Education in this country is pretty messed up. A conversation with the average British teenager, teacher or parent will confirm this. Both the Labour Party and the Coalition Government seem to have absolutely no idea what to do with this problem. Labour had years to improve our education system but seemed to spend the time moving pieces around the board and examining students / inspecting teachers to death. None of these strategies worked. The Coalition is so clueless about Education that they have simply adopted many of Labour’s education policies (just as Labour did when they originally took over from the Conservatives in 1997). Academies, for instance, were created by Labour but are now very much part of the Coalition agenda.
The Academy programme – under Labour or the Coalition – is a damaging, wasteful and intellectually insulting enterprise. The word itself is deceitful. Simply calling a comprehensive school an ‘Academy’ does not make it any better. A dictionary definition of ‘Academy’ suggests a level of excellence that shouldn’t statistically exist in an inclusive institution like a school – unless the figures themselves are being managed or fiddled. Successive governments believe that parents are stupid enough to be fooled by such a simple ruse. They might as well be called ‘Super-Dooper’ schools for all the difference a change of title makes.
Academies are financially wasteful. It takes millions and millions more to create an Academy than it does to improve a regular comprehensive school or build one from scratch. There is no evidence that Academies are more effective than other schools at academically improving the students in their care. Some Academies – even with their huge budgets and advantageous systems - have failed completely and have either had to be closed down or be put into Special Measures. This has not stopped two successive governments blindly expanding an untested programme at the cost of millions and millions of pounds to the British taxpayer.
Academies are opposed by teaching unions, who have found these new forms of educational institution to be extremely damaging to the societies in which they are situated. Academies allow for the privatisation of education, they practise ‘back-door’ selection of students and harm other schools in the local area by creating both a cash and brain-drain. They have sponsors, who partly finance the Academy: these can take the form of wealthy individuals or successful businesses. They have an input on the curriculum and organisation of the Academy. In these times of austerity these individuals and companies are almost certainly motivated by money, advertising and influence and these cannot be healthy factors to introduce into an educational environment.
Why do Academies attract parents? Simple. Some schools, due to their initial catchment areas, draw a greater number of Middle Class, advantaged students. These students generate better grades for their school than a school down the road that services a community that is less wealthy. If you take one hundred students and randomly create ten teams of ten, then you should have ten fairly equal teams. No significant advantages. No significant problems or weaknesses. If, however, you take the ten best footballers, place them in one team and then enter all ten teams in a football tournament, then the team containing the best footballers will routinely top the league. This is what happens in schools. The schools that recruit from Middle Class areas are not better institutions: they are simply full of students who are more academically advantaged – by virtue of the fashion in which they have been raised. These schools often generate less improvement in their students across five years of compulsory education than other students but that doesn’t matter because the only figures that are advertised for these different schools are the end-of-course examination results. The Middle Class school will always generate more ‘A’ grades under these circumstances.
This nasty problem has always existed, but the Academy programme embraces it and exacerbates it. These Academies are seen by the government and by British parents simply as better schools, with better facilities and better teachers. This, of course is a gross simplification. If fact, it is more likely that the better teachers generally work in the other, struggling schools, where more academic value is added to students, with less financial investment from the government and self-interested sponsors. This matters little to parents in general, however, who hear a high GCSE pass-rate in an Academy (which ironically might be statistically underachieving) and want to send their children there. Is this so wrong? Basically, it is. It is wrong in the same way it was wrong for the survivors of the Titanic to hog their lifeboats and not return to include others suffering in the freezing water. Academies take huge amounts of extra money from the Education budget, that is effectively being cut from other non-Academy schools. The parents of academically bright students in these struggling schools also give in to temptation and pull their children out, only to apply to the local Academy. The ‘success’ of Academies therefore relies upon creating schools that gradually ‘sink’, despite the best efforts of their teachers and students. Unsurprisingly in these situations, greater concentrations of behavioural problems occur since the Academy is hardly likely to take on students with poor behaviour records from their primary schools or previous secondary schools. These schools simply have to cope the best they can with greater behavioural problems, fewer gifted and talented students to set a tone and good example and, of course, less money. They are viewed cynically by parents as ‘bad’ schools, even though parents had a large hand in creating them.
Why doesn’t everyone simply apply to an Academy? Ultimately they can, but Academies employ fairly insidious strategies to further ensure the illusion of their own ‘excellence’, while further damaging other institutions. Academies are often placed in charge of these other struggling schools. A bizarre situation is then generated where a school that is helping students improve to a greater degree than the Academy is superseded and taken over by the Academy, simply because the Academy has a higher number of A grade students attending it(generated, of course by the lifestyle decisions of parents who want to be ‘seen’ to be doing the best for their children – even if they aren’t). If a student applies to the Academy and their predicted grades match the high grade aspirations of the institution, then they are accepted. This can happen even if the Academy is oversubscribed because Academies get money from the government to expand if they are seen to ‘succeed’. If an honest, hard-working student applies but has a predicted grade that would be damaging to the Academy’s existing reputation and grade-average, then the Academy declines. It can, of course, offer that student a place at one of the struggling schools, the management of which it has taken over. There is plenty of room in those and a D-grade predictor won’t do any damage there. This is how Academies select through the back-door. They damage other schools statistically and financially, parasitically head-hunt the better academic students from them and ensure the intelligence-insulting illusion of their own continued success.
Parents should not be blamed for wanting the best for their children. There has to be a better way of doing that than by selling a generation of other parents’ children down the river. We have cannibalised Education in this country. The politicians have orchestrated this obscenity and the public have either misguidedly empowered them or stood by and allowed it to happen. In the years to come, with Academies everywhere, our education system in tatters and standards cheapened, this will be judged as wilful negligence of our children. We will have created a societal Munchausen by proxy.
