No academy on Fearnville Fields

This is the letter I wrote to the Yorkshire Evening Post a few weeks back:

I understand that there has been a proposal to build a new academy (a private state school in which the state provides the money and private individuals become overpaid CEOs) on Fearnville Fields. I am very pleased to hear that the proposal has been turned down. Well done to the campaigners.

Green spaces such as these [where I spent many a happy year as a sub-teenager trying to kill myself walking across the pipeline!] are not just recreational but also help in fighting flooding.

But equally important is not to support the building of any more academies/ free schools. I have been actively campaigning against academisation for over a decade now. Academisation is just privatisation of education, and has nothing to do with raising academic standards, or any standards actually. 

And the evidence is now in; it is not just that the concept is immoral, but the practice is corrupt and incompetent. It is ruining whole generations of school children's lives, and as such is threatening our society's future. 

And given that the evidence is very much in, and the new Labour government will be renationalising our public services, I am very surprised that a Labour Council is even contemplating allowing any more of these institutions to be created. There are other more imaginative ways of solving the school places crisis, such as extending a current school but actually on a quite separate site.

Victoria Jaquiss FRSA

Education campaigner, teacher

They didn't print it as far as I know, so here it is in my blog.

School Deserves praise for Stand on English

YEP Letters: April 24

Published on the 24 April 2014

 

I support the City of Leeds School’s brave stand in declaring so publicly that its students need extra lessons in English as an Additional Language.

Head teacher Georgie Sale points out correctly that even four years in the UK is not long enough to have acquired enough academic English to get the exam grades that reflect any child’s natural ability.

However, as a previous long-serving and ultimately ousted governor, I know that this is a long held view; that attention has always been given to EAL, and that, despite our children not getting the grades that would keep Ed Balls and now Michael Gove off our backs, we went on passing inspections, with the EAL d honourable mention in the dispatches.

Two years ago we gained School of Sanctuary status - the first UK high school to do so. What an honour!

And how would anyone like to be remembered as the teacher, the support assistant, the school that supported you in your darkest hours as well as your best, or the robot following orders in the exam factory?

Sadly, I see that the IEB (Interim Executive Board) has applied for academy status. This will not, in any way, improve the overall average grades.

The school will continue to languish quite unfairly in the eyes of the Government, the media and the local public.

sunset over City of Leeds carpark spring 2014

Worse, all the emphasis on EAL will inevitably be directed to improving average grades; and inevitably away from offering the individual children the sanctuary and personal support that any school should be offering as well.

However, until we get a government that has an Education Secretary who genuinely understands David Blunkett’s old slogan that “Every Child Matters”, children will be forced down inappropriate routes that only serve in the pointless competition that is pitting one country’s educational system against another.

And we won’t get this government unless we as citizens stand up for ourselves and we as teachers, stand up for our charges.

 

Victoria Jaquiss FRSA, (teacher, writer, ex-governor, local resident), by email

 

Absolutely No Child Matters in Leeds and Middlesborough

Michael Gove. He has ideas above his station, and he probably really thinks he knows what he's doing. Plus he has a taste of power. He says, Bring the Head of Leeds or Middlesborough Council, or Children's Services, or whatever from wherever in the whole of the cuntry, and they crawl out of the wood work to deliver. He says Build me a free school, at public expense, at Beccles or Saxmunden for which there is no demand, and hey, it's being built. After taking the money the building firms will blame Govey when it's hard to ignore anymore that 37 pupils don't make a summer.

If it is true that the Bear of Small Brain has really ordered 34 Leeds schools to become academies ie give away their buildings and their land to any old private firms, then shouldn't we be on some barricades somewhere!

It says [YEP 29.6.12] that, according to the DFE, 34 Leeds primary schools are failing to meet the Government's minimum standards" but, according to Nigel Richardson, director of Leeds City Council Education services,  Leeds is "one of the fastest improving local authorities in the country. Of the 30 Ofsted inspections since January this year, 24 schools were rated as good and one one . . inadequate."

And here, I think is Leeds' problem. A good and improving Labour-controlled authority! Oh no says arch-conservative Education Secretary, that will never do. If they won't be rubbish on their own, we'll just make satisfactory mean unsatisfactory.  And if the chosen schools "do not co-operate, Mr Gove has the power to impose his own interim exective board to run the school before it becomes an academy."

Well, I ask myself, where will the Gove find enough people in Leeds to be the IEBs for the 34 condemned schools? School governors, after all, as I told an astonished Jonathan Dimbleby 6 weeks ago, on Any Answers are "a bunch of unpaid amateurs".  What could the unpopularity be worth of being complicit in the pointless privatisation of their local primary school?