Posted by labourblogger on September 16, 2012
With reference to educational policies, I write to reply to Ms Griffin?s points in support of Localism and academies,( Kidderminster Shuttle 6th Sept).
Localism; first, I must correct Ms Griffin?s misinterpretation : ?local democratic accountability? of schools is not primarily achieved by the appointment of school governors by a local authority. Rather, it arises from the relationship the school has with its local authority, in our case, Worcestershire County Council. The council is a democratic body, comprising, at its highest level, of local residents, elected to serve as councillors for a specific local area, operating from a local decision-making setting, County Hall, Worcester, accountable to every adult in Worcestershire every four years. Likewise, the professional officers who serve local authority schools are locally-based, in our case, as locally as Kidderminster and Stourport.
Conversely, an academy school derives its authority to provide its services from the Secretary of State for Education, in London, who appoints his choice of key governors and allows most of the rest to be chosen by the governing body itself. An academy school is entitled to spend public money, (Worcestershire taxpayers? included), without reference to wider local educational need and without accountability to any democratic forum. Localism, in the case of academies, is a sham.
As for the educational performance of academies, Ms Griffin assumes their capacity for improvement is greater than that of local authority schools. Internationally and nationally, the evidence does not support her. For example, publicly-funded, but democratically-unaccountable schools in the USA and Sweden have a mixed record. In Britain, the only evidence we have, the initial success for academies in ?turning around? failing schools, was achieved, (where it was achieved), with very significantly increased funding.
What drives the Tory-led government?s educational policies is ideology, not evidence. As it does in all areas of society, it seeks to impose a free-market model. To this end, it is bent on dismantling the network of universal services to schools by local authorities, as it seeks to privatise everything.
Jamie Shaw, Wyre Forest Labour
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