Last week’s GCSE results and the varied performances of our local schools started a debate amongst my Cabinet colleagues.

One of the downsides of the comparison tables that we publish in the UK is that we tend only to look at what is happening in our own part of the world.

However, we can’t escape the fact that we are in a global market and that students from Swindon will have to seek jobs in a much more competitive age than many of us may have known.

From 1944 until the late 1980s the local council as the education authority had a great deal of control over schools and how they operated.

Now all but one of the borough’s secondary schools are academies and answer directly to the Department For Education.

Nevertheless, the Ofsted inspectors were convinced that the council should do more to raise standards.

In addition, the whole of the UK is only rated as average in internationally recognised league tables.

I want to start a real debate about what we can do to make sure that our children receive a world-class education.

Let’s start with some questions. Do we have high enough ambition for all our students?

If we as a community do not expect our children to achieve at the highest level, why should they apply themselves?

If anyone thinks this isn’t possible, I can think of two locally-educated students who went on to Oxford University. One is now in my Cabinet and the other has a senior role in Parliament as Chief Whip.

Related to this we might ask ourselves: Do we hold teachers in sufficiently high esteem?

Should we seek to raise the level of the profession to the same status as barristers or surgeons?

In some countries only the academically elite universities are allowed to provide teacher training, which further cements those societies’ belief in the value of education and educators.

A third issue might be how long our children spend in school each day. The recent BBC TV series showing children been taught by Chinese methods certainly aroused strong passions.

There was frustration, anger, and bemusement, and that was just the British teachers’ reactions.

Yet, on only a few weeks teaching, which was based on a 12-hour school day, those pupils outscored their English counterparts in maths and science, two core subjects on which future employment will depend.

Lastly, if we wish to realise the highest ambitions for our children, do we need a better way to pay for schools?

For the last two decades Swindon has been one of the 40 lowest funded local authority areas in England. Perhaps this has to change, too.