EDUCATION Secretary Gillian Keegan MP has sent a scathing response to false claims published in an open letter by a local Labour parliamentary candidate.
Sir Keir Starmer’s parachuted candidate sought to blame the Government for a shortage of school spaces at the Whitehaven Academy and Workington Academy site, seeking funding from a long-closed fund.
But Mrs Keegan reminded him that the Labour-led education authority is responsible for ensuring there are sufficient school places – and that this was among its statutory duties.
The level of funding allocated to schools is based on the capacity data provided by the education authority. However, the council and its predecessor Cumbria County Council – also Labour-led – indicated that “no additional places” were needed in year 7 to 11 for either of the Academies.
This led to 56 children being denied a place at Workington Academy this year, the town's only 'secular' secondary school.
The Education Secretary, who recently attended an education and skills fair in Workington organised by Mark, also said that the Department for Education did “not recognise” a departmental underspend mentioned in the open letter.
The Labour candidate for Whitehaven and Workington did not provide any evidence to support his claims, and Mrs Keegan said that the local authority had been recently provided with an additional £5.5 million specifically to support the provision of new school places in Cumbria, part of the £28m allocated locally for new school places since 2011.
Because Mark was named in the earlier correspondence, Mrs Keegan chose to copy him into her reply – though the Labour candidate has so far failed to publish the detailed response to his unfounded criticisms.
Mark Jenkinson MP said: “The Labour candidate has been well and truly schooled by the Education Secretary.
“He knows full well that local education provision is the responsibility of the Labour-led council, yet he consistently fails to call them out on anything - bin strikes, planning failures, bus cuts, potholes and now school places are all ignored.
“Cumberland Council is letting down the young people of Workington and Whitehaven, yet he is choosing to deflect from their failure again instead of holding them to account.
“As the Education Secretary has indicated in her reply, Cumberland Council has a statutory duty to provide sufficient school places.
“The level of capital funding provided to schools annually by the Government is based on the local authority’s own assessment, yet the data it provided indicated that no extra places were required. This is despite the council’s projections suggesting that there may not be a single 11-16 school place available at all in Workington in just a couple of years.
“The Labour candidate chairs a government advisory ’What Works Centre’ on children and families, and recently completed a year-long £141,000 contract with the Department for Education, so he can’t claim he doesn’t know the truth.
“This is not the first time he has been caught in a lie, liberally sprinkled with characteristic (and misplaced) faux outrage.
“He recently blamed the Government for poor bus services, but it was Labour-led Cumbria County Council who cut services and refused to make use of the funding on offer, even having to return unspent money to the Treasury - while Cumberland Council are still yet to spend £millions of government bus funding.
“The open letter not only a deliberate attempt to mislead the electorate: it was also a cynical ploy to collect people’s data”
Mark Jenkinson wrote to Cumberland Council back in January after it emerged that 56 children who named Workington Academy as their first choice were denied a place.
He has been warning successive authorities of the issue for several years and previously told Cumberland Council that the lack of school places was as “regrettable as it was avoidable.”
Section 14 of the Education Act 1996 places on Cumberland Council a duty to secure sufficient secondary school places, and to make sure that there is diversity of provision and of choice for parents.
The council could also have created new school places in Workington Academy by securing the additional funding for new developments using Section 106 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, but it consistently fails to do so.
Most recently a 180-home development was passed in Seaton last month, recognising a lack of school places while failing to secure funding for a single one. Mark has made representations to the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities who has temporarily paused the development.
