New academy

Given that the move is essentially no more than a move out of local authority control and influence and into the control of a sponsoring chain, with central Government (who’ll pay the chain with our taxes ) in direct supervisory attendance, the excitement seems a touch synthetic, or at least puzzling.

Mrs Gould’s words, as quoted in your article (Gazette, March 27) resemble the language of many pro-‘academy’ heads, in that they don’t convey any clear educational reason for the move.

Unsurpisingly so, because the reasons for such moves aren’t educational, but political; here, they amount to little more than opting – with West Sussex’s encouragement, evidently – for governance by a privately-owned chain, rather than governance by the local democratically-elected authority.

It is little else than a crude shift – a frequently manipulated and pressured, or merely fashionable shift – away from the ‘public’ towards the ‘private’ in schooling, towards the part-privatising of what has been thoroughly public.

So much, one might say, for ‘localism’ in education.

So much too now for ‘state’ education.

No-one need ‘research’ academy trusts to discover that trusts aren’t public, that they’re private companies.

Nor is research needed to arrive at the realisation that the success of a school isn’t necessarily promoted by ‘escaping’ from local authority governance.

It isn’t choosing the right sponsor for one’s school that’s going to ‘help us in striving towards our ultimate goal of becoming an outstanding school’.

Sponsoring chains, like local authorities, may or may not deliver.

There are examples, helpfully current, of chains that evidently do not.

Standards of schooling, and political ownership of schools, are logically different things, and it doesn’t help to confuse them.

So it’s a pity that heads and others with an interest ( for various reasons, not all of them clear ) in seeing their schools become ‘academies’ should inappropriately use a kind of language (educational ) to wrap up and justify decisions that are straightforwardly political.

Straightforwardly, but not always transparently so.

Robert Hull

Elm Grove South

Barnham

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