and is an Associate Member at the Bauman Institute at Leeds University. He writes regularly for the Guardian and the New Statesman
Chris Bowers is a writer and broadcaster, specialising in tennis, environment and politics. He commentates on tennis for radio and television, has written several books, and counts as a tennis historian; he was the founder of the Environmental Transport Association in 1990, and works as a communications consultant for the European Federation for Transport and Environment; and he is the biographer of Nick Clegg. He is a former Liberal Democrat councillor on Lewes District Council, and stood for Parliament for the Lib Dems in 2010 and 2015. More on www.chrisbowers.org
Lisa Nandy is the Member of Parliament for Wigan. Since being elected she has campaigned in Parliament to tackle child abuse, to save the Education Maintenance Allowance and against human rights abuses in Palestine. She has fought against low pay and zero hours contracts and campaigned against growing poverty in Wigan and across the country. In September 2015 Lisa was appointed Shadow Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change. 

Friday 27 April 2012

Why Labour should not embrace free schools - by a Labour MP

As Brent Labour ponders whether to set up a free school with a partner in the borough they may be interested in this article in the New Statesman by Lisa Nandy, Labour MP for Wigan.

Andrew Adonis’s argument in the New Statesman last month that Labour should embrace free schools is selective, outdated and, in part, simply wrong.

In reality, free schools do not have the comprehensive and inclusive intake he claims. The catchment areas of the first 24 free schools tend to favour the better off, and consequently are populated by "middle class suburban people” according to research by the market analysts CACI. All of them take fewer children on free school meals than surrounding schools. At the West London Free School, for example, 23 per cent of pupils are eligible for free lunches, compared with 32 per cent in the five neighboring schools.

This is not an accident – it is inherent in the free schools model. The pattern has also emerged in Sweden, which pioneered free schools, where evidence suggests that free schools increase social segregation because they are, according to the Swedish Education Minister “generally attended by children of better educated and wealthy families making things even more difficult for children attending ordinary schools in poor areas.”

This backdoor selection is sanctioned by the Secretary of State, who says free schools must adhere to the admissions code, but allows "agreed variations", which have only been made public in response to freedom of information requests.

The problem with focusing only on free schools, as Adonis has done, is that schools are not islands. Tony Blair said a school “belonged to itself, for itself.” But schools are part of their community and what happens in one has an impact on children in another. Adonis ignores the enormous impact free schools have on other children, based on a model of surplus places, where good schools flourish and expand while others wither and die. This is great news for children, unless you happen to be stuck in a school with spare places and reduced funding while it is allowed to wither on the grapevine.

Similarly, the amount spent on free schools cannot fail to impact on other children. The amount spent per pupil in the first free schools is well above average, in part because the schools are smaller and because they are running at reduced capacity for the first few years. The West London Free School, for example, received £12,416 per pupil in its first year, compared to an average of £7,064. In addition, the set up costs are huge.
 The first round of capital funding amounted to £50 million which included £14 million for just one school building. Total capital costs for just the first 24 schools will range from £100-£130 million whilst nearly 100 civil servants are working on the free schools initiative in Whitehall. At a time when other schools are facing a real terms cut to their budgets over the next 3 years this seems shockingly unfair.

Adonis rightfully acknowledges the importance of teachers, as most politicians do, but is anyone actually listening to them? He argues for more centrally driven change, but visit any classroom across the country and teachers will tell you they are sick and tired of central reform.

The international evidence is clear, that autonomy and accountability work. But that points us away from Michael Gove’s free schools model which has taken away local accountability in the form of the local authority and centralised power in the hands of the Secretary of State.

We should be handing more power to teachers, not to Gove, increasing, not reducing local accountability and improving collaboration, not competition for places, so that children – particularly the most disadvantaged - are not left behind.

In practice this would mean teachers having more flexibility to decide what, how and when they teach. They might, for example, choose to teach by ability not year groups, and other forms of innovation that should be possible in any school, regardless of structure. It should be coupled with investment in lifelong learning and serious thinking about what happens to children outside the classroom, which matters above all to the children who most need our help.

Adonis looks to Singapore for lessons, but on a select committee visit to the country this year, ministers told us they were keen to learn from Britain about how to better equip their children for life and for the workforce. Similarly, Finland, which we visited last year, succeeds because of the status, pay and conditions of teachers, yet free schools can use unqualified teachers and are not required to adhere to national pay and conditions agreements. Michael Wilshaw, who Adonis cites as a champion of this model, was critical of the use of unqualified teachers at a recent appearance before the education select committee.

Adonis seems to have bought into Gove’s vision – that introducing competition, taking away "bureaucracy" and pursuing a relentless academic vision allows the brightest young people to do well, regardless of background. Gove ignores - and indeed has removed help for - the enormous practical barriers that exist for those children.

Free schools are part of that vision. To paraphrase Andy Burnham, it’s a vision for some children, and some schools, not all children and all schools. Labour can do better than that.
Lisa Nandy is the Labour MP for Wigan.