Academies

“Mrs May”, writes the Tory-leaning columnist of the Financial Times, Janan Ganesh, “could not survive an election campaign saying so little so often if people paid attention”. Since so many don’t, “the repetition of slogans in lieu of answers carries no cost”. Fraser Nelson, another Tory, comments in the Spectator: “She seems to think that, if you refuse to give the press anything, the public won’t care. Worse, she seems to be right – for now, at least”. May’s purpose, so Nelson writes, is not to “seek a mandate”, but to evade one. “That’s what this election is really about: a bonfire of these...

Tube workers’ union RMT has announced its members on stations will strike again from 6 February unless London Underground bosses meet its demands for an increased staffing level. The company’s latest proposal is to reinstate 250 of the jobs it cut under the “Fit for the Future” programme, but RMT has rejected the offer as insufficient. An RMT rep told Solidarity : “There’s no way we’d settle for winning back only a quarter of the jobs lost. We want all cuts reversed. Most of the company’s proposed 250 jobs will come back at the CSA2 grade, which we’re fighting to abolish. “It’s not fair for...

Research on Ofsted points to endemic problems in the schools system and inspection regime. Last week, the Education Policy Institute (EPI) released important findings about the fairness of Ofsted reports in England. They found a “systematic negative correlation” between schools with children from poorer backgrounds or lower prior attainment and positive Ofsted judgments. In other words, schools with children from better off backgrounds are more likely to get Good or Outstanding judgments and schools with children who have previously achieved well are also more likely to get Good or Outstanding...

Between half-term of summer 2016 and Xmas 2016, over half the maths teachers in the London secondary school where I teach will have quit. The maths department is more stable than most. Our science department, for example, went through almost a Year Zero in 2015, with almost a complete turnover of staff. And our school is probably more stable than most in low-income areas of London. The Guardian has reported that the Harris Academies in and around London — “one of England’s largest and most successful academy chains” — had “465 teachers leaving in 2014-15, 422 in 2013-14 and 375 in 2012-13”...

On 27 October, the government announced that it would drop plans for a new Education Bill any time before summer 2017. In his last budget statement as Chancellor, George Osborne had announced that all schools in England would be forced to convert to academy status by 2022. The following day, 17 March, the then education secretary Nicky Morgan published a White Paper which outlined the variety of ways in which this goal would be achieved. The scale and breadth of opposition to this proposal, not least in Tory-run local authorities, meant that by the time the now-dropped Education Bill was...

Hartsdown Academy, in Kent, sent 50 students home on the first day of term for “incorrect” school uniform. Nervous 11-year-olds on their first day in big school were turned away because of quibbles about their socks, or buckles on their shoes.Yet the headteacher and the academy chain bosses are defiantly self-righteous. They want to stop the school being “scruffy”. There is no evidence that wearing costly, awkward, and weird clothes helps learning. School uniforms are unknown in Finland, which comes top in world assessments, and in France and Germany. I teach maths in a school which requires...

Teachers struck on Tuesday 5 July in a well supported national strike for guaranteed terms and conditions across all schools, increased funding to schools, and the resumption of negotiations on teacher workload. The strike saw large protests. The march in London was overwhelmingly young, and many young teachers told Solidarity sellers that they had joined the Labour Party in the past year. The government claims two thirds of schools remained open. However that figure masks a whole range of partial closures, and the increasing use of cover supervisors and support staff to keep schools open. The...

Members of the largest teaching, union, the NUT, will take strike action on 2 July in England to demand nationally agreed terms and conditions for all teachers in all state-funded local authority and academy schools. The action is also demanding increased funding for schools and an end to cuts. 60% of secondary schools in England and 15% of primaries are now academies and can set their own terms and conditions. Back in March the government announced they would force all schools to become academies. That prompted the NUT Executive to propose strike action to demand all teachers have agreed...

Last year, teachers, students and parents in Lewisham ran a campaign that successfully fought off the threat of academisation to four schools in the borough. Activists were confident that this left them in a good position to launch a vibrant campaign against the government’s proposals for forced-academisation contained in the recent White Paper, Educational Excellence Everywhere. Just as this campaign was starting to gain some momentum it became clear that we faced a more immediate and local threat. In December 2015, Sir Steve Bullock, the directly elected mayor of Lewisham set up an Education...

Facing a storm of protest, the government announced on 6 May what appeared to be a significant U-turn. Legislation to force academy status was dropped. However, the Tories have not retreated from their objective to turn all schools into academies. They will now pursue this aim through a number of different routes. Academies are state-funded schools which are independent from the local authority (LA). The concept was introduced into the English education system by the last Labour government in 2003, as a supposed solution to “underperformance” in a small number of secondary schools, as deemed...