Schools being put in hands of privateers

My letter printed in full by Yorkshire Evening Post:

If Teresa May thinks she has called her election in time, then based only on the situation in education, she is surely wrong. Parents have now seen what teachers have known through dreadful experience for some time now. Ignorant political interference from successive governments has reduced what should be the happiest days of our children's lives into ones of trauma.

How many parents see their kids' favourite teachers suddenly leave? Qualified, dedicated teachers are leaving the profession and their charges in droves. These are teachers burnt out before they get properly started, and those burnt out when they have years more to give. 

Parents see their own children, tested to oblivion, hysterical at the age of ten, at the very thoughts of SATs. These are Yr 6 tests which only there to judge how well schools are doing. 

Parents are being criminalised for taking their own children on holiday. Whose children are they? The state's? This country is penalising parents for wanting to spend more time with their own children and give them experiences that they couldn't afford or which aren't available during the normal holiday period.

Parents know that funding cuts are losing us the TAs and are increasing class sizes.

Parents know that their school has cancelled GCSE Music even if they didn't realise that Arts subjects are already being lost to the curriculum.

And above all parents know that schools are being put in the hands of the privateers, and taken out of the hands of experienced educationalists. And, if they didn't already know, they will soon, that they don't even need to be consulted anymore.

In the UK the privateers are the academisers. If it was up to teachers and parents no schools would become 'academies'. Sadly a combination of a succession of ignorant secretaries of state and, all too often, their stooges, governing bodies, have allowed businesses to expand their money-making plans into the field of education. (And I write as an ex-school governor of 20 years 'experience)

Academisation is not just putting control of education into the hands of the privateers. It is a land grab. The public, tax-payers' school buildings and the land that they stand on are just given away to the new owners. 

It will take one generation to see off all that the Education Act of 1944 and Tony Crossland's Comprehensive Statute of 1965 put in place. If we don't stop this government's disastrous uninformed "educational" policies, this generation of 10 yr olds will be the illiterate, uncreative, disillusioned and suicidal adults of the 2030s. 

And it is with some sadness that On going to the NUT Conference in Cardiff I find out that yet another Leeds high school is going for the old "jump before you're pushed" argument. I hope that the parents of this school get together to tell its governors to just say no to academisation. That old notion that jumping before being pushed gives you some sort of a choice has long been discredited. The instability that all other schools have gone through, and are still going through should be warning enough. 

Victoria Jaquiss 

Leeds Education campaigner, teacher, 

parent, grandparent, ex-school governor

Making a Profit from Education: Buzzers, Gates and Locks

Well, after academies, PFI, free schools, there are many other little interesting mechanisms pickpocketing the parents' purses.

This one started as a result of an awful shooting in a Scottish school. I was a parent-governor at Royal Park Primary School Leeds at the time, and like all governing bodies everywhere we debated security.

By this time I was also, by trade a peripatetic music teacher, and on my travels around Leeds I began noticing the first signs of new buzzers, gates and locks. Undoubtedly they would make it harder for the criminal to enter their schools but they were taking their toll on the length of my school day, and on my patience.  And I couldn't help but think that the makers of buzzers, gates and locks were clearly clearing up here.

One day it was absolutely pouring with rain, I was standing outside School X, failing miserably to attract Reception. Beside me was the van-driver trying to deliver his parcels to the school. I was  irritated, getting wetter. As was the van-driver. "I've got 67 more drops today" he informed me. The thought of standing in the rain outside another 4 schools was irritating me. 67! It didn't bear thinking about.

Eventually Reception spoke through the intercom. We told them who we were and we were let in. We could have been anyone. Some schools did get video links, but very few.

Having sold nearly all the schools new buzzers, gates and locks, the companies then turned their thoughts to signing-in machines. if you have ever been embarrassed by your passport photo, take a look at these. Having finally got past the remote controlled gate you now face a machine which invites you to enter a few personal details, and may or may not print off a sticky badge for you. The worst of these leave glue on your jacket for weeks, probably best to attach them to the ID badge that you already. This badge has a photo and declares you work for the Council and have been CRB/DBS- checked. But the school now wants you to prove that you have just walked in through Reception.

And some schools are so pleased that the machine saves their staff time checking their visitors and regularly visiting teachers, you find the staff don't even look up to greet you. I would have thought that, at this stage, eye contact would be wise. Well it would make you feel welcome. Anyone could walk past claiming to be the peri.

Two things were happening simultaneously:

1.In the name of security, expensive impersonal time-wasting machines were totally failing to protect the staff and children inside the building.

2.Those of us who for years had begun to consider ourselves part of the school team, now had a label to wear and the label says Visitor [you are not one of us].

I don't mind wearing this badge when I do indeed visit schools irregularly, but I feel that the makers of the time-wasting signing-in machines have also created a nice little wedge between the schools and the local education department workers [music peris, signers, speech therapists etc], and it is not appropriate. We all should be working as a team in the education of our children. The privateers are creating barriers.

I debate this regularly with my schools. I am happy to sign in so that, in the event of a fire, there is  record of how many people there are on the premises. Some schools accept that I am indeed part of their team and are happy that my Council ID is ID enough. Some still argue that this was a safety requirement in the case of a fire. I have yet to work out how that would work.

Meanwhile, back at Royal Park, Headteacher Extraordinaire, Rita Samuel declared that all parents and other members of the local community were welcome on and inside school premises every morning and afternoon, and there would be no barriers. As governor I had argued against her view but I quickly saw that I had been wrong. A little trust goes a long way. [And in the end was it not the insecurity of the gun laws rather than the insecurity of our gates and locks and buzzers that did the damage?]

 many

How PFI New-Builds Drain the funds from our School System

When the late unlamented Education Leeds began its cruel and pointless destruction of Leeds schools, I thought, Blimey, have they got shares in construction companies? But I dismissed the thought because, in my naivety, I didn't think that the powers-that-be would work like that.

I thought that they were self-obsessed incompetents who seized upon this or that most recent piece of "educational" research in order to please their masters and mistresses, who were actually also self-obsessed incompetents, but further up the food chain.

Then after the devastation that was the closure of my beloved Foxwood, which seemed to involve a lot of money spent on consultants, the refurbishing of Cross Green to turn it into Copperfields, and a long-winded re-organisation and rehiring of staff, plus the design of and the making of and the purchase of new uniforms, new signage, new this and that with the new logos. . . . .

 . . . . Well after that [that colossal and pointless waste of money in order to save money] I developed an interest in these matters. Over the following years,  I went to just about all the "consultation" meetings in Leeds for closure and mergers. And heyho! How they seemed to involve demolition and rebuilds.

And worse, by now they had invented PFI, so the new builds came with very long and very expensive strings attached: Company A would design (well!) and build the new school. But having kindly put the money up for the building, the company now charges school rent for the next 25 or 30 years after which they may or may not still own it. After that the school may or may not belong to itself. And, and I'm only guessing here, the roof will probably still leak.

And so PFI, also draining the NHS of all it can get, sets about plundering education. Leeds schools are paying rent to shareholders in far-flung countries while having to make TAs and teachers in the UK redundant. Aided and abetted by Ofsted - but that is for another blog and another day.

Now this "rent " was not money that the school was used to paying, and it was not already catered for in the budget. The hook was that a "decaying" old building would be replaced at no initial expense to the school with a brand new one. The fact is that the old buildings were not so unfit for purpose . . .

To make matters even more sinister, the ancillary staff who managed the building such as caretakers and cleaners would no longer be employed by the head and the governors but by the construction firm. The incomes from letting out any rooms for music centres or sports clubs now went directly to construction firms and its shareholders; the inconvenience all rests on the school. If a music teacher wants to run an after-school practice in her or his music room, s/he must book it. What!

Well, we in Leeds have seen enough of these new builds to know that "building schools for the future" was no more than a nice little epithet. I have never forgotten the day that I was at a governors' meeting with members of Education Leeds. They were joking about how many cranes you have at any one time on the Leeds skyline. A shiver ran down my spine! They were proud. They thought their power amusing.

                                                   *  *  *

 I was at the seasonal occasion a few years back when Chris Edwards of Education Leeds told us that this would be his last Christmas at Leeds, and added he hoped we would get all we wanted for Christmas. I openly opined that he had already just done that. But it was too late for Royal Park, Leopold, Askett Hill, Agnes Stewart, Braimwood, Parklands, and the other thirty plus Leeds schools that his improbable regime had put an end to.

Now it seems the population is growing after all and we need some new builds. I wonder how they will be funded!

Academies, the dismantling of our state education system?

My guest blog for John Baron in Leeds Guardian in 2010. And things have only got worse.

Opinion: Academies, the dismantling of our state education system?

Guest blogger and Leeds schools campaigner Victoria Jaquiss looks at the increasing role academies play in education and asks: Are teachers the new miners?

Pupils protest at Primrose High School in March. The school could be closed and turned into an academy Photograph: John Baron/guardian.co.uk

[It was, soon after]

 

Friday 18 June 2010 11.30 BSTLast modified on Friday 31 October 201420.54 GMT

Chapter One: What is an Academy and how does it manifest itself?

An academy is a school, with a pretentious title. Full-stop.

No, make that a comma. It's a school, with a pretentious title, and with a bit more money to play around with than other schools.

Academies aren't really anything. They have no vision or educational philosophy. This makes fighting the introduction of academies into the educational world like fighting jelly.

The previous ("Labour") government thought they would like to replace "failing" schools with academies. So just in the neighbourhoods where children were most vulnerable, and most in need of some extra social work and care and understanding, now they have boot camps, blazers and ties, the loss of previous identity (ie its name), the loss of its headteacher, and the loss of staff escaping a system they don't approve of.

They are force-fed extra GCSEs and BTECS (two GCSEs for one exam) – and so blatantly playing the system that nobody outside education really believes they're doing it.

The new Conservative administration has decided that the "outstanding" schools can opt out of local authority control, and become academies. And opt out of national curriculum, by which they have just been judged to be outstanding. So that's their raison d'etre gone then. Or their raison d'outstanding.

And shame on the new Lib-Dems in government for going along with academies.

In the space of three or four years academies have gone from being a punishment for the "worst performing" schools to being a reward for the best performing ones.

Chapter Two: How is an Academy an improvement on a school?

Well, it's not. A year or so ago, Price-Waterhouse-Cooper (Marxist-consultants-not) concluded that, on balance and on average, academies made no difference to overall standards, and where particular institutions have improved on their immediate predecessors it is usually down to a change in intake.

This is down to a process improbably called "fair-banding" in which academy heads are allowed to select their intake to create a social and intellectual mix, which may result in local children being denied a place at their nearest school.

Weird.

Chapter Three: What is the point of becoming an academy?

So, if an academy is a meaningless concept with no academic rigour behind, that doesn't make any difference to overall "standards", what is the point of it?

There's no point.

Chapter Four: How can we stop the damage happening to our education system?

Irony and understatement are good weapons. And presentation of facts without spin.

I could write for years but you wouldn't read it. Here's a story.

In the autumn term 2009, Education Leeds presented City of Leeds School with three possible academy sponsors.

Each potential sponsor put its argument forward for why and how they should be allowed to run our school. Their arguments were all, in my opinion, laughable, and we the staff, saw all of them off. Our reward was to be threatened with closure, instead. That'll learn us!

Chapter Five: What are academies really about?

They are about the dismantling of our state education system. They are about destabilising and demoralising the work force, and, ultimately lowering the standards of teaching.

Teaching was once one of the most secure jobs in the UK. Many of us entered that profession, wanting to do something socially worthwhile, accepting relatively lower pay for our degrees in exchange for security and altruism.

You could only sack teachers if you close their school. You can't lower their pay, or change their working conditions in situ. I think you can see where this is all going. And I don't really know why.

Perhaps it's fear of the outspoken teachers, who didn't say "SATs, league tables, CRB checks for visiting authors – hmm, good idea". Fear of the teaching unions, fear that we will teach children to think for themselves, if they don't fill up our days with yet another new government initiative.

The teachers are just the new miners.

And I really am stopping now. Thank you, if you have been, for reading this guest blog.

Victoria Jaquiss writes her Leeds Schools Campaigner blog. She has actively opposed plans to turn Primrose high in Burmantofts and Parklands Girls in Seacroft into academies, as well as fighting against plans to close City of Leeds School in Woodhouse.

Let me Object to the Creation of The Temple Learning Academy, Leeds

The article on the Temple  Learning Academy in YEP [2.10.14] is disheartening. All the more so for its matter of fact tone. Since a law was passed in 2011 that local councils were not allowed to open new schools, this and any new educational establishment has to be an "academy", and thus accountable only to the Secretary of State for Education. In vain would a parent complain to the council about their child's school, treatment, or being sent home for wearing the wrong style of shoes.

Now this article also goes on to state some things which need a good challenging: 1. Schools in the trust in East Leeds were oversubscribed. Well, over past decade they closed and knocked down Foxwood /East Leeds, Braimwood, Agnes Stewart, Cross Green/Copperfields. So hardly a surpise that not enough school places, Furthermore, these schools catered for many children from deprived areas; the effect of poverty on their educational progress condemned the schools. The schools closed but the poverty went untreated.

2. The "postcode analysis" - analysis suggesting something academic, but is actually just counting addresses. Temple Moor, advantaged already by being placed in the middle of a middle class estate has worked hard over to maintain its successful image, but I would argue its staff works no harder than we did at Foxwood, but with a different clientele, set of circumstances and most of all public image.

3. Then we had the crocodile tears from the lady who cried for the kids who have to travel. They wouldn't be desperately seeking the "best" school for their kids  if rumour, Ofsted and private education  company Education  Leeds hadn't taken a scythe to our Leeds primary and secondary schools. Successive governments have created laws which encourage dissatisfaction and the pointless criss-crossing of towns everywhere in search of the best school for Bertie and Rachad.

4. Now the concept of a "through school" . This is not a innovative educational initiative. It's a practical solution. A high school which includes a primary is the only way that local council can increase school places without privatising them so well, done to Roundhay for managing this and yet getting its primary pupils into a separate building.

A school is like a private party. Its success depends entirely on who attends, and all these levels and grades and sinister men and women in suits at the back of our classes, and the millions of our public misspent pounds, do nothing for the "education" our children.