Education, deprivation

- areas where work

is needed

As if Boston doesn’t have enough problems – couple more have been highlighted in recent days.
The most recent is a report from UCU - the University and College Union - reveals 'two Britains' divided between the educational haves and have nots.
It ranks the 632 parliamentary constituencies in England, Scotland and Wales according to the percentage of working age people between 16 and 64 who have no qualifications – and it places the Boston and Skegness constituency 17th in the bottom twenty – with 22 per-cent of the group being studied having no qualifications.
On the UCU map – reproduced above – the best and worst areas are compared … and look at the dark brown blot where we live.
The union said that the areas with the lowest levels of qualifications were most likely to suffer from a cocktail of government policies that will restrict access to education:
• education maintenance allowances for teenagers have been axed
• up to 300,000 adults on inactive benefits are set to face prohibitive charges of £1,000 a year to study
• tuition fees have tripled and are now the highest public university fees in the world
• fees and loans are to be introduced for working adults who want to retrain.
The UCU General Secretary, Sally Hunt, said: “There are two Britains living side by side - one with education, and the massive personal benefits it can bring, and the other without. “Education is central to our country's future, yet in some places thousands of people still have no qualifications. There is a real danger that children growing up in certain areas will have their ambition blunted and never realise their full potential.
“The government needs to urgently revisit its education policies if we are to really offer improved life chances to all. Introducing fees for people on benefits who wish to study, for example, is incredibly counterproductive. We should be encouraging people to strive for qualifications, not pricing them out.”
The second report, from the Lincolnshire Research Observatory sets out the 2010 English Indices of Deprivation and what it means for Lincolnshire. The figures, produced by the government’s Communities Department, place Boston roughly in the middle of a list ranging from 1 to 326 – with 1 being the most deprived and 326 the least.
The figures also show that in the Index of Deprivation, Boston was more deprived in 2010 than it was in 2007.
The two reports show once again that action is needed to raise the standard of both living in Boston and being educated here.
And yet again, they highlight an area in which our local politicians should be involving themselves.
But luckily for those in the hierarchy of our current council leadership, it’s easy to dismiss the figures by saying that as there are many other areas in exactly the same boat as us it doesn’t matter.
After all, we need to make it known that Boston is like everywhere else rather than a place with worse issues than everywhere else, and avoid giving ourselves a label we can't lose for having serious problems no one else has.

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