Academisation is a misnomer. It offers nothing

A teacher friend just asked me what were my first three objections to academisation. Here are the first five, off the top of my head:

Objection 1 is philosophical and political. Education should be a public service, publicly accountable. Schools and headteachers who go into “academisation" often go in thinking they will minimise the damage, to jump before they are pushed [doing the government's dirty work for them] and then find it goes pear-shaped. No longer protected by the council , heads get sacked, and then the vultures arrive. Dedicated teachers who are prepared to take on the challenge that is headship find that their career ends at the point that they should have arrived.

Objection Number 2. 10%  of a school’s designated funding that usually comes out a school’s notional allocation, goes to the council which then runs its supportive education services. So when a school has a student with a hearing impairment, for example, specialist teachers are employed and available; when a school would like to try out a samba band for a year, tuition and instrument hire is available, and there is a specialist; when there is a crisis there is response [eg in the very sad case of Anne Maguire’s murder, trained bereavement counsellors were on hand]. If all schools in one city are academies, then these services can’t survive.

Objection Number 3. Recent history show us that time and time again, privately run schools  [misleadingly called academies] leads to corruption, not only to corruption but the lowering of standards. Staff morale dips, staff turnover increases, children lose that regular “I taught your sister” thing. Behaviour gets worse.; attainment dips, Desperate to save their school from ignomy, desperate to protect their pay, teachers who would never have willingly taught the barmier parts of the national curriculum, now find that being a "maverick" is a career threatening activity.

Objection Number 4. For the staff,  we now lose the “Burgundy book”. Teachers don’t have to be qualified, don’t have to be paid properly, and all those rights that teachers fought for over the years.

Objection Number 5. Academies don’t need to cooperate with other schools in the area. They may be stand alone; they may belong to a chain whose headquarters are in some distant town. Whatever, they now can set their holidays whenever they like, so parents can find that their children off school at different times [holiday planning, worktime planning?]. Schools compete for their intake. Isn't co-operation a better way?

Academisation is a misnomer; it has nothing to offer. And if teachers can't stand up for themselves and for their pupils and parents, then who can?

DYA looses its grip. Is that Brilliant, Chris?

I originally wrote this in response to the news that GCSE  results at the David Young Academy, Leeds had dramatically dropped, and that observers declared behaviour a massive issue. Then I went to see Bloc Party in Manchester [cos without live music you can't breather, let alone think] , which somewhat halted my literary flow [cos sometimes with live music you just enjoy yourself] and didn't get it finished at the time. Now it's old news, and actually it's just repeating old news.
 

Well, the DYA was born out of the very much unwelcome closure and merger of two high schools nowhere near Seacroft - all boys Braimwood in Roundhay and mixed C of E Agnes Stewart in Burmantoffs. The Foxwood/East Leeds building was still standing on its firm foundations over the fields and in sight, but obviously what this area needed was a fortress of non-architecture, a lot of lime green paint and a escalator at the front entrance. And obviously construction companies need to earn a living!

From the off,  DYA then operated its “fair banding” policy, not a policy that was available to the schools it closed down. This involved selecting a mix of able and less able kids. And in one year DYA excluded more children than all other Leeds schools put together. A friend, on Appeals Panel at the time, despaired.

 

The excluded children were then farmed off to the historically unpopular inner-city schools who were regularly disparaged in the media by the late unlamented Education Leeds and its CEO [just as M Wilshaw is currently damning the whole of Bradford] who was enthusiastically facilitating the merger. He used the word, Brilliant a lot, and was only interested in how things looked, not how things were.

 

My interest in this of course was that I taught the kids of Seacroft and Gipton for a happy and challenging 16 years and would have stayed had not Foxwood School not been sacrificed on the altar of results to be closed and merged itself.

I knew and loved those rejected families. I taught those four boys who killed themselves the year after Foxwood closed. I went to David W's funeral, with his dad there in handcuffs, not so discreetly next to the policeman. All this new paint and data and all this publicly shaming students and schools and teachers for no end good at all.

What children need are well-respected and remunerated staff who are happy to spend their careers mostly in one place. When you are greeted with You taught my mum, you have saved a lot of time having to prove yourself . Trust and respect straight off, and from the staff’s side too.

What education needs is to be publicly owned and publicly run, and their buildings, staff and other assets not given away to entrepreneurs and private companies who are only in it for the business, the money and the power, and in some cases because they have an overwhelming belief in themselves. Who may or may not have experience and background in education.

The Platitudinous One let loose on Any Questions

This is the letter that I wrote to Any Answers, but forgot to send:

Your panel appeared to know very little about the mechanics of education, and the disaster that academisation has brought. It is not a freedom for educational innovation. It is an open invitation for business and rich people to meddle in something that they have have no qualifications or professional knowledge of.

 And the act of giving life to a child does not make a parent an educational specialist.  Parents are partial, and they are biased, and what is good for one child may not! In fact is unlikely to  suit another. 

Nick Gibb talked at length about nothing at all. It was one platitude after another. He judged schools in abstract terms with these stupid Ofsted labels. But schools are full of children, individuals whose role in life seems only to be part of a number of students who achieve an arbitrary academic goal. 

Children are delicate vulnerable sentient beings who need a good listening to before anyone inputs anything. 

And London schools improved because of the London challenge. Inventing "academies" was, with help from crony, Adonis, Tony Blair's second crime. They have never, per se, improved anyone's life chances. They make some rich people even richer.