We asked you to submit your questions to candidates standing in the 2024 General Election.
From all your submissions, we chose 10 that represented the broad issues you wanted answers to.
We asked every candidate we had contact details for to respond.
We’ll be publishing them in the run-up to the General Election with the responses from the candidates who replied from each constituency.
These are the answers are from candidates standing in the Westmorland & Lonsdale constituency.
What are your plans for education? Schools are struggling with limited budgets, and increasing demand for services. Staff are being cut because support staff’s pay rises aren’t fully funded. People are losing their jobs because education is underfunded. Children are the future of our country, and our education system should be a beacon of funding and investment to give us the best future possible.
Tim Farron, Liberal Democrats
The Liberal Democrats would tackle the crisis in teacher recruitment and retention by creating a teacher workforce strategy to ensure that every secondary school child is taught by a specialist teacher in their subject.
We would reform the School Teachers’ Review Body to make it properly independent of government and able to recommend fair pay rises for teachers, and fully funding those rises every year.
We would tackle the crisis in special educational needs provision, and help to end the postcode lottery in provision, by giving local authorities extra funding to reduce the amount that schools pay towards the cost of a child’s Education, Health and Care Plan.
We would put a dedicated, qualified mental health professional in every primary and secondary school, making sure all children and parents have someone they can turn to for help, funded by increasing the Digital Services Tax on social media firms and other tech giants.
We would increase school and college funding per pupil above the rate of inflation every year, and end the scandal of crumbling school and college buildings by investing in new buildings and clearing the backlog of repairs.
James Townley, Reform UK
The education system needs both financial intervention and improved teaching practices. There has been a significant increase in the number of school-age children in the UK, partly due to immigration.
Reform UK’s tougher stance on immigration would help alleviate some pressure on teachers and schools, but we also need to address the years of austerity by directing more funding into our schools and addressing planning and policy issues.
Central government and local authorities have not been proactive enough in anticipating future needs.
We would ban transgender ideology in primary and secondary schools as it poses a dangerous safeguarding issue by confusing children.
There should be no gender questioning, social transitioning, or pronoun swapping, and parents should be informed about their children’s life decisions. The mental health epidemic among young people is partly due to this confusion.
Additionally, phones and social media have a huge impact on our youth, and we need restrictions to protect our children, offering them a real upbringing full of learning, outdoor education, and face-to-face socialising.
Izzy Solabarrieta, Heritage Party
Our education system needs a huge overhaul. Years of decline and under-funding, coupled with the complete infiltration of cultural Marxist activism, means children are being let down.
Firstly and immediately, sex needs to come out of school. Under the Heritage party, this would happen before a single penny was spent on the sector. Relationship and sex education, along with gender affirmation modelling, have no place near young children and are sexualising them and damaging them.
There is a place for it in some stages of secondary education, but only on very limited grounds.
The Heritage Party would implement a tripartite system at secondary school level. This would mean bringing back grammar schools for the academically talented children.
Technical schools would equip young people with the practical and vocational skills that our country so desperately needs. General schools would ensure that all children get the education they need to leave school at 16 and go into the world of work.
As part of our manifesto, the Heritage Party will strengthen our borders and stop mass immigration. This saw our population rise by nine million from 2000 to 2020 – goodness knows what it is now – and yet the infrastructure has not been built to support this sort of number.
I absolutely agree that children are the future of the country, and I believe every government policy should only be made with the effect on the country’s children, as first consideration.
Phil Clayton, the Green Party
Remove Ofsted, increase teacher’s salaries, allow teachers and schools to decide what and how to teach, free from league tables and interference form National Government.
Would you/your party consider writing off all nurses’ university debt if they signed up to working in the NHS or care sector for at least 5 years thereby upskilling the care sector and taking some burden off the NHS?
Tim Farron, Liberal Democrats
The vast majority of those training to be nurses go on to work in the NHS, there’s no need to force them.
The reason they leave the NHS is because the Conservative government doesn’t support them on the job or through their studies.
That’s why the Liberal Democrats are campaigning to bring back nurses bursaries to help trainee nurses through uni and put forward a 10-year retention plan to improve working conditions for NHS staff.
James Townley, Reform UK
Reform UK has already agreed to write off university debt on a rolling basis over 10 years.
If nurses stay in the sector for 10 years, their debt would be completely written off. We will also give all frontline NHS and social care staff a zero basic rate of pay for three years.
Izzy Solabarrieta, Heritage Party
Yes, absolutely, in fact the Heritage Party would pay off the student loans of all British students who have graduated in any Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths and Medicine subjects, as long as they work in their field here in the UK. The country desperately need these young people and their skills.
We would also require trainee nurses to spend the majority of their training time on wars giving practical care. This may mean that nursing returns to not being a degree subject, but instead is a profession with on-the-job training and study combined.
Phil Clayton, the Green Party
Yes. That’s our policy for nurses, doctors and other health professionals.
