Question 2: I have not been able to get my child into a good local school. What will you do to help?

Education is the most frequently named issue across the constituency. In East Dulwich, West Norwood and Herne Hill, parents have complained about not having enough primary school places.

I have been surprised and deeply saddened that the greatest opposition to Conservative policies on education, both inside and outside the constituency, has come from those who are wealthy enough to afford private education or to move to areas where the best schools are.

I’m a school governor at two inner-city schools and went to a failing state school myself and fully back the Conservative proposals on education, they will help everyone, especially the poorest in society.

We have 5 pledges that would address the problems I found in West Norwood, Herne Hill, East Dulwich and Brixton.

1) Give many more children access to the kind of education that is currently only available to the well-off: safe classrooms, talented and specialist teachers, access to the best curriculum and exams, and smaller schools with smaller class sizes with teachers who know the children’s names.

2) Give every parent access to a good school
we will break down barriers to entry so that any good education provider can set up a new Academy school. Our schools revolution will create a new generation of good, small schools with smaller class sizes and high standards of discipline. Our school reform programme is a major part of our anti-poverty strategy, which is why our first task will be to establish new Academy schools in the most deprived areas of the country.

3) Education’s real power lies in its ability to transform life chances, but we can’t go on
giving the poorest children the worst education. So we will introduce a pupil premium – extra funding for children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

4) We will call a moratorium on the ideologically-driven closure of special schools. We will end the bias towards the inclusion of children with special needs in mainstream schools. The most vulnerable children deserve the very highest quality of care.

5) We will make it easier for teachers to deal with violent incidents and remove disruptive pupils or items from the classroom. We believe heads are best placed to improve behaviour, which is why we will stop them being overruled by bureaucrats on exclusions.