A Conservative government will unleash people’s energy, ideas and passion to get Great Britain moving again.

Charlotte Leslie, Bristol North West’s prospective Conservative MP, today welcomed Andrew Lansley, David Cameron’s shadow Secretary of State for Health, as he unveiled the Conservative Party manifesto on College Green.

The manifesto, officially launched this morning in London, invites everybody in the UK to form the next government by giving real people real power. Government should be there as a safety net to support and a spring-board to enable -not to micromanage and interfere with every part of people’s lives. A Conservative government will unleash people’s energy, ideas and passion to get this country moving again.

For residents of north west Bristol, a Conservative government will bring real change. Charlotte has a special interest in health issues. Her father is an NHS Bristol surgeon and she strongly supports plans to transform Southmead into a new state-of-the-art acute hospital. Under a Conservative government, not only will doctors be empowered to prioritise patient care over targets, but patients will be able to rate hospitals and doctors, and anyone will have the power to choose any healthcare provider that meets NHS standards.

Andrew Lansley, Shadow Secretary of State for Health, was greeted with cheers as he arrived on College Green soon after 4.30pm and gave Bristol residents their first look at the Conservative manifesto launched only a few hours earlier.

Priorities include radically improving our school system to make opportunities more equal. There will be extra funding for children from disadvantaged backgrounds and Keystage 2 tests and league tables will be overhauled. First-time buyers will be helped to get on the property ladder and new businesses will not have to pay National Insurance contributions for their first 10 employees.

Bristol already has a strong culture of recycling, but under a Conservative government there will be even more incentives to encourage recycling and working towards zero waste. And railways will be improved and local transport made greener.

After speaking to Mr Lansley, Charlotte said: “It’s great to hear a Shadow Minister understanding and reiterating what I am hearingon the doorsteps of north west Bristol every day- power to the people! People have had enough of an over-bearing, inefficient Government squashing their ambitions, but at the same time, failing the most vulnerable who most need Government’s support. Its time to overhaul our politics and our Government. ”

To read the report, click HERE.

The New Blue publication from the Social Market Foundation

Charlotte Leslie was selected as one of ten Conservative candidates to write for SMF (Social Market Foundation) publication “The New Blue”.

You can download this “The New Blue” and read her essay “Chapter3 – Public Engagement – The Key To Raising Aspiration”.

In this essay Charlotte concludes:

My ideas to revitalise society are based on measures that would also help an individual: affirming their identity; affirming the worth of that identity and confirming the ability to act and achieve. The assumption I make is that with all these things in place, people will actually want to achieve and aspire.

Of course, you can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink. No number of satisfied conditions can actually create aspiration itself – that is beyond politicians. But since all these policy suggestions have wider benefits beyond those of encouraging aspiration, I venture that they are not a bad place to start if we want to release aspiration so this country and its citizens can achieve their full, and great potential.

Campaigning in the rain to Save Special Schools

In a new national report “SEN: The truth about inclusion,” Charlotte Leslie looked at the human cost of the Government’s determination to reduce the number of children with special educational needs (SEN) educated in special schools.

The report, which gained national coverage in The Observer and the Daily Telegraph, revealed that children with more severe SEN in mainstream schools without statements were twice as likely to be truants as any other SEN children. Shockingly, a fifth are persistent truants.

Charlotte said:

“This Government is determined to reduce statementing, and to send children with SEN to mainstream schools. They call this ‘inclusion’. But inclusion must be judged not by which building a child is educated in, but by the standard of education and life they receive. On that measure, the Government has failed. I will continue to work for children with SEN to be genuinely included in society, by getting the education they need and deserve.”

Charlotte Leslie addressing the Conservative Party Conference

Charlotte Leslie co-authored the Bow Group report “SEN: The Truth about Inclusion”

Executive Summary

The Special Educational Needs debate has long been dominated by the inclusion –exclusion debate. This paper recognises that inclusion in mainstream school is good for many children with SEN and does not seek to enter into a debate of ideology, but simply to reveal the facts: Since the Labour Government came into power in 1997 and began to implement its policy of inclusion we find that:

On Statements and Special School Places:

• Around 9000 places at special schools have been lost
• The number of statements and assessments issued for children with SEN have fallen by over a third

On Truancy:

• Children on ‘School Action Plus’ schemes, which are replacing statements are twice as likely as other children with SEN to truant.
• A fifth of all children of School Action Plus are persistent Truants.

On Exclusions:

• Special Educational Needs pupils make up the majority of pupils expelled from school at 67%, though they comprise only 17% of the school population
• SEN pupils are more likely to be suspended more than once in a year. Out of the 78,600 pupils who were excluded more than once in a single year, half (49.7%) were SEN pupils.
• For the first time, this year over half of all suspensions from secondary school are pupils with Special Educational Needs (55%)

On SEN and Pupil Referral Units (PRUs):

• Over half of pupils are suspended from PRUs —nearly three quarters have Special Educational Needs
• Two thirds (66%) of all SEN pupils at PRUs end up being suspended
• Special Educational Needs pupils in Pupil Referral Units has risen by 70% since 1997

On Parental choice:

• Around 83% of the increase in Independent School numbers over the last ten years are children with SEN.
• Over half all appeals are against a local authority’s decision not to assess or statement a child.

We conclude that whilst inclusion in mainstream school is very beneficial for some children with SEN, these figures are a compelling argument for an urgent systemic review of the Government’s ‘inclusion’ policy, particularly focusing on the failures of the School Action Plus scheme and support David Cameron’s call for a moratorium on the closure of special schools until a review of the statementing process has taken place.

This is the first report in the Bow Group's INvisible Nation series

The following is the introduction to the report entitled Invisible Children written by Charlotte Leslie, Chris Skidmore and Nick Cuff and published by the Bow Group. You can download Invisible Children and to read it in full.

It is ten years since Tony Blair made education his priority in government. An entire generation of pupils have passed through school under Labour’s watch. Pupils who were in the first year of primary school in May 1997 finished their GCSEs last summer. Has every child mattered? In the first of the Bow Group’s ‘Invisible Nation’ series, this report looks at how the Blair generation fared.

We look at more closely at the standard 5A*-C measure of achievement, and look at how much those qualifications will be worth to pupils.

Then we look at those who don’t get those crucial five good GCSEs. And we look at those who don’t get 5 GCSEs of any grade at all.

But that is not the whole story.

This report shines a light on the invisible children. Children who didn’t even get a chance to fail their GCSEs because they never even got to take the exam. Then this report asks what we can do about it. Factors behind social disengagement are complex but we conclude that central tracking of pupils, individualised learning and a real skills agenda are key to improving the situation we find here.

This report reveals what became of the 656,000 pupils who were 7 in 1997 and who took their GCSEs in 2006 *:

The invisible Children:

• 7,000 pupils are missing from education in their final year
• 30,000 pupils were either missing or not entered for GCSEs
• Nearly 60,000 pupils did not obtain any GCSEs, either through not turning up to their GCSE exams, not passing any exams, not being entered for GCSE exams, or disappearing off the school roll.

Undetected Underachievment:

• 20,000 pupils who sat GCSEs did not sit maths GCSE, 26,000 did not sit English GCSE and 45,000 did not sit science GCSE
• Last year, 29,800 pupils who sat GCSEs did not gain any qualifications – a rise of 6,600 pupils from 2005.
• Over a quarter (27%) of boys do not gain a single GCSE above a C grade – along with a total of 130,000 pupils

The Divide of Deprivation:

• In 695 wards across the country – mostly in inner-city areas of deprivation – the percentage of pupils gaining five GCSEs of any grade has actually fallen backwards
• Pupils taking Free School Meals and pupils with Special Educational Needs are most likely to be the victims of disengagement and educational failure: 41% of persistent truants have SEN, as do 64% of excluded pupils.
• The educational attainment gap between rich and poor is widening, particularly in urban towns

* This study solely covers GCSE entries. Reflecting the fact that the core qualifications must be obtained through this award.

“The Invisible Nation” magazine shines a spotlight on all the people who have fallen off the back of the statistics, and fallen below our social and political radar, the people we’ve forgotten we’ve forgotten.

Charlotte recently launched the Bow Group magazine on the ‘Invisible Nation’. Charlotte said

“There are many members of The Invisible Nation, and by their nature, it is easy to forget they exist. But if we are to be Compassionate Conservatives, these are the very people we should help back into society. This magazine shines a light on the kids who never even get to take their GCSEs, office cleaners who keep The City up and running but who struggle on pitiful wages, the mentally ill who find it hard to even face the world, let alone get to the job centre, and many more.

My dad is Australian and served as a doctor out in Vietnam. I will never forget him telling me that in assessing which war blasted victim to treat first, you had to leave the ones who were screaming. ‘It’s the ones who have stopped screaming who are really in trouble’ he said.

There are members of our society who have simply stopped screaming. Compassion means hearing the silence, then going out to help.”

Charlotte is the former Editor of the magazine of the Bow Group – the oldest Conservative Think Tank, set up by Geoffrey Howe in 1953.

You can download current and past issues of the Crossbow from the Bow Group web site.