Meet the candidates event II

Tonight was the second meet the candidates event in the Peggy Killick Suite at Nantwich Civic Hall.

That was very fitting for me, as Peggy was a bit of a heroine of mine. The "Queen of Nantwich" was a very hard-working, principled and thoroughly lovely person. I was honoured to be Peggy's agent twice. She was a very easy candidate to organise for, because absolutely everyone knew her and respected her. She was the scourge of the Tories and she was always pleased about that.

Anyway back to the meet the candidates event. Again there was a good turnout and it was a very interesting evening. There happened to be quite a few current and retired teachers there so we had a really good debate on testing children.

Personally I am very concerned about the pressure put on children through SATs and I am particularly concerned about the Year 6 variety. It is important that we know how a child's education is progressing, but we don't need to make such a song and dance about the test. And we particularly shouldn't be coaching children for the test, that is almost a return to the dreaded 11+ (which by the way I failed).

I understand that you can now buy good luck cards for SATs! Which, to me, says that we are putting our kids under too much pressure, too early in their education.