Forced academisation of schools -Julian Sturdy response

This is a response by Julian Sturdy (dated 8 June but received 29 June) to my letter of 4 May about the forced academisation of schools.

My response to this letter below.

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Dear Mr Franklin

Thank you for taking the time to reply to my letter regarding blanket-academisation. I understand that you will have received further correspondence from me regarding the Government’s revised position on this issue. However, I wanted to address the specific concerns you raised in your latest email to me.

Firstly, it may well be the case that all’ of the teachers and head teachers you know wish to continue working in the maintained sector. However, this is certainly not true of all teachers and it is important to note the number who do work in academies and view conversion as successful to the educational outcomes of their schools.

Secondly, proposals to increase democratic accountability of schools have been proposed through allowing parents the right to petition regional schools commissioners where they believe that a given multi-academy trust is failing their children. This cannot currently be done by a school maintained by the local authority.

Again, all of the parents you know may express a preference for their children to be taught by 'qualified teachers’. I am sure that you will agree that it is important that we attract the best people to the teaching profession, which means that there should be individuals from a wide range of backgrounds and with a wide range of experience. I start from the presumption that head teachers are best placed to decide what teachers they employ. The ability to employ those without Qualified Teacher Status allows academies the same freedoms as fee-paying independent schools and many parents in this sector appear happy with teaching provision.

Fourthly, the Government’s proposals state that local authorities will retain powers to ensure that all children are given school places, ensure that the needs of vulnerable pupils are met, and hold academies and multi-academy trusts to account as champions of families and parents.

Fifthly, I am yet to find any evidence supporting your assertions regarding the performance of academies over the short- and long-term. 

As stated above, the local authority will retain the powers to ensure that all children are given school places and ensure that the needs of vulnerable children are met. Furthermore, I believe the challenge that you allude to in your sixth point relating to exclusion would be equally applicable to maintained schools.

Finally, the Government has also committed to reforming alternative provision and is proposing to introduce a system whereby mainstream schools remain accountable and responsible for the education of pupils who require this service.

I am not in favour of the government removing any requirement on schools to become academies because I believe that this has proven to be successful for those schools that were failing our children and required further improvement. However, as I made clear in my previous email I am opposed to the forced conversion of Good and Outstanding schools and I shall ensure that my views continue to be made clear on this matter.

I hope that this response is helpful and if you have any further concerns please do not hesitate to get in touch. 

Yours sincerely

Julian Sturdy

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Dear Mr Sturdy,

Thank you for your letter of 8 June, which I received this morning – can I recommend email as it is faster, cheaper and greener.

It is not just all the teachers I know who oppose academisation.  The major teaching unions are opposed to (forced) academisation.  See for instance the NUT https://www.teachers.org.uk/campaigns/academies.  There are teachers who favour academies, though many of those that do work in academies would much prefer to see the school under democratic control where the concern is for the welfare of the pupils rather than meeting the requirements of the academy chains.

To say that parents have the right to petition the government appointed commissioners is a form of democratic accountability is ludicrous.  If the government were to replace parliament with regional commissioners who we had the right to petition, but no say over their appointment or re-appointment or policies I do not believe that you would describe that as democratic control.  There is no democratic accountability in the right to petition.  Democratic accountability requires the ability to select people on the basis of their policies and the right to recall or remove them if they fail to deliver.  None of this applies to commissioners; they are a bureaucratic not a democratic force.  Further, currently, where a school is considered failing by Ofsted it is required to become an academy whilst there is no such requirement on an academy to be returned to local authority control.  Indeed, where a school does not match Ofsted requirements over some small matter it may be required to become an academy despite the opposition of parents and teachers.  This is not democratic; it is authoritarian central control. 

The major point here is that there is no control over what the school does.  If it teaches fundamental Christianity or Islam; if it denies evolution and so on there is nothing that parents can do because they have no control over the academy chain.  If they don’t like what the local authority is doing, then they can vote new members in.  In short there is a complete loss of democratic control within academies.

As to attracting the “best people to the teaching profession” I am aware of many who would have been teachers but find the current imposition of the national curriculum which controls not only what is taught, but how it is taught a serious impediment.  Being the best people is not enough.  Would you be happy to be treated by an unqualified doctor because they were one of the “best people”?  However good people are they need training to be able to work effectively and this is as true of teaching as any other profession.  I can think of only one other profession with no entry requirements – Information Technology and look how many projects fail or are late and over budget!

Also, many good people are being switched off from teaching, in large part as much of the national curriculum concerns how to teach and is not evidence based; often going against the evidence to satisfy the prejudices of the Minister of Education.  I do have a theory about Ministers of Education.  Ministers are highly intelligent extremely ambitious people, but they believe what worked for them will work for everyone.  Not everyone is ambitious or highly intelligent and therefore actually need different methods of teaching if they are to learn effectively.  (Note that this is not a party political point as I have seen it in all governments for as long as I can remember ie Keith Joseph).

You state “the Government’s proposals state that local authorities will retain powers to ensure that all children are given school places”.  What will these powers be – given that they do not have any control over admissions to academies?  What will they do with pupils that have been excluded?  Currently some of these are educated via home visits and the like. Will local authorities have to build an entire infrastructure just for these children?  How will that be funded?  Without proper answers to these (and many more questions) it will lead to real problems once local education authorities are abolished.

As I said before “The whole academy programme is profoundly anti-democratic giving away of our schools to private bodies and removing any democratic oversight.  I hope that you will therefore push the government to remove any requirement on schools to become academies, and to introduce a mechanism to enable academy schools to return to LEA control.”

Best wishes

Tom.

Tom Franklin
4 Frazer Court
York
YO30 5FH

email:    tom@franklin-consulting.co.uk

Worlds smallest computer?

now that is a lightweight computer. and they say it will be £10-£15... So, I want one of those.

Learning styles

Nice article looking at the literature on learning styles and concluding " no clear evidence supporting any of the many theories about learning styles. They fault weak methodology and the commercial nature of much of the research"

Why so many theories of education?

Stephen Downes asked "why education has so many different theories, as opposed to pretty much any discipline that is not fiction, which has just one main theory. "

I don't think multiple competing theories is restricted to education, but affects the whole of the humanities and social sciences. I think that there are a number of reasons for this (some better than others).

Firstly, we bring a huge amount of baggage with us - political beliefs, religious beliefs, the society we live in etc. Thus we can have Marxist, capitalist, Christian, Muslim etc theories of society and of education.

Secondly, but related to the first, there is no agreement on what education is about (or for). Is it to enable us to be good workers (wage slaves?)? or is it to develop the whole person in an Enlightenment way? Or is it to make us good believers? (Well we have faith schools in the UK) Or, what is the balance between these competing demands on education.

Thirdly, there is no agreement on whether learning is social or individual (for lack of a better word). Clearly, at some level learning is what occurs inside the learners head, but equally clearly it has social aspects too.

Fourthly, measurement is extremely inaccurate for a number of reasons. Marking is an art not a science (however hard exam boards try). Get two people to mark the same script and the marks can vary enormously (hence double marking and double peer review). Also, we examine (ie look at) what we (easily) can rather than what we may want to. We use proxies to the real learning. Thus, it is very hard to know what has been learned.

Fifthly, Learning theories seem to have problems with the disconnects between:- formal and informal learning- what the student wants and what the teacher / system want- learning and using that learning (there are plenty of stories - and some research - into students being able to answer exam questions on eg physics questions, but not being able to apply that to the real world.

In conclusion, I would suggest that the social sciences (and I would lump education in there) are not comparable to the physical sciences as they start from ones political perspective and therefore there will be competing incommensurate theories. The nearest I can think of the sciences is evolution and so called intelligent design. Because they start from different premises (evidence and faith respectively) they cannot actually be compared.

Universities - Education or training

Our beloved government wants to change the rules for universities again; see http://tinyurl.com/47kyez

There seem to me to be several problems with what they are proposing.

They have just got rid of funding for "equivalent or lower degrees" ie second degrees for people who already have a qualification - however out of date or irrelevant to their change of career their original degree was. So that excludes many of the older people who might want to go to university.

Then, even if there are six million people who have "A" levels who have not been to university, many of them will have no desire to - they will be working and not want to take time out to go to university. Even if they do want to go to university, if they have not done serious study for a number of years then they will need to go to some form of pre-university course to get back into the habit of studying - but there is no mention of that, who might provide it, or how it might be funded.

Even if we get over all of that, is there a queue of businesses wanting to fund these courses? There has been only limited take up by industry of foundation degrees, and they don't have to pay for these. It looks very like the city academy idea in schools, where to drum up support they have widened the definition of who can do it and waived the funding requirements with the result that there are some very dubious (ie religious fundamentalist) people running some of our state funded schools.

And finally, we come to the change in the academic year so that we have short intense courses running alongside the more relaxed (well long holidays at least) three year courses. He appears to forget that many of the people who would be doing these degrees actually use the long holidays to earn some money to carry them through the rest of the year. However, maybe there will be decent grants / loans. Though that seems unlikely.

When though will academics have a chance to have a decent go at their research - there are very few these days who take long holidays, most use the summer as a time when they can do some research with fewer admin and teaching interruptions.

This looks like an attempt to firstly divide universities between teaching and research universities - bringing back the binary divide by the back door perhaps? and secondly to move universities further away from education to training.

After all, what the government appears to want is a submissive productive (trained) workforce that doesn't think too much (educated).

Perhaps we need to campaign on this.

The counterblast begins (I hope)

At last there seems to be the beginnings of a counterblast to this test, test, test of children that started under Major and expanded enormously under Blair.

While testing (in the sense of formative and diagnostic testing in class) is (and always has been) an essential part of education (though these days usually under the name assessment). Summative testing is stressful for all parties, and as the article suggests damaging to education.

Unfortunately, I don't think that this will move anything like fast enough, and many more children will have their education damaged through over (summative) testing. Damaging because it narrows the curriculum to focus on the tests, damaging because it ensures that focus is primarily on those who can be bumbed up a grade (the borderline cases) to the detriment of those who are mid grade, excelling or doing poorly. Damaging because it makes education boring. Damaging because the focus moves from learning to testing. Damaging because it is stressful for all involved.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2099635,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=networkfront