There are some schools in Blackpool that do seem to get a bad press. Beacon Hill is one of them – it’s a National Challenge school, for example, which means they struggle to hit the 30% getting Grades C or above in 5 GCSEs including maths and English. Equally, I knew what a lot of hard work and innovative methods were being used to improve performance at the school.

So I was fascinated to pay a visit to Beacon Hill to see for myself. I chatted to the headteacher Barbara Lund for quite a while, and found much common ground. Beacon Hill is a comparatively small school for a secondary – some 650-700 pupils – but that means that the head knows each and every pupil. That is far harder in a school twice the size. This is important at Beacon Hill because it has a fairly challenging intake, with very high levels of transience and also from deprived backgrounds.  Taking pupils in throughout the school year is both disruptive and challenging to teachers. As we said, teaching at Beacon Hill is very much a vocation for the staff. You have to want to do it. But equally, this is a school where Every Child Matters in the fullest sense – it is more than just a soundbite.

Aspiration levels tend to be low – it can be difficult to improve maths performance, for example, if parents themselves have numeracy problems. But that is why the school is putting extra effort in to being a community focal point, open from 7am till 10pm. It provides adult literacy and numeracy courses, an on-site nursery, a primary school, and even a flock of chickens!

By the time we had a tour of the school, the children had mainly left for the day. But in classroom after classroom, there were still pupils and teachers working away in ones and twos at subjects such as maths. We also visited the hair salon which works on a commercial basis three days a week, and as a training centre for the rest of the week. I have already promised to start trusting my hairstyle into their hands!

All in all, it was an impressive visit. This is not to minimise the challenges the school faces. It is still important to measure absolute levels of attainment. The sad fact is that the moment you publish that data, it becomes a ‘league table’, and schools are stigmatised if they are at the bottom. But Beacon Hill is improving, its value-added scores are superb, and it has a clear sense of direction. But it demonstrates that a good education need not just mean an academic education. That’s why I think Conservative proposals for a ‘pupil premium’ of about £2,000 for every pupil from a deprived background will help Beacon Hill build on the good work it is doing.