Will schools in financial difficulties receive the Flybe treatment from Kelly Tolhurst MP, the new Minister of State for Education? In her career the Minister has served as a PUS – or first rank of the ministerial ladder – across three departments, plus a couple of months over this summer in the Whip’s Office, where she had previously served in a junior role in 2018. Kelly Tolhurst, MP for Rochester and Strood in Kent is possibly best remembered for being the Minister sent out explain the refusal to bail out the airline Flybe when it ran into turbulent financial conditions at the start of the covid pandemic.

“Unfortunately, in a competitive market, companies do fail, and it is not the role of Government to prop them up.

Given the time of year, the nature of Flybe’s business and fleet, and the routes that it flies, sufficient alternative transport arrangements should be available, either with other airlines or by road and rail.”

Hansard 5^th March 2020

Hopefully, the new minister will be more understanding about the financial position of schools as they wrestle with the present financial crisis. As her role at the in the Business Department involved responsibility for small businesses, the MP should be well aware of the challenges that schools will face. As a supporter of the free market, she may well want to see whether the Department is spending its cash wisely on issues such as teacher recruitment and SEND.

As I mentioned in a previous post, the constraints of a national Funding Formula that can be ignored when times are good may also need to be something to be considered, especially the differences between maintained schools and academies when it comes to shifting cash around.

As an MP for Rochester, Kelly Tohurst will know of the stark differences between the town’s schools, where some are comprehensives that are operating alongside selective schools, and will as a businesswomen understand both the costs of re-organising the system nationally to benefit the few rather than the many, and the links between the school system and the need for a modern skilled workforce, something some of her predecessors may have seemed less concerned about.

As in other areas with selective schools, private secondary schools are thin on the ground in the Rochester area of Medway Council and that should be a warning to any government thinking of expanding selective education. The cost to the state of parents switching from private education to state selective schooling should be enough to dissuade any government from taking our school system back to the nineteenth Century as means of creating a twenty first century growth economy.

The Secretary of State should be familiar with issues such as youth offending and the variations between different groups and their schooling. I would hope that this will be a serious consideration for the new residents of Sanctuary Buildings, perhaps more so than under recent inhabitants.

Finally, I would again make my please for Jacob’s Law, whereby children in care are guaranteed a school pace within 14 days of the State taking over parental responsibility. This needs the promised change in the administration of in-year admissions and would befit the education of these children often taken from their families with no say in the matter and dumped in a different part of the country.