The greedy old nuclear power plant-owning millionaire from the TV series The Simpsons has attempted to get his hands on almost everything in Springfield, yet the town’s school has so far been safe from him. Nevertheless, the scenario of private sponsors gaining stakes in the running of public schools is no longer a fictional one. There have recently been heated debates and extensive media coverage about the Government’s current drive to turn 200 underperforming primary schools into academies. Opposition and supporters are facing each other on the battleground of the future of education, and there seems to be no easy way to resolve the problem.
The debate was furthered with the leaking of a Whitehall document branding Haringey primary schools the worst in inner London with one in seven of the borough’s schools being below the minimum standard. The Government’s solution to reform failing schools such as those in Haringey is to take them out of council control and to turn them into semi-independent academies. Such academies are still partly funded by the state, but are predominantly run by sponsors who are often private companies, trusts, charities or religious organisations. Under this new model of governance, the schools get to pick and choose which services they would like to keep buying from the local authority and which they prefer to buy from private contractors.
Critics claim that the Conservative Government is simply forcing through an agenda of privatisation and fear that education could become a mere commodity for profit. Whether this will prove to be a reasonable concern or not, it is true that academies will be less accountable since they will no longer need to have every important decision to be approved by the local authority. This also leads to fears that communities will lose control over their primary schools if these are run by a board of predominantly private sponsors rather than the local council. Amidst these concerns regarding privatisation, accountability and community control, we should also not forget that there is no one-size-fits-all model that can solve the individual problems many schools are facing. Every school has its very own issues to deal with that keep it from performing better and simply converting them to academies is unlikely to be the universal remedy we have all been waiting for. This simply seems to be too good to be true.
However, there are always two sides to the same coin and there are significant advantages to academies which we should not ignore. Once a school has successfully converted to an academy it gains access to more funding and new resources through its private partners. This, for example, allows the school to buy new equipment, employ additional staff and reduce class sizes, and to use the know-how and resources of its partners for the benefit of its pupils. In addition, academies enjoy greater independence when it comes to designing the curriculum and to processes of decision-making (although critics are likely to regard this as a negative point). Moreover, the new emerging academies cause another significant change in the diverse landscape of education: They have suddenly made private education affordable for everyone. Overall, even though converting to an academy is not the best solution for every single underperforming school, there is considerable evidence that it is an effective and quick way to turn failing schools into successful ones, affecting positive social change in the communities along the way.
We at The ClementJames Centre and IntoUniversity know a prime example of an underperforming school that has undergone an impressive transformation into an outstanding academy. Our partner school Burlington Danes Academy converted in 2006 in partnership with the charity ARK Schools (ARK Schools is developing a network of academy schools as part of the Academies Programme, established by the Department for Children, Schools and Families in 2000). In the late nineties the school was in a sad state of academic decline and in 2004 was placed in special measures by Ofsted. Now, in 2012, Burlington Danes is completely revitalised and performing to a much higher standard. Moreover, Burlington Danes will not remain the only academy in our local area. Sir Rod Aldridge is to open a new Aldridge Academy in North Kensington in 2014 under the umbrella of his Aldridge Foundation. This academy will have a strong focus on entrepreneurship, adding to the great diversity of primary education in our borough.
We are still at the beginning of the Government’s experiment of converting failing schools into academies and it remains to be seen whether this will really prove to be the best solution for the benefit of all those involved. At the moment, the apocalyptic threat of a Mr Burns educating our children to become little copies of himself is still very distant, and it remains up to us to keep education as accessible and to the highest standard as possible.
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