Out in sunny Wyke and Woodside

Another fantastic sunny day in Bradford South and I’ve been out and about in the constituency with some of the team enjoying the sun and talking to voters.

First stop was Sandale Community Centre in Woodside, where I was chatting to people at their Luncheon Club. The Centre is undergoing some improvement work, with a new Play Pod and a new secure play area. The Centre provides a valuable community resource and meeting place and is the base for the Woodside Neighbourhood Police Team (NPT), who hold One Stop Shops there on the second Tuesday of every month between 1.30pm and 2.30pm. As well as members of the NPT there are representatives from Housing to offer advice.

In the afternoon I was out with our fantastic Wyke campaign team, including Wyke’s 3 Labour Councillors, David Robinson, Sarah Ferriby and David Warburton, Labour’s candidate in the local election on May 6th. This picture of the 4 of us was taken at the Oakenshaw Fun Day last year.

This evening we’re back to Woodside for a bit of door knocking. For all the talk of the internet changing how politicians campaign, you can’t beat good old fashioned face-to-face contact on people’s doorsteps. Hope the weather holds for the rest of the campaign.

New schools for Bradford South

On Friday of last week (Oct 2.) I unveiled a plaque to commemorate the official opening of the new Appleton Academy in Wyke.

The new Academy will be a fantastic asset to the local community in Wyke and will provide first-class facilities for pupils and staff. It's going to help drive up standards of attainment and will be yet another brand new secondary school in Bradford South.

Sponsored by Bradford College and named after Bradford-born, Nobel Prize winning physicist Sir Edward Appleton, the through-age school (3 - 16-year-olds) has opened in the existing buildings of the former High Fernley Primary School and Wyke Manor School, but it will move to a new £23 million building on the High Fearnley School site in September 2011.

Funding for the new Academy was agreed by the Government following a campaign that involved me, Labour Councillors, parents, staff and governors of Wyke Manor school.

Thanks to investment by a Labour Government more than 4,000 schools will have been built or modernised by July next year – the biggest sustained period of school building since Victorian times. Bradford South has benefited from Labour’s Building Schools for the Future programme with new schools already open at Buttershaw and Tong, building underway at Grange Technology College, and plans for the new Appleton building advancing. Since 1997, every school has benefited from increased investment, but the Tories are committed to cutting £4.5 billion from Labour’s Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme. That is the same strategy that landed us in the dark times characterised by newspaper headlines about "Bradford's crumbling schools".