It’s been a busy week this week, and you’ll see that reflected in my column. I want to start with something that I’ve mentioned before in my column, but it’s such an important topic I want to give it a bit more space.
On Tuesday I went to a meeting of the headteachers and principals of the newly formed North Schools Alliance, a group of schools from North Solihull who are working together to tackle one of the biggest challenges they face – attendance.
Since Covid, attendance has been really slow to recover and is still nowhere near pre-pandemic levels, all schools are experiencing this to some extent. It was briefly a hot-button issue in the national press at the start of the new school year. That seems to have died down now, but the issue doesn’t go away when the headlines do.
The heads told me that they are doing all they can, and from the list of support they’ve put in place it certainly seems that way to me. All of them are confident in the quality of their teaching, and the results they get for pupils who turn up consistently back that up, but they can’t teach the ones who aren’t there to be taught. It’s a crying shame that so much education is being missed. There are many different reasons why some children don’t attend school. What we need to see is schools, parents, community organisations and local and national government working together and looking at new ways to support attendance in every way we can.
I’ll be raising this issue through all the channels available to me, I want to support our impressive North Solihull School leaders on this and make sure every pupil is in school and getting the education they deserve.
Earlier on the same day I went to a round table discussion about Arden Cross. It’s a massive infrastructure project involving housing, transport, healthcare, research and business. We discussed our ambitious plans for a world-class HealthTech Campus as part of the development.
Delivered by the Council, in partnership with the University of Warwick, we focused on how we can work together to use our strategic location, high quality infrastructure, and broad skills base to create opportunities for our communities and drive economic growth across the region. It was all part of the inaugural West Midlands Life Sciences Week, bringing together scientists, healthcare innovators, business leaders, and policymakers to drive collaboration and innovation.
It seems to have been a big week for getting everyone together and seeing what we can do to collectively improve things for our residents. There was a multi-agency networking event at Hatchford Brook Family Hub this week where a number of council teams met with colleagues from health, charities and other agencies to look at ways of collaborating and streamlining the work we all do so that we can improve services for the people of Solihull. It was the last (for now) of a series of these meetings, I’m told they’ve been very successful events and lots of good ideas have come out of them, so watch this space for further developments.
Yesterday I went to the launch event for Dreamhack ESL ONE 2026, which will take place in March next year at the NEC. It’s a huge festival – the ‘Glastonbury of gaming’ as someone told me at the launch event. There will be a huge variety of attractions and activities taking place across the weekend, including a major Dota 2 tournament (it’s a very popular game globally). It’s exciting to have things like this coming to our borough, and not the first or last massive esports event we’re hosting. It’ll bring thousands of visitors and hopefully inspire some of our children and young people to explore the wide variety of careers on offer in the industry.
Tonight, I will be attending the Solihull Moors Foundation Awards Night. I was delighted to be invited and I’m really looking forward to it. The foundation does really excellent work in our community, especially the opportunities they provide to children and young people with additional needs to get into sport. They do a lot more too, and I’ll talk a bit more about their work next week as I’ll mention some of the award winners.
Recently at a WMCA board meeting I was disappointed to note that some funding which was available from the Free Courses for Jobs grant had to be returned for the DfE as it hadn’t been spent. WMCA do a huge amount of good with the funding they provide and distribute in Solihull and across our region, so it’s a shame when money doesn’t get to the people who could benefit, wherever they may be in the West Midlands. I’ll keep using my role there to push for the best for all the region’s residents.
And finally, National Adoption Week is coming up in October, so it feels timely to say if you’ve ever thought about adopting, why not find out more, it could be the best decision you ever make.
Thanks for reading,
Karen.