Rowen urged to reconsider opposition to raising school leaving age

Date published: 03/03/2008

Rochdale’s Labour Parliamentary Candidate Simon Danczuk has urged Paul Rowen to reconsider his opposition to Gordon Brown’s plans to raise the school leaving age to 18.

Under education reforms planned for 2013, young people will be required to stay in school, training or workplace training until they are 18 – a move that Rochdale’s Liberal Democrat MP has publicly opposed.

Speaking after Gordon Brown’s speech at Labour’s spring conference in Birmingham at the weekend, Mr Danczuk said he shared the Prime Minister’s view that "the need to spread opportunity" was greater than ever before.

Highlighting the fact that nearly 20 per cent of people in Rochdale do not have any qualifications and that 10 per cent of people in the Borough were not in education, employment or training, Mr Danczuk argued that no responsible Government could neglect the young people leaving school totally unprepared for the demands of life in 21st century Britain.

"When I left school there was a lot of jobs you could walk into without qualifications but that won’t be the case in the future," said Mr Danczuk. "Our Prime Minister is right when he says that in the old Britain, there was a view that only a minority needed the best education and the best skills, because there was only so much room at the top. That view is no longer relevant as we now live in a skills economy and there are more skilled jobs available than ever before."

In the centrepiece speech of Labour’s conference, the Prime Minister reinforced his commitment to establishing a world class education system to tackle child poverty, stating: "When we allow just one life to be degraded or derailed by early poverty, it represents a cost that can never be fully counted.  What difference could that child have made?  What song will not be written; what flourishing business will not be founded; what classroom will miss out on a teacher who can awaken aspiration? Because just one child’s life wasted haunts us with the thoughts of what might have been, this government must end child poverty in this generation."