Protesters make their feelings known over those potentially involved in sponsorship of Islington Green School in June last year |
Must do better: how academies are failing
Our children may be taught in shiny new buildings, but their education could be falling apart, writes Fiona Millar
The Great City Academy Fraud by Francis Beckett is published by Continuum, £16.99. order this book
I MUST declare an interest. For the past four years, Francis Beckett and I have been part of a campaign to reform admissions to all secondary schools.
Thanks to the contentious proposals in the last Education White Paper we helped win the argument for significant reforms to the Code of Practice on School Admissions.
Somewhere along the way, though, Francis got sidetracked into investigating and challenging city academies.
One can only hope that this book will help to win that argument in a similar way. It should certainly be required reading for all parents in Camden and Islington, where several academies are looming.
Academies are based on the Tory city technology colleges and are independent schools, owned and run by business sponsors and free of the legal requirement that protects the rights of parents and children in other maintained state schools.
The book is a racy and, if it weren’t such a serious subject, at times a comic look at what has happened since the Tories wound up their CTC programme after establishing only 15 schools.
The then Labour education spokesman Jack Straw told the House of Commons: “No programme has been such a comprehensive and expensive failure”.
Nevertheless, David Blunkett recycled the idea in the late 1990s claiming that academies would replace failing schools in disadvantaged areas.
Since then what can only be described as an ideological obsession with removing as many schools as possible from the public sector has led to unprecedented pressure, often amounting to blackmail, on schools and local authorities to go down the academy route.
This is usually done by threatening withdrawal of Building Schools for the Future money. It explains why Camden, a successful authority with many oversubscribed schools which don’t fit any of the academy criteria, is proposing an academy in one of its most affluent areas and why Islington Green School, also rapidly improving, is faced with the same choice of “no choice”.
As Beckett explains, the supposed £2 million contribution from the sponsor, which few paid in full anyway, has also been waived.
Small ongoing revenue contributions are acceptable instead, in return for which sponsors get a school worth up to £40m of tax-payers’ money, to run in perpetuity.
This often involves subsequently buying back services from their own companies.
Sponsors control the governing body (which only needs one elected parent representative), the curriculum, admissions, exclusions and teachers’ pay and conditions.
Big businesses have by and large turned their backs on the scheme. Instead we have what Beckett describes as a “rag bag of second-hand car salesmen, evangelical Christians, advertising agencies, churches, property speculators and a few others, some of whom want to put up as little money as possible and get as much control as possible”.
This “rag bag” includes charities like ARK, founded by the venture capitalist husband of an international supermodel, which was successfully deterred from sponsoring Islington Green School (parents teachers and governors dressed up as fat cats and demonstrated outside their central London offices) and is now investigating its chances in Camden, as well as several of the donors who feature in the “cash for honours” enquiry.
Most objectionable of all must be the biblical creationists such as Sir Peter Vardy who believes that children should be taught that the universe was created by God in six days and that this event occurred in 4004 BC.
One of the earliest un-Christian acts of the Vardy schools was to exclude scores of troublesome pupils – something that is simply and easily done in academies where parents and students are not entitled to the usual right to appeal.
One of Vardy’s fellow fundamentalists, Robert Edmiston, is another sponsor. Like Vardy, he made his money in the car business and wants to teach creationism for the simple reason that “if you tell people they are descended from monkeys how can you expect them to behave like anything other than monkeys?”.
In an Alice in Wonderland twist to the inextricable relationship between politics and the academies, Edmiston also runs something called Constituency Campaigning Services, a strategy centre charged with targeting 164 seats on behalf of the Conservative Party.
It would be a bitter irony indeed if the government’s pay-back for giving Edmiston a few schools, from which he can peddle his evangelical views, turns out to be a Tory election victory.
Academy advocates defend them on the grounds that they are popular, although some are more popular than others and we tend to hear more about those, and that they are urgently needed to tackle persistent school failure.
As Beckett points out, inevitably parents will be drawn to a spanking new £40m building especially if it is replacing one that has fallen into abject disrepair.
Clearly academies in areas where there are not enough school places will also be popular.
Most parents do want good local schools but there is no proof that they either want them independent or run by fat-cat sponsors; indeed there have already been several successful parent-led anti-academy campaigns around the country.
Too many schools and children do still fail, but the reasons for this are complex and often have deep roots in family background, low aspirations and poverty. The book is clear that there is as yet no compelling evidence to suggest that simply making a school independent and introducing a sponsor will lead to these huge challenges being addressed.
Several academies have been failed by Ofsted and the majority remain “satisfactory”, which the government now tells other schools is “not good enough”.
Close examination of academies’ performance is difficult as they don’t appear to have to comply with Freedom of Information requests, but many are using less challenging qualifications to boost their league table positions.
When these are stripped out and the requirement for a maths and English GCSE pass is included, some of the most successful appear to be performing similarly or even less well than their predecessor schools and certainly no better than many schools in the maintained sector which haven’t benefited for the same levels of funding.
As Des Smith, the envoy for the academies movement who was duped by an undercover Sunday Times reporter, subsequently explained: “Money has been wasted in the most appalling way; many of them are the same schools with the same problems, just with new buildings.”
If the warning lights aren’t flashing already they should be. They certainly will be if you read this book…
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