Mayor Dave - Investing in our Schools and Scrapping Temporary Classrooms

Writing in his latest monthly column for the Times and Citizen, Mayor Dave Hodgson has congratulated local students and teachers for the remarkable recent achievements of local schools. In the article, Mayor Dave also writes about the recently-announced school investment plan, which will see all temporary classrooms in the borough replaced with high quality permanent facilities.

Here's the full text of the column:

"As reported on the front page of the Times and Citizen recently, temporary classrooms are to become a thing of the past here in Bedford Borough under our £48 million schools investment plan. The programme will also invest in extra capacity where it is needed and ensure that schools have the facilities they need to provide high standards of teaching and learning. Crucially, the national crisis in primary school places will be avoided here in the Borough, due to careful planning and targeted investment including the construction of several brand new schools.

Thanks to the hard work of students and local schools we have seen a series of extremely positive developments in local education recently. Against a backdrop of the first national decline in GCSE results for many years, the 5 A* - C (with English and Maths) performance figure rocketed up here by over 6 per cent. We have also seen the remarkable progress by schools across the borough endorsed by Ofsted, with over 90% currently graded as good or outstanding. Ofsted's latest annual report in December named Bedford Borough as the second best place in the country for a child to attend lower or primary school, on the basis of the proportion of children attending good or outstanding schools.

This is all extremely encouraging, and we should take the time to say a big thank you and indeed well done to everyone involved in the ongoing task of driving up standards including students, teachers, governors, parents and whole school communities. As well as our support, schools also need investment to continue this process and ensure that current and future generations of local children can be provided with the high standard of education they deserve. That's what our schools investment plan is all about."