Blackpool North and Cleveleys MP, Paul Maynard, today writes to post-16 schools encouraging to take up an offer by the Holocaust Educational Trust for 2 students from each school to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau. The one day trip to the infamous Nazi concentration camp in Poland is part funded by the Government. The trip is £59 per person travelling, but additional funding can be applied for to cover the this and other travel costs.

Commenting, Paul says, “Although many students learn about the Holocaust from books and film, its true terror and horror cannot be contemplated without an visit. The scale of wanton cruelty and murder is beyond belief to people alive today. As someone who studied history, trips like this where meaning can be established and respects paid to the lives lost, play a big part in understanding and learning. I really do hope that schools in my seat take up this opportunity. I also applaud the last Government for starting this programme and also the current Government for continuing to support it.”

Paul says, “I often see parties of school children being shown around Parliament and they all look so happy and enthused. I feel that young people will get a great deal out of a visit to Parliament and I look forward to welcoming groups from many different schools in Blackpool and Cleveleys. All too often democracy can seem remote and irrelevant to our everyday lives. It is indeed the exact opposite and plays a major role in how we live. If young people can get a taste and understanding of this importance from an early age, then maybe that will lead to engagement later on. I really do hope that one of the pupils that visits will challenge, replace or join me in Parliament in years to come”

The great irony  is that the very party which legislated for the OU – Labour – have done so much over the last decade to squeeze the adult education sector. They withdrew public funding for learning for learning’s sake – as they would describe it – in favour of supposedly ‘useful’ learning. Instead, they have been busy promoting something called IAL – that’s Informal Adult Learning (and not funded by the taxpayer). A white paper came out earlier this year called The Learning Revolution which was full of ideas, but not over much about what government would actually do.

Adult education is a fascinating topic and a personal priority of mine for Blackpool. In an area like this, people need to be able to access education at all levels well after the age of 18, since so many may have missed opportunities earlier in life. This will range from basic literacy and numeracy skills to post-grad study in astrophysics. But it shouldn’t just be about class-based learning. Learning takes place wherever people gather together who are interested in a topic – from an allotment society to a flower-arranging society.  It’s a policy area in its infancy, really, in terms of considered thinking, and gets nowhere near the attention schools do.

Over the coming weeks, I’m going to be investigating the formal and informal adult education sectors in Blackpool and Cleveleys. Watch this space. If you’ve got any thoughts, though, then let me know.

But yesterday was a special day because we had David Cameron and the Shadow Cabinet meeting in Preston, and then David went on to do a Town Hall meeting in Fleetwood. I went along to the Conservative Club there with some of our local activists to hear David, and also listen to the excellent Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, our excellent community cohesion spokeswoman.

David was excellent at the Town Hall. He promised that Blackpool would be a priority, that we would kickstart the funding for the Colleges – the collapse of which he described as  ‘shambolic’ and ‘appalling’. He also backed Blackpool Council’s regeneration plans, and pledged support for improving the local infrastructure.

Next day, we had our Party Chairman Eric Pickles along to examine progress at the garden in Grange Park which we did a makeover on during the 2007 Party Conference. Eric met with our ward councillor Peter Collins as well as garden supporters. The only sadness was that Maureen Horne, the driving force behind the garden, wasn’t there to greet the guest as she is ill in hospital. Get well soon Maureen! When she comes back, though, she will be in for a nice surprise as the toilets are being installed at last.

These high profile visits around the Fylde – including George Osborne visiting BAE Systems – are a sign that the Party considers Blackpool North & Cleveleys a key battleground. Over to you!

The next day I was back at Beacon Hill to try their Headmasters hair salon for the first time. Great value, great cut. There is more information at http://www.beacon-hill.blackpool.sch.uk/fab_headmastersopening.html. I thought it was superb – and I’ll be going back again in future.

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.

Stop for a moment though. Is it not the case that Blackpool is changing? Change can often be for the better as well as the worse. Under the Conservative council, school results are gradually improving, as we saw with the league tables published yesterday. I would focus on a growing culture of aspiration in the town’s education system as a positive change, rather than concentrate on the downgrading of a restaurant which is a negative change. Conservative proposals to expand pupil funding in disadvantaged areas will give the Conservative council an added boost as it strives to undo years of Labour damage.

Don’t get me wrong – I like the White Tower. I just put it in the “top places to eat in Blackpool” article in my magazine - (sorry, you’ll have to book a private party now). But what this town needs to regenerate is not just more tourists, but a sense of ambition for its own citizens. So the real optimism should be found in those league tables. They may not be a perfect measure of indicating success – and Blackpool is still further down the league tables than we should be – but, for me, improving educational chances for Blackpool’s young people is the number one task.

One obvious discussion point was the impact of the Baby P case on social work. I expressed my concern at the strain such cases put on social workers. It is always going to be impossible to prevent every act of evil, and in seeking to prevent such an act of evil, I do fear that the pressure may be on social workers to go too far in the opposite direction. It is a difficult balance to reach, and I do not envy those with the responsibility for the task of protecting our children.

We also discussed the various challenges Blackpool’s children face. But rather than just go through all the negative facts and figures out there, we focused also on the ways in which the new Conservative council was beginning to overcome the awful legacy left by the previous Labour administration. GCSE results are improving – though it would be good to see maths and English improving faster, and everyone recognises the problems in recruiting maths teachers even. But as we also agreed, league tables do not always tell the whole story. I made clear my own belief that we have a cultural problem in this country where a good education is equated with an academic education – and that is a legacy of all post-war governments that needs overcoming.

We also considered some of the potential impact of Conservative proposals for improving discipline in schools, looked at how our plans for establishing new schools and enhancing parental choice could work in a Blackpool setting, and discussed the positive impact I believe our Pupil Premium, targeted at disadvantaged pupils, would have on the average spend per pupil in Blackpool.

It is difficult to do justice to all we discussed. I want to blog about the Building Schools for the Future programme in a few days. Indeed, we didn’t really get on to the issue of targets in nursery education, child and adolescent mental health services and the debate over setting/streaming v. mixed ability teaching. There was a lot of agreement on all sides about so many issues, and I hope I left the impression that the next MP for Blackpool North & Cleveleys will be paying more than just lip service to the mantra of ‘education, education, education’.

I support the Government’s Academy programme, but failing schools need to be turned into Academies now, not after more years of failure. They also need to be given genuine freedom to innovate and improve, yet Ed Balls has tied Academies down in local authority red tape. As a nation, we are falling behind. The Chief Inspector of Schools has said that improvement in all schools, across the board, has stalled. The Government has no answer, apart from more bureaucracy and targets.

It is not just the schools at the very bottom which should worry us. Too many pupils locally are failing to get five good GCSEs including maths and English. Imposing yet more Government targets on struggling schools will do nothing to improve pupil achievement. They need to focus on discipline and behaviour and getting that basics right, particularly English, Maths and bringing back modern languages into the mainstream.