State Schools Underperform in Kent under the Conservatives

11.02.20pm UTC (GMT +0000) Sun 27th Jun 2004

Liberal Democrats are concerned about the number of underperforming schools in Kent

At the Special County Council Meeting held to debate the performance of KCC services, Martin Vye, County Councillor for Canterbury South, and Liberal Democrat Spokesman for Education, accused the Conservative administration of being complacent about the serious problems facing Kent's schools.

"I recognise the immense amount of hard work done by schools and LEA officers and their achievement in improving education in Kent. But the stark facts are that there are 30 schools in need of special measures, with serious weaknesses, or causing concern.

"Kent has fewer schools judged to be good or excellent than the national average. Kent has fewer children achieving the nationally required standard in literacy at the end of primary school than the national average, and fewer achieving the national standard in numeracy."

The Conservatives attempted to blur the clear outline of failure by saying that Kent does better in terms of children achieving good GCSE results.

But Martin countered: "This is sheer complacency. If we had no schools under-performing, if we could bring all schools up to a good standard, if we could ensure that children did better at the end of primary education, then Kent's GCSE results would be better - and that is surely what the Conservative administration should be concentrating on."

Martin asked for a group of Members to be set up as a matter of urgency to examine the reasons for this underperformance in some of Kent's schools.

"We need to know why" said Martin. "Of course, I am not asking for this to be done in public - it does no good to subject individual schools to public exposure. But as Councillors, we owe it to those who elected us to get to the bottom of this worrying under-performance."