The early sponsored academies were a triumph for the Labour party. After decades and decades of the poorest kids in the poorest parts of our country going to the poorest schools, here we had a major upheaval in the system: a serious injection of money directed right at those who needed it most; a grand building programme; recruitment of innovative, entrepreneurial leaders with proven track records and a brave decision to liberate those leaders not to follow ‘what we have always done’, but to do what we had not done before. And this all targeted on the most disadvantaged. This was truly a government taking a preferential option for the poor. So surely the Labour party in every town and borough must have been rejoicing? Well, people find change difficult and of course once these academies delivered success and transformed the life chances of the kids lucky to attend them, then the Labour party would scream their success from their rooftops – wouldn’t it?
Instead of that happening I had to suffer the embarrassment of being namechecked by Michael Gove as secretary of state in a speech to Conservative party conference. We allowed the Tories to ‘steal’ our successful policy; we allowed them to seize the moral high ground on education, and it has damaged our credibility immeasurably. ‘The problem is the party hasn’t quite made its mind up on academies’, was said to me by a shadow cabinet member. How deeply depressing – not least because the system will not wait for dinosaurs; it will keep moving forward and I want the preferential option for the poor, I want the great moral purpose of the Labour party, so ably demonstrated in the early academies programme, to be at the forefront of system change.
So at some point we allowed Gove to seize the agenda, claim academies for his own, and allow every man and his dog to become an academy without any commitment to taking a preferential option for the poor and disadvantaged and vulnerable (some early converters even went on telly and said they were doing it for ‘the money’: they will have been disappointed!). Now is the time to seize that agenda back. Now is the time for Labour to speak about their pride in their academies, to unashamedly develop policies which take a preferential option for the poor, to be clear that a Labour success will never again be hijacked by Tories, and to ensure that we tell it like it is rather than how some wish it to be.
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Ros McMullen is an academy principal and a member of the Labour party. She blogs at principalprivate.wordpress.com and tweets @RosMcM
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How about starting by pointing out that the Conservative government stole money earmarked for rebuilding dilapidated schools in order to hand it out to their pet education projects? I do not agree that academies are a good idea, because not every school administration can be trusted with its own budget, look what has happened at the Haberdasher’s Aske School, the Quintin Kynaston Academy, etc. But then this also happens in non-academy schools. Someone I know well is a teacher at a state school and has to buy her own supplies because she is told there is no money and yet there is expensive equipment lying around that is not being used. There needs to be much closer scrutiny. Also, I thoroughly dislike the idea of school governors being chosen for their political party affiliations. In my constituency there is a Labour governor who is thoroughly unsuitable to be a school governor (or a member of the Labour Party for that matter) due to his overtly racist views.
Well run Academies in poorer areas have, in the main, been a huge success and the children have been the winners. After all it is the children who are the important element in this debate.Of course there have been- a small minority- where things have gone wrong eg fraud. Labour need to be bold in Education as we still have too many under achievers and that needs to be tackled head on. Well managed schools be it local authority or academies to work together and learn from each other.Failure as in the bad old days not to be swept under the carpet.
Academies, whatever their original motivation, were always likely to be divisive and open to hijack by the Tories with a quite different agenda. The question that was never answered was why couldn’t the “freedoms” granted to academies be equally granted to LEA schools? The key benefit otherwise was just the injection of extra funding to schools in poor areas, which didn’t need the academy model anyway. The problems of providing a decent education across the piece are far more complex than can be achieved either by different governance or more money against the background of English education mired in concepts more suited to the 19th than the 21st century.