The announcement has been made that there will be legislation unveiled in the budget to turn every school in England into an academy independent of local authority control .
Draft legislation, to be published possibly as early as Thursday will begin the process of implementing a pledge made by David Cameron in his conference speech last autumn.
This flies in the face of any evidence about the validity of the Academy model as a vehicle for school improvement. This starts with the Education Select Committee who said that ‘There is at present no convincing evidence of the impact of academy status on attainment in primary schools’.
NEW! The Schools Business by Matthew Bennett
Essential background reading.
Barely under Control: Jenny Turner on the privatisation of schools
The Schools Privatisation Project
Reports, including facts and figures with conclusions drawn. These documents are all very well written with good readable graphics.
A Guide to Regional Schools Commissioners
Academies: It’s time to learn the lessons
Academies and maintained schools: what do we know?
A Guide to the Evidence on Academies
What works in enabling school improvement? The role of the middle tier
Slightly more Academically written Reports
Sutton Trust Report – Chain effects
Henry Stewart’s Blog
Forcing schools to become academies will mean more “inadequate” schools and worse results
The Tories are also interested in social control. Whilst most of us regard education as being about opportunity, liberation even, a right not a privilege, the history of education shows that the state has only ever really wanted to regulate learning on a need to know basis whilst inculcating a “know your place” hidden curriculum where even reception kids are branded for life as failures.
With fewer and fewer skilled jobs needed in industry and less and less employment of any kind even Gove was too radical in his equality rhetoric and had to go. Emboldened – perhaps stupidly – by a current Parliamentary majority and a Labour Party they regard as fatally split between MPs and grassroots, Cameron thinks he can now go for the final push of total authoritarian centralisation. Morgan does not use Gove’s rhetoric of working class rights but one simply of global competition. “We” have to get higher up those international leagues. Stalin and Hitler would have been proud of them.
The Tories are only interested in finance, not in people.
Their aim is make all schools self-funding and before you know it the schools will be charging for extra-curricular activities rather than after-school care. The Tories will then be able to save on after-school care benefits while parents are forced to pay for the activities.
The better funded academies will attract the ‘better’ teachers through increased salaries, and the smaller academies will suffer. The larger academies will also pick and choose the children they want to admit meaning children’s education in the smaller academies will be a problem.