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Academies For All? Why The Hell Aren’t Parents And Teachers Manning The Barricades?!

In converting all schools to academies it’s children, teachers and parents that will lose out, says Kevin Harcombe…

Kevin Harcombe
by Kevin Harcombe
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Rejoice! The Chancellor has delivered us from darkness! All schools to become academies! Parent governors abolished in favour of professionals with ‘the right skills’! Extended hours for our secondary colleagues! Sugary drinks taxed! What could possibly go wrong with such a great plan?

I’ve nothing against academies. Like morris dancing or swinging – all very well if you like that sort of thing, just not for me. My governors have looked at conversion on more than one occasion and decided that the only people to benefit would be the lawyers, who would gain about £25k from the process. Also, they rightly fear being swallowed up by some massive multi-academy trust (MAT), perhaps a subsidiary of G4S (who run our prisons so well) or KFC (‘This school is finger lickin’ good’ – Colonel Wilshaw), and lose our distinctive, slightly quirky, but highly successful character. Now that element of choice has been taken away from us in the biggest shake up in education since, well, the last biggest shake up in education.

Has the government made a forensically detailed and persuasive case for all schools to become academies? Has it explained to me how becoming an academy will improve the excellent parent-teacher meetings I’ve just sat in on? Or how our Forest School will be enhanced by paying £25k to solicitors? Has it demonstrated, in short, that it will be better for our children than it is currently under the supposed ‘dead hand’ of the local authority (admittedly, I work in one of the best-performing local authorities in the country)? Has it, my arse! But it’ll steamroller it through anyway. I might as well just throw my car keys in the bowl with all the others and get my bells and stick.

I am not ideologically opposed to academies, but they are not a panacea; they perform no better than maintained schools and often (thank you for blowing the whistle on this, Sir Michael) a lot worse. It is the government that is ideologically opposed to local, democratic accountability and driven to shrink the state.

Once again, education will have to lump it.

I’ve met people who work for MATs whose job it is to set targets for headteachers and then descend on them, like Dementors on Harry Potter, each fortnight to review their progress. I have not been impressed. Some of them, appalling generalisation here, were not terribly bright. But they were very good at following formulaic evaluations and dab hands at placing ticks in boxes. The trouble with successful education is that it’s not always possible to quantify what makes it successful, though of course that doesn’t stop everyone, including me, trying. You simply extrapolate from the best and transplant everywhere, like rolling out a Starbucks franchise, right? Vision? Check. Assessment for Learning? Check. Coaching? Check.

Wrong. There is no magic bullet. Successful education is a dynamic process. We are dealing with human beings with all their frailties, foibles and differences. We are providing learning, not a skinny decaf latte with a shot of bile and a blueberry muffin to go.

The great majority of primaries, most of which are still maintained, are now judged by Ofsted to be successful, despite the fact we’re all struggling to recruit teachers because the legendarily shambolic DfE got its training numbers wrong and despite shrinking budgets and despite the imposition of a new curriculum without anyone having thought through assessment. So the government is now adding the insult of major structural upheaval to the injury of its incompetence. And who will lose out in this whole sorry mess? Yes, the teachers who’ve wasted two years implementing said National Curriculum and associated assessment twattery that won’t even be compulsory under academy status and who, certainly, face lower pay and worse conditions in this privatised future and who won’t even be able to afford a sugary bloody energy drink to see them through the extended day because the bastards have taxed the bejasus out of it. Yes, parents who, despite being urged to set up free schools, will no longer have an authoritative voice on governing bodies and who will no longer be able to take grievances to locally democratically elected councillors but will instead have to deal with a centrally appointed regional schools commissioner and a fragmented nightmare of an admissions system. But above all it is the children who will suffer, and especially children in disadvantaged areas. Why the hell aren’t parents and teachers manning the barricades?!

Eighty-five per cent of England’s primary schools have looked at academy conversion and said ‘no thanks’. Wrong answer it would seem. Now will those thousands of primaries jump or wait to be pushed? Some schools, perfectly happy and successful under LA control, will panic and go early with DfE sweeteners (has to be sweeteners because sugar is banned) – a year’s supply of Pritt Sticks, perhaps, or a signed portrait of Nicky Morgan to hang in the school hall.

Soon, though, carrot will become stick until eventually, come 2022, the last local authority maintained primary school in England, its fabric crumbling, though principled resolve undimmed; its ragged flag fluttering in the breeze behind barricades made from old tidy trays, Gove Bibles and interactive whiteboards, will be pummelled by the legal firepower of government forces, as the school band strikes up a final defiant air and the dishevelled teachers and parents lift their voices: ‘Do you hear the people sing, singing the song of angry men, it is the music of the people who will not be slaves again!’ Miserables? Too bloody right, mate; miserables as sin.

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