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Posts Tagged ‘academies’

The left’s failure to embrace school standards has opened the door to grammars’ return

19/09/2016, 05:21:05 PM

by Kevin Meagher

The debate about grammar schools should have been over and done with a generation ago.

After all, it was a system that locked-in the most appalling social inequality.

If you passed your 11-Plus exam, you went to grammar school, with an effective guarantee of a professional career and life membership of the middle class.

If you failed it – because you were poorly on the day of your exam, or dyslexic, or for any other reason – you went to Secondary Modern school, where you would learn to ‘do something with your hands.’

A broadly-based education was not for the likes of you. Like the Epsilons in Huxley’s Brave New World, you were bred for drudgery.

It was a wicked system that divided families and communities, perpetuating ridiculous assumptions about intelligence and by extension, the worth, of tens of millions of people over decades.

By disregarding the talents of so many, so early and so utterly, it fuelled strife in industrial relations that bedevilled post-war Britain.

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Gove is down but he’s already won

17/07/2014, 04:12:46 PM

by David Butler

“Woo! Balrog’s dead” – Phil Smith, upon the downfall of Malcolm Tucker, The Thick Of It

Cheers rang out in classrooms across England. The leaders of the NUT and NASUWT punched the air. The great phantom is finally vanquished. The revolution is over. Except, their celebrations are hollow and wasted. For there will be no return to the status quo ante. Gove’s school structure reforms are not going anywhere

In policy-making terms, institutions matter. Institutions set the rules of the game; they mediate and seek to balance powers through norms and rules. In the case of education, this means moderating the competing demands of parents, teachers, business, the wider community and the state (on behalf of the taxpayer/general citizenry). Through building institutions, politicians can embed the aims and principles they are seeking to achieve and extend.

The institutional analysis can help explore Gove’s expansion of academies and creation of free schools. His reforms represent the culmination of a thirty-year project (of both centre-left and centre-right) to create, mould and embed a new institution, namely the independent state-funded school. Baker’s City Technology Colleges evolved into Adonis’s City Academies, which in turn provided the foundations for Govian Free Schools (and the Twigg-Hunt proposed Parent-Led Academies).

School autonomy, the main feature of the new institution, involves greater freedom over the curriculum (and its delivery), ability to set their own pay and conditions for staff, and control over school day and school term lengths. This autonomy is aimed at raising standards and extending parental choice (the principles capture by the institution).

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The real scandal in education is the inequality in schools’ funding

25/09/2012, 07:54:28 AM

by Robin Thorpe

Education is widely regarded as the single biggest factor in lifting people out of poverty, it is also the most influential interaction that many people have with the state. Yet the way that schools’ funding is dispersed is not widely known and if the Labour movement is truly about breaking down inequalities then the huge disparities in funding across local authority boundaries needs to be acknowledged and changed.

Massive changes are currently being implemented to the way that schools are funded and these changes are being effected largely because of the extension of the academy system.

Most schools that changed to academy status in the last few years did so voluntarily and did so because they were offered the carrot of increased funding. This carrot will no longer be available to academies, as from 2013/14 all schools will have control over their entire budget.

The maintained schools still have their budget set by the local education authority (academies receive their budget from the education funding agency), but all funds are now to be delegated directly to the school.

Under the current system the LEA retains part of the budget for maintained schools in return for providing core services such as payroll, CRB checks and contingency funding. The new system will see schools having to buy back into the service (or they can choose another provider).

This is part of a large (top-down) re-organisation of schools funding that seeks to remove local authority control over schools’ funding formula and replace it with a national funding formula (centralizing schools funding policy). The main reason for this seems to be that the EFA has to benchmark its funding formula for schools nationally and it can’t rationalize the differences between authorities to maintain parity for academy funding across county boundaries.

They are therefore seeking to simplify the system; however the system they are seeking to simplify is very complex. The current funding formula is based on actual school circumstances and has been developed over several years to direct funding to schools for a specific purpose; for example in Dorset there are several schools near army stations that have a number of children leaving and joining each year, this inevitably adds an administrative burden to these schools.

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The Sunday review: Education, education, education: reforming England’s schools by Andrew Adonis

16/09/2012, 07:00:06 AM

by Anthony Painter

There are many peculiarities in our politics. Perhaps the most peculiar aspect of current political debates centres on education policy. The Conservatives, relying on a single international and heavily caveated measure of relative educational performance, seek to discredit Labour’s period in office. Simultaneously, they have basically adopted Labour’s approach to structural reform of secondary education. Academies and their close relative, free schools, university technical colleges (UTCs), studio schools, the Teach First initiative, are all initiatives supported by or initiated by the Labour government. It’s too easy to forget.

At the same time, Labour is almost embarrassed to be associated with this reform programme. While it ums and ahs, Michael Gove will take full credit for the improvements the academy movement is likely to bring. Shy reformers lose their voice. So Labour’s interventions in the education debate are suddenly sotto voce. Andrew Adonis, the architect of these reforms, is looking to raise the volume once more.

In Education, education, education – part memoir, part “how to do reform” manual, part education reform history, part ministerial diary, part manifesto – Adonis reminds us that Labour consistently drove reform in office. The end point of these reforms is inevitably “an academised system.” Quite why Labour should resist is perplexing.

Adonis is generous – rightly so – to Conservative reformers of the system and Lord Baker in particular. City Technology Colleges were the precursor of the academy programme as was local management of achools. The introduction of the GCSE is also identified as a key educational reform, opening pathways for the majority. Lord Baker is now the driving force behind the UTC movement. At the same time, a number of Labour figures are given a less than rosy assessment. Tony Crosland who set out on a mission to “destroy every fucking grammar school in England” is served particularly poorly by subsequent developments. As “secondary modern comprehensives” – Adonis’s phrase – resulted from educational reforms on the 1960s and 1970s, so the majority were ill-served. Margaret Thatcher, of course, went along with all this in the early 1970s.

So both parties have their heroes and villains. Adonis is clear about wanting to take the politics out of education so this is perhaps not surprising. If there is a default setting then the left has a tendency to support the status quo and producer interest over innovation and the consumer – kids and parents. The right too often sees educational advancement in a social Darwinian fashion – useful only for a minority beyond a certain level. Yet, despite the noise surrounding the debate, reform has been consistent for two decades or more now. There seems to be a critical mass of reformism; a radical centre of educational improvement.

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