SCHOOLS across our region and the whole nation are crumbling, and in my Middlesbrough constituency we have a secondary school that has been in temporary accommodation for a shocking four years.

That means that it is likely that at least one year group will pass through Outwood Riverside Academy never having set foot in an actual purpose-built school between the ages of 11 and 16.

I was able to ask the Prime Minister about this awful situation recently at Prime Minister’s Questions. Unfortunately, he could not provide any response to the question about Outwood Riverside.

He did, however, tell me he was “proud of what the Government is doing in Teesside and the Tees Valley to support education with the recent announcement of new sixth forms”.

Which was baffling because my question was not about sixth form provision. And it was doubly baffling given new sixth forms are not only not needed, but the evidence is that there is actually a surplus of sixth form provision in our region.

So while children across Teesside and County Durham face major disruption from this dodgy concrete scandal, which by their own admission the Tory Government have sat on their backsides over – I won’t use their exact words in the Great Daily of the North – and in Middlesbrough around 500 kids are being educated in an old HMRC office, we are being told that’s ok because there’s a proposed sixth form in the pipeline.

Of course, the sixth form in question is a free school being proposed by a partnership of Star Academies and Eton College. But if you replaced the word Eton with any other in the English language, or indeed the Latin or Greek languages, I don’t believe for a second this scheme would be approved.

When the Department of Education last conducted a Tees Valley Area Review on this matter, their final report concluded that what was actually required was a series of mergers between existing providers to avoid duplication and “to put colleges on a stronger financial footing whilst also enabling them to better meet the economic and educational needs of students and employers for the long term”.

So, we know that we have had an excess of capacity and that there will be a further drop in the numbers of post-16 students which will coincide with the opening of this new college. It will exacerbate the problem.

The students who compete to get into Eton/Star will no doubt do well, but that should be the norm for all students, not just the selected few.

I know from my work on the Business and Trade Select Committee that we face major economic challenges in terms of embracing the industrial opportunities and demands of decarbonisation, especially here on Teesside, given the skills shortages that core industries consistently complain of – not least in the automotive industry as the UK plays catch up in terms of the electric vehicle gigafactories and the like.

We need to make sure that students not only have the opportunity to pursue academic careers through higher university, but that they are all able to realise their GCSE potential and then have the opportunity to excel in engineering and technical careers by gaining the skills that our economy needs and is currently lacking.

That is the only way we are to grow our economy and simultaneously meet the needs of the net zero age.