Preston City Council’s Labour Group will oppose any further moves to turn the city’s schools into academies.
The councillors claim there is little evidence that academy status offers pupils a better standard of education than local authority schools.
Holland Park School in Kensington, west London, has twice been asked to justify its high salaries by the government, which ruled earlier this year the single-academy trust had not broken funding rules when it spent thousands of pounds on luxury products.
“We’ve had plenty of Republican as well as Democratic secretaries of education but none of them, even those who believed in alternatives to public education, actually tried to eviscerate public education,” said Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers. “Here is someone who in her first budget tried to eliminate every single summer school programme, every single after-school programme, and who has done everything in her power to try to make it harder for us to strengthen public [sector] schools.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/dec/27/betsy-devos-trump-republicans-education-secretary
Actually this is not a new development. See our article from 2012 Alperton teachers say NO to an academy – Strike against the Co-op academy
When a bunch of young weavers in the Rochdale Pioneers Society opened their first grocery store on 21 December 1844, their hope was to promote ethical trade and share profits with their members and community. It was their response to a divided country rocked by economic problems with the poor suffering.
One hundred and 75 years on and the Co-op says it is taking inspiration from those founder members, not only through selling Fairtrade goods and funding local charities through its membership scheme but also by putting itself at the heart of communities through the sponsorship of 24 academy schools.
Trustees at the scandal-hit Perry Beeches Academy Trust continued to break academy funding rules in the chain’s final year as a school sponsor, delayed accounts show.
Concerns highlighted in the latest accounts, including unauthorised credit card transactions, a lack of internal auditing and a failure to follow tendering procedures show that troubles continued to plague the trust in its last year as an academy sponsor.
In March 2016, a government investigation found the trust had funnelled £1.3 million to a private company without following proper procedures. The company then paid a “second salary” to superhead Liam Nolan.
Nolan, who received £160,000 over two years on top of his £120,000 salary, stepped down from the trust in May 2016 and was banned from teaching in November 2018. He can apply for the prohibition to be set aside in November 2020.
