Lewisham’s problem secondary schools continue to be a priority issue for Lewisham voters, as mayoral candidates faced tough questions at a hustings.

Candidates were quizzed about the borough’s secondary schools, which see 40 per cent of parents send their children to schools outside the borough, at a hustings hosted by The Sydenham Society and The Forest Hill Society.

Labour mayoral candidate for Labour Damien Egan shared concerns about the quality of secondary schools in the borough, and said more funding was needed for schools.

“We can improve our schools coming from a place of support,” he said.

“We need real political leadership on this. We need to bring schools together, to share best practise, and we also mustn’t ignore the fact that the Tories want to take out another £9 million from our schools.

“That is cuts in your teachers. We have got very hard-working teachers across all our schools doing fantastic things – they need support and we need to be working with them. There’s certainly not enough money going into our schools, I would say that there is not enough and we should be campaigning for fair funding.”

But independent mayoral candidate Duwayne Brooks said money wasn’t the sole issue.

He said: “Lewisham’s GSCE results on average have been below national average for 16 years.

“Eight other local authorities get more money for education than Lewisham, only eight, so how can it be a money issue if Bromley schools are performing better but receive less money?

“During 200 to 2010 under a Labour government Lewisham had money, yet we were still at bottom or second bottom of the table,” he said.

Liberal Democrat mayoral candidate Chris Maines said Lewisham needed to become an attractive place to work for teachers.

“That might be needing to provide homes for teachers – housing is expensive in this part of the world – and having a much more sophisticated career development programme for them to retrain and share practice and professional development will keep teachers here. We have Goldsmiths in the borough and the University of Greenwich nearby and we can tap into it,” he said.

Mayoral candidate for People Before Profit John Hamilton condemned the use of private finance initiatives (PFI) in the education sector.

He told residents: “We do need new schools and more schools and if we didn’t build them by PFI We probably could have bought three times ass many new schools as we did with normal government money.”

Mr Hamilton also highlighted management styles within schools as an issue, adding: “We do need to have a better relationship between staff and their heads. I don’t agree with this idea of a management team- and a head sometimes called a chief executive officer.”

He said the “wide gulf” between senior staff and teaching assistants in terms of work load and pay needed to be reduced.

Conservative mayoral candidate Ross Archer blamed the current council administration and PFI contracts for the failures, and said academisation would lead to improvement.

He said: It’s not about money, it’s about local failures in the town hall. We need to review the PFI contracts and see if there is any money there and reinvest it back into our schools.

“We need some more academies in Lewisham. I think we need to have a range of different schools in Lewisham. I think academies drive up results and i will be campaigning for more academies to come into Lewisham.”

Democrats and Veterans mayoral candidate Will Donnelly was not invited to the hustings because his party had not received more than five per cent of the vote in the last election.