I AM sure that you agree with me that providing education is one of the most important roles that the government has in this country. All of us parents worry about how well our children do at school and the quality of the education that they get from the schools they go to and rightly so. How well our schools and colleges teach our children is crucial to how well they develop in life.

Education wider impacts than at the level of individual children, it has important consequences for how our economy develops. People argue that the reason that this country lags behind most of Europe in terms of our levels of productivity is because of poor levels of investment in education here. Employers continually complain about the levels of literacy and numeracy that they find when they employ people just out of school. Education is central to how we will develop as a country over the coming years.

The fact that ensuring that everyone gets the highest quality standard of education has been at the core of Liberal Democrat policies since the party was first founded is one of the reasons I joined the party.

So how the government can think that cutting the levels of expenditure on education in Cumbria is a good or fair thing is beyond me. The new schools funding proposals announced by the government make no allowance for the increased expenditure on staff that schools need to make. It is all very well for them to say that funding per pupil is remaining the same but, if the school needs to spend over five per cent more on National Insurance and pensions, as they will have to under these plans, then something has to give.

According to headteachers in schools in Cumbria they are facing an effective cut in their budgets of about £23m between now and 2020. Given that staff costs account for almost 90 per cent of the money spent by schools, the only way to save that type of money is by cutting back on teachers. The sum of£23m is the equivalent of 625 teachers being cut across our county.

This at a time when the chancellor has just announced more money for the government’s “free schools” initiative. We really don’t need more schools, we just need the schools that we have to be properly funded so they can do the best job possible.

Last month I put a motion to the House of Commons calling on the government to reconsider its plans and invest more in education in Cumbria.

On top of this I have arranged a meeting with the schools minister Nick Gibb to discuss the problem and see what can be done to address it. To ensure that the minister takes it all seriously, I am going along with the other four Cumbrian MPs, so there will be representatives from of all of the major English political parties, together with someone from the Cumbrian branch of the National Association of Head Teachers.

Let’s just hope that he listens.