AS the summer holidays are in mid-flow, thoughts will soon be turning to the new school year.

What will be an exciting time for many of our children may also be a challenging year for our local schools.

Across the borough every primary school and secondary school but one will face budget cuts.

Locally £4 million will be cut from primary school budgets and £4.3 million cut from secondary school budgets.

It’s somehow becoming commonplace for head teachers to ask parents for donations of workbooks, pens and pencils.

Some schools have even asked parents for financial contributions by direct debit.

Teachers meanwhile are under more stress than ever before.

With class sizes rising and the workload increasing, is it any wonder that we’re in the midst of a teacher recruitment and retention crisis?

For many the original attraction of teaching has faded as the resources to deliver quality teaching are simply non-existent.

We have also seen the introduction of a new measure of school quality introduced – Progress 8.

This is based on the expected achievement of a child at aged 11 compared to their actual results at 16.

It was meant to move past the original method of only considering final GCSE results, but in areas such as ours, Progress 8 is letting our schools and children down.

The method fails to consider the background of the students and their conditions at home.

This means schools in affluent areas are far more likely to see their pupils achieve beyond their expectations compared to areas, particularly in our region, where students are less able to spend times on their studies due to their family and home circumstances.

This is no fault of the schools, the pupils or the hardworking teaching staff but of the system which is skewed in favour of those pupils with the best circumstances to succeed.

However, it is our schools which lose out, slipping down the league tables and suffering the consequences.

The new system also focuses heavily on those traditional academic routes.

In areas of the country such as ours we rely on technically skilled individuals and should therefore be rewarding those who take the vocational route instead of stigmatising them.

This structural bias will however further reflect on the school without taking account of local circumstances.

Throughout the education system we are seeing vast underfunding, a teacher retention crisis and a systematic imbalance.

In towns such as ours where opportunities to thrive are few, A-level provision scarce and without any higher education at all, our young people need all the help they can get.

I am genuinely concerned, however, that under the current circumstances our education system is not fit to give our young people the start in life they deserve.