Emma Lewell has paid a visit to Epinay School

Emma Lewell, South Shields MP, has visited Epinany School. The MP met pupils and staff during her visit on Thursday, September 18.

Transcript

00:00it's amazing to see this school go from strength to strength there's obviously some really good

00:04leadership here and some excellent staff and it just looks so much brighter it feels like a really

00:11happy healthy brilliant place for children to learn under the last 14 years of Tory government

00:16SEND has been completely neglected it was always an afterthought we've ended up in this crisis

00:22situation where there's not enough places for children lots of money is being spent where

00:26children are having to leave the borough or leave the area that they live in to get an education it's

00:32not right it's not fair parents are absolutely tearing their hair out having to go through this

00:37system and just because they love their children and want the best for them and schools are struggling

00:42with it too because they want to provide more nobody goes into education as an educator not

00:48wanting to do it they want to give more to those children in the area as well and this government is

00:54absolutely committed to sorting that out for once and for all i know that there's a white paper

00:59coming out later this year i would urge everyone to feed into that and then hopefully for once and

01:04for all we can get a proper system where children are supported in mainstream education and where

01:09there's enough special school places for those children who absolutely need it and then parents

01:14won't have to spend all their time fighting a system that quite frankly is broken it's been fabulous

01:20um emma's been great uh not just uh listening to me but getting around the classes and speaking to

01:26children um and just being a kind of fun the fun with them really and making it easy for our children

01:33to relax um it was really important for me to kind of share some of the issues um around south

01:38town inside the northeast around education and for those messages to kind of go forward to national

01:43government and and emma was really keen to kind of listen and understand um but more importantly to talk

01:48about some of the positives which there are lots of in our area about the types of things we're

01:53trying to do to to make schools more inclusive so it was really a fabulous um a fabulous trip which

02:00which i hope we do again sometime soon

02:10you