Compulsory Academies: An Absurd Policy

Even Tory councillors are beginning to rebel against the peculiar and absurd announcement that all schools paid for by the taxpayer and in the state system are to be forced to become academies. Peculiar because it was a key element of Osborne’s disastrous career breaking  budget; this is not the usual way to announce fundamental changes to education. The councillors rightly protest because the policy is absurd. Academies were a good idea to address special situations of failing schools. Some have been a success, but by no means all. Statistically they are no better and no worse than the local authority led schools of like type. Fundamentally academies suffer serious shortcomings which play to advantage in certain specialist circumstances, but which rule out this misguided proposal that they become universal.

They are outside the control of anybody except the Secretary of State for Education, who while steeped in ideology and privately educated, is clueless of detail. That means that public money is being used to fund an education system which will be so detached from democratic control as to be beyond it. It means that parents will have nobody to turn to when things go wrong. It means that parents will no longer have representatives on the governing body. It means teachers will no longer be paid according to a scale because academies can pay what they like. Teachers will not even have to be qualified because academies can employ whomever they like. To cap it all they will also be allowed to teach what they like. We can be certain of a chaotic outcome. There will be a few which are amazingly good. a few that a good, a lot that are in a low average and far too many which will be abject disasters.

In case you wonder how I come to these conclusions I can add that through a large family I achieved the curious record of having at least one child continuously in full time education for 48 years, one is a teacher with experience at both LA schools and academies and I  have twice been a school governor. On the last occasion I was parachuted in to a school in special measures by the local eduction authority and played a leading role in closing it down and reopening it as an academy. So I speak as an insider. Pay attention!

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