Letter: The concept of academies is at the root of failing schools
If they're anything like me, your readers will be confused by the background story to the alleged failure of four Telford secondary schools, "Academy trust job was just too big" (Shropshire Star, April 27).
The complexity of how three out of four "good" schools all became, within a year or so, classified by Ofsted as "inadequate" is mind-boggling.
I smell a rat, and anyone who has gone through the Ofsted inspection machine (just three is my record) will know that the inspection model is designed to be so complicated that the "experts" can make anything out of it they choose.
The problem, however, does not lie with this or that head teacher, the board, or even individual members of that body. And even Peter Lawley falling on his sword is a little demeaning.
The problem lies with the entire concept of academies – a political invention introduced by Labour in 2000, and developed eagerly by the Tories in 2010.
Within weeks of taking office, the newly appointed Education Secretary, Michael Gove, wrote to every local authority in England, inviting them to turn their secondary schools into academies, with spurious claims of more flexible curricula and (crucially) financial inducements to do so.
Whether they knew it at the time or not, what local authorities now know is that the "academisation" of secondary education was and is a major plank in the Tories' ideological campaign to destroy local authorities, and nothing at all to do with the betterment of education.
This remains Tory ideology and the underlying reason behind the reduction of local authority control and influence over different aspects of community life, and the creeping privatisation of education.Why else would you get rid of a perfectly good system of councillors having oversight of important aspects of education, councillors who would employ education officers to encourage, develop and motivate teachers and to whom parents have access to voice directly their concerns? A far better system than an unelected, somewhat mysterious Trust, to whom parents have no access. Suspicious? So you should be. The parallels with the problems in the NHS are compelling.
The Tories didn't spend an absolute fortune of public money on their top-down reorganisation of the NHS for the fun of it. They introduced a top-down reorganisation to fulfil their ideological commitment to privatise the NHS.
David Askins, Telford
