CNJ Comment - If it was good enough for David, Ed and Oona...

Published: 27 May, 2010

ALTHOUGH certainly a flagship policy for the government just gone, the spread of academy schools shuffled by on tiptoes.
Labour educationists became suspicious of schools being allowed to set their own budgets and admissions, and appoint governors at will – and railed against their own party’s design.

Those unresolved cries of dissent are no longer audible in the new coalition government and the academy programme will be accelerated at a rate of knots.
For example, in an expanded gameplan, every junior school rated “outstanding” by Ofsted can now apply to become a sponsored academy.

The transfer to autonomous status will be smooth. At a stroke, hundreds of the most successful schools may be taken out of local authority control, bending the trusted old system where neighbouring schools work together, rather than as rivals.
What will be left for the education officials employed by the council to do all day?
There is a risk – some might say a likelihood – that an expansion of the academy programme will pit public institutions in competition against one another.

Hasn’t this same system of competition been introduced into the National Health Service?
The pages of this newspaper are regularly filled with glowing Ofsted reports from our primaries and secondaries, success stories which exceed even staff expectations.

Camden’s schools remain popular. By and large, the system has worked. Questions should dutifully be asked of the new government ministers as to whether the system really has wounds in such drastic need of healing.

Take Haverstock School in Chalk Farm, which has emerged as a solid example of the state school system. The quality of Haverstock’s past yields is demonstrated in every walk of life. Entertainers, sportspeople, writers and – most starkly remembered in recent days  – politicians.

The Milibands admit they owe a debt to the school, as does Oona King who yesterday began her campaign to become Mayor  of London in the school’s assembly hall. Whether you regard these people as skilled diplomats or not, they have ascended in fields once reserved for children who began life in more rarified school surroundings.

Yet up the road from Haverstock, an academy – Camden’s first – directly linked to one of the most powerful universities in the world, UCL, will soon open.

A competition for the most able intake is not beyond the realms of imagination.
The consequences of insular schools in such a marketplace could be devastating. Well paid, well-resourced schools guided by local authorities appears fairer.