On hot summer days, the staff at Cotsford Primary School can’t let the children into the playground because of the smell of cannabis being grown in nearby properties.
The school, in Horden, County Durham, sits amid 19 boarded-up houses, so teachers have to be inventive to help pupils succeed.
The children are encouraged to help in the library or as maths mentors, but to do so, they must fill in application forms and be interviewed. Some of them are unsuccessful and given feedback on how to improve. “It sounds a bit brutal,” says the school’s deputy headteacher, Vicky Page. “But if we don’t give them those opportunities now, they’re far less likely to have them when they’re older.”
The school’s work is getting harder, nestled as it is in an area where politics has long failed its residents. Westminster slogans have long been left unmet. In east Durham’s former pit villages, things never got better, they’ve never taken back control and Horden, along with neighbouring Blackhall and Easington, was never levelled up. A once proud, close-knit community has been left to the vagaries of absentee landlords, rising deprivation and residents who often don’t want to be here.
Finally, however, people feel they have a choice – and what has happened here highlights the challenge facing the Labour government.
In an area where voting Tory was seen as a sin after their closure of the mines, Reform UK have swept in, hoovering up the votes of the forgotten and the disaffected. They won two-thirds of seats in County Durham in last May’s councils elections, with the Liberal Democrats coming second. Seven out of the eight seats in east Durham’s mining villages went to Reform UK.