Cllr Fiona Onasanya, Labour Spokes for Children and Young People and County Councillor for Kings Hedges in Cambridge, has said that the Ofsted report  on schools in the East of England is a wake-up call for Cambridgeshire.  Speaking after the figures released showed that up to 250,000 children in the region were being taught in schools which were regarded as requiring improvement or inadequate (the two lowest Ofsted grades) and that primary schools were performing worse in the Eastern Region than anywhere else in the country, Cllr Onasanya said:  “This is a worrying report and a wake-up call for Cambridgeshire at a time when we are facing even greater cuts to support for our schools in the future  and significant organisational change for many in the drive to have our schools fit the one size fits all academy model forced on us by Michael Gove from Westminster.  It’s hugely important that we manage to get a fairer funding deal for all our schools which are badly underfunded compared to other local authorities but this report also shows that weak leadership and management are a major factor in the poor performance of so many schools.”

Cllr Onsanya added: “We have to close the gap between what our children can achieve here and the best performing authorities in other regions as well as look at why children in many primaries are not achieving well and starting off behind when they transfer to secondary school. If the government would stop changing the goalposts every two minutes, demoralising the very teachers we need to work with and let us get to grips with the issues here, it would be a start but somehow I doubt that will happen.”