Academy status will not help our schools (From Your Local Guardian)

Academy status will not help our schools

4:55pm Monday 7th March 2011 in Your Say

As has been well reported in the Sutton Guardian, all of the secondary schools within the Borough are considering converting to academy status. It was announced in last week’s edition that the schools are now beginning a consultation process (this public announcement took the form of a single paragraph in a sidebar). I believe that there is a great deal of concern over the potential conversion of our entire secondary education sector, and that these concerns are justified.

Why should schools want to convert to academy status? The Coalition Government (of which Paul Burstow is a member) claims that being an academy provides schools with greater freedoms over their budgets, policies and curriculum. As far as concerns the issue of curriculum, academies still have to prepare their students for GCSEs, AS and A levels, the same as every other, local authority controlled establishment. The Government are currently reviewing what subjects they believe are appropriate for schools to be judged on and which are not, and academies will still be subject to the same assessments of their performance.

It is true that the Governing bodies of academies have more freedom over their policies. Whilst it is true that some academy governors may simply choose to keep things as they are, some of our schools are already selecting from outside Sutton, increasing competition for places in our local schools and placing pressure on our working parents as they are faced with sending their children long distances to schools which may not be as good as the ones they have failed to get into (e.g. Sutton Grammar).

Then there is the issue of budgetary freedoms. There appears to be a perception that academies are financially better off than local authority schools. This is untrue. Any school which converts will receive a one off grant of£25k to cover the legal costs of conversion. Some independent estimates have placed the overall cost of this at £75k. The level of per-pupil funding remains the same and is subject to the same cutbacks as all other schools. It has been said that the idea behind a mass conversion was for the schools to maintain the local education authority in some form, and to still receive services from Sutton council. This is a false dream I fear. The BBC has reported on government plans to use the roll out of the academy programme to initiate council budget cuts of £413m over the next two years. This is in spite of Department of Education figures suggesting that the maximum saving that could be made as only £60m (based on a national conversion rate of 200 schools a year; BBC News website, 24th January 2011). An influential Government committee has also expressed fears that many academies ‘do not have adequate controls to ensure public money is being spent properly’ (BBC News Website, 27th January 2011). With these factors in mind, it is hard to see how academies could expect to supply vital central services (e.g. cleaning, maintenance, insurance costs) without having to turn to private companies and running the risk of paying more than they need or can afford to in the long term.

Finally, there is the major issue of accountability. Any conversion would cause major upheaval to a school, but there would be very little public notice of what issues had arisen, along with how and if they had been dealt with. The Secretary of State has previously said that any schools rated outstanding by OfSTED would not have to be inspected in future unless there was cause for concern, and four of our schools currently have such a status (Sutton Grammar, Cheam High, St Philomena’s and Wilson’s Schools). Due to the separation of academies and their local education authority, all academies are directly accountable to the Department of Education and Michael Gove, not their local communities.

If any of your readers have similar concerns, or if this article raises them in their minds, then I urge them to take two steps of action. The first is to access the website of their local school, where there should be a link for comments to be made regarding the conversion. The second is to follow this link to an online petition. My intention is to gather sufficient signatures and send the list to Paul Burstow, Tom Brake and Michael Gove on or around the 26th March, when there will be a major protest march through central London (the March For The Alternative). The petition can be found at http://www.gopetition.com/petition/43500.html.

Kind regards, Michael Craven North Cheam Based on information supplied by Michael Craven.