Today I was joined by Gillian Keegan, Secretary of State for Education, to meet with Alex Scott and Becky Stratton to discuss how the Government can do more to improve educational outcomes for students and adult learners at the college.
“Hi. I’m Sidney Yankson the Parliamentary Candidate for Southampton Itchen. I’m here in the constituency with the Secretary of State for Education. Part of my policy for this area, for the educational sector is to look after what I call the triangle - the student, the teacher and the parent. Those are the three people that I care about and making sure that the outcomes for them are absolutely fantastic. We thank the secretary of state for coming here today, to meet with the principal and the senior team at Itchen College to talk a bit about how we can do more to help the parents and the students with their outcomes.
It’s been really great to be here. Often when you sit up in Whitehall, and you’ve got plans and you add lots of money into a sector, and we have really been supporting building up our college sector and also our apprenticeships’ offer. Its great to see some of it in practice here. So today they have been resitting GCSEs. Very best of luck to everybody doing that, but also T-levels. The new T-levels. Brand new qualification, which has a lot of work experience that I know a lot of businesses are engaged with locally. Seeing that in action and hearing students talking about their experiences, I think is also some part of our vision for the future.
Thank you very much Secretary of State. I echo all of that. As I’ve been round Thornhill, Harefield and in fact some of the estates in Sholing, I’m absolutely passionate about getting people up-skilled, so they can get the jobs, the prosperity that comes with that, so they can pay the taxes that fund our public services.
I thank the Secretary of State for popping along to see us here and I look forward to meeting you on all the campaign trail.
Many thanks.
Good luck.”
We also discussed adult learning, improving the buildings by providing more classrooms and supporting students with resilience.
If you would like to hear more about how we want to improve educational outcomes for the children of Southampton, please get in touch with my office.
Sidney Yankson
