Congratulations to the Open University on its first forty years. Never mind all the cheap jibes about late night hangover TV with scientists with no dress sense and wobbly props. The OU was a great idea, and brought higher education for mature students within the remit of the many and not the few – spot the
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Shame on me for not blogging for a fortnight – too much happening!
But yesterday was a special day because we had David Cameron and the Shadow Cabinet meeting in Preston, and then David went on to do a Town Hall meeting in Fleetwood. I went along to the Conservative Club there with some of our
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I was pleased to attend the Rossall Beach Residents Association’s initial open meeting last week. Well-attended and well-organised, I learnt a lot, and was able to share the key themes which had emerged from our residents survey.
The next day I was back at Beacon Hill to try their Headmasters hair salon for the first time.
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There are some schools in Blackpool that do seem to get a bad press. Beacon Hill is one of them – it’s a National Challenge school, for example, which means they struggle to hit the 30% getting Grades C or above in 5 GCSEs including maths and English. Equally, I knew what a lot of
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One of the more impressive parts of Barack Obama’s inauguration speech was his promise to assess the effectiveness of government spending programmes, and stop those that weren’t achieving what they were meant to achieve. Well here’s an example of that from the UK. The aim of the Government’s scheme was to place some 2,000 ‘vulnerable
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The Pleasure Beach announced today that the local landmark restaurant, the White Tower, is set to restrict itself only to private bookings. For many, this is an ‘end of an era’ moment and, inevitably, another “nail in the coffin”. We have plenty of them in Blackpool, it seems, these days.
Stop for a moment though. Is it
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I had a very rewarding two and a half hour session with the Cabinet Member (Don Clapham) and Director (David Lund) of Children’s Services here in Blackpool yesterday, alongside David’s Assistant Directors. We had a fascinating, wide-ranging discussion that encompassed not just education but the wide range of ways in which services to children now
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Labour’s fifty day deadline for three Blackpool schools to turn their performance round is no solution.
I support the Government’s Academy programme, but failing schools need to be turned into Academies now, not after more years of failure. They also need to be given genuine freedom to innovate and improve, yet Ed Balls has tied
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Blackpool Gazette’s headlines feature all too many murders these days. In the news pages, you read of violent attacks all along the seafront, some fuelled by alcohol, some not. Government ministers talk all the time about anti-social behaviour and what they are going to do about it – but the perception it is getting worse
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