No choice for parents
According to the latest figures published by the Policy Exchange think-tank, more than 11 per cent of one-party governed Wolverhampton's pupils flee the city daily into neighbouring areas in a desperate search for a good education. The vast remainder are unable to do this and have to put up with the local bog-standard, under-performing schools.
The much repeated statements that hard-working and tax-paying parents have freedom of choice of schools for their children is clearly a mirage, unless you have the wherewithal to fund travelling long distances or support private schools.
The vast number of cars blocking the city's roads at rush hour is a sure testament to the lack of support for the present system.
Crossing council boundaries leaves empty places in the schools that are shunned and are perceived to be failing or offering low academic standards or the trendy out-of-touch PC curriculum. Local authorities will then block any new providers of schools, claiming they have a surplus of places.
Once again it will be the deprived areas, in the heartland of Labour voters, that will suffer under this heavy, suffocating hand of this city's authoritarian, old socialist style administration.
The ideology of envy that pervades the corridors of power within the Town Hall will only harm further the underprivileged. Dumbing down to the lowest possible level is self-destructing and should be replaced by academic centres of excellence in these very localities. But the present educational propaganda is that the city is against such privately financed colleges, which, in the long term, will be to the detriment of the city's multicultural population.
Unless there is a clear change in the local education authority policies, the city will end up with an education system like its ring road – clogged up and of little use to its inhabitants.
C O Jones, Meadow House, Burnhill Green.
