Delivering for Rochdale, From Our Streets to the World Stage
When I was a lad growing up on a council estate in Spotland, the idea that a Rochdale MP might one day sit round a table in government would have seemed far-fetched. For nearly two hundred years this town sent its members to Parliament without a single one of them holding a departmental ministerial post. That changed this summer, and I still feel the weight of it.
Being appointed Minister for Early Education by Prime Minister Andy Burnham is the honour of my working life. But a title only matters if it delivers something real for the people back home. So this month I want to tell you what that job has actually meant for Rochdale.
Much of my brief is about giving children the best possible start in life, and over the holidays I saw exactly what that looks like on the ground. At KYP, at BACP, at Aspire 2 Inspire in Greenbank, and with the Rochdale Nigerian Community Association in Broadfield Park, I watched local youngsters get a proper meal and a day full of sport, science and fun through the Government’s Holiday Activities and Food programme. As the minister now responsible for that programme across the whole country, there is a real pride in seeing our own community groups make it work so well right here.
I also visited the Best Start Family Hub on Derby Street in Heywood, one of seventeen hubs across our borough that support families from bump and birth through those crucial early years. That support makes a real difference to families across our borough, and I will fight to expand it.
None of this is charity. It is the difference a Government makes when it decides that where you are born should never decide how far you get.
That same principle runs through the £20m of Pride in Place money coming to Smallbridge, Hurstead and Belfield over the next ten years. This is your money to shape, so I have been out and about hearing what local people actually want from it, from Haroon’s chippy on Stevenson Square to the team at Cohen’s Chemist. The whole point of this fund is to give local people a real say, and I intend to make sure that promise is kept.
Ministerial red boxes have not kept me away from the things that make our town what it is. Over the past few weeks I have cheered on the Hornets, welcomed the veterans of Get Together After Serving as they opened their brilliant new cafe opposite Rochdale AFC, joined the Armed Forces Breakfast Club at the Flying Horse for Parachute Regiment veteran Brian Lamb’s 90th birthday, and stood in a packed Town Hall Square as OMD paid tribute to the town where they began. Rochdale at its very best.
This week my work takes me a good deal further afield. I am in Paris representing the United Kingdom at UNESCO’s Digital Learning Week, where education ministers from more than twenty-five countries are wrestling with one of the biggest questions of our age: how we make the most of artificial intelligence in our classrooms without losing what makes teaching human.
It is a strange and rather wonderful thing to carry Rochdale’s name onto a stage like that. But I will be making the case I always make, whether in Westminster, in Whitehall or in a conference hall on the Seine: that every child in every town deserves the same fair crack at getting on, and that new technology must serve our children rather than leave them behind.
The teachers at my old schools here in Rochdale changed my life by showing a working-class kid what was possible. That is the whole reason I do this. Whether I am on a doorstep in Rochdale or a summit in Paris, the job never changes. It is to open those same doors for the next generation of Rochdalians.