Public meeting, the day's news and Lib Dem education

Busy day trying to do the day job. One of the difficulties of being a candidate is life must go on and salaries earnt. The incumbent has the luxury of no longer having a day job, as they are technically not a MP and they therefore have the time to spend on the campaign.

Last night we held the first of what we hope will be a series of public meetings. Weather was pretty foul so I was pleased we got as many there as we did. Was quite worried beforehand as you never know how these things will go but in fact enjoyed the experience in the end. Will now look to lining up a few more.

There has been an odd mood to the campaign so far. The death of the Pope and the royal wedding have caused a ‘stop start’ campaign. We had no campaigning activity at all last Sunday, nothing tomorrow apart from some delivery and the same on Saturday.

I see that at his press conference this morning Tony Blair refused to rule out tax rises after the next election. There are now so many economic organisations that are predicting rises that it is rather difficult for him to spin away from this. I gather that Blair and Brown are both sponsored by Unions who are calling for windfall taxes on banks. The Lib Dems meanwhile are at least coming clean that they want higher taxes.

Of interest to me was the launch of the Lib Dem education policy. Very simply they seem to have got the wrong focus on what they are trying to do. Abolishing faith schools and grammar schools is really somewhat of a nonsense. In fact under this Government, although they would not want to admit it, the number of new faith based schools has expanded through their City Academies scheme. The Lib Dem policy of scrapping GCSE’s and ‘A’ levels is also a mess. Like their income tax proposal this policy is about changing the system without changing the problem. Changing the system is not about driving up standards. The Conservative proposal to tackle the bad behaviour of some pupils that destroy the education of others by their actions is something that schools need. Giving power to Headteachers and school governors to exclude pupils is better than trying to force excluded pupils back into mainstream schools, which is the Lib Dem proposal.

One of the key features of the Lib Dem proposal was the reduction of class sizes to twenty. This might sound very appealing. However, as someone who works in the education sector, the jury is definitely out in terms of the benefits of this. A recent report has shown that when Labour reduced class sizes to 30 for 5,6 and 7 year olds the educational benefits were negligible. In any case I have no idea where they believe they would get the money to employ 2 or 3 new teachers per school as well as build the new classrooms. In fact it is well known we are facing a teacher crisis in about five years time.

I was closely involved in Kingston when we lowered the class sizes from 32 to 30 and the rows and unhappiness this led to in both the schools and the communities was immense. That was only six years ago. So, it would be interesting to hear from the Lib Dems where they would be putting what would be the equivalent of 3 or 4 new infant schools considering the immense problems we had to find space and build on educational land for the reductions in 1999. But as I have said before, because none of their policies would be implemented they can get away with this!