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Guest post: "As a deputy head, these are my fears about academisation"

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KateMumsnet · 17/03/2016 11:11

Not a single school in the country closes at 3.30pm. In every town and village there is a mighty army of indomitable teachers and teaching assistants who, rather than allow extensive testing regimes to deprive children of art, music and sport, put aside their exhaustion to lead extra-curricular clubs, choirs and workshops after the bell has gone.

If you've ever worked in an office where you occasionally had to do big presentations that took hours to prepare, imagine having to deliver five hours' worth of those presentations every day to 30 people. Then you have to prove they've all understood exactly what you were saying.

Imagine if you then had to use your spare time to prepare more presentations as well as providing personalised written feedback to every participant. Then imagine conducting an orchestra or refereeing football matches for dozens of excited children at the end of it all.

Still, if George Osborne is going to give a bit of money to a small minority of schools so they can fund their after-school clubs slightly more generously, then fine. It's a start.

That was one of the main education stories of the Budget: a bit of extra money to fund extra-curricular clubs that already exist. But there was another announcement, one that looked liked the privatisation of the entire state education system.

The Budget announcement that between now and 2020 all schools, whether they like it or not, will be forced to become part of an "academy chain" means they will be privately controlled but publicly funded. You, the voter, will have no say over how schools are run - but you will still have to pay for them out of your taxes. This brings an end to the system of democratically controlled, locally accountable education which was introduced 114 years ago so that every child in the land could go to school, rather than down the mines or up the chimneys.

The announcement comes as no surprise to many teachers. Indeed, most schools have already taken steps to protect themselves from being overtaken by a large, corporate behemoth, usually by forming trusts and clusters with other local schools that can be turned into less sinister academy chains with relative ease.

But what will this mean for your children? Well, if all schools are academies then, in some ways, no schools are academies. Academies have always been defined by the ways they differ from their local authority-controlled counterparts: they're unconstrained by the national curriculum, they have to find their own HR and legal services and they have considerably more freedom over admissions. If these "distinctions" are applied to all schools, then what the government will actually be doing is abolishing the national curriculum (a bizarre new version of which was introduced in 2014, creating a great deal of now seemingly pointless work), taking away legal and HR support from schools that still feel they need it, and causing considerable confusion around the admissions process.

The curriculum is a moot point in the primary phase. Nowadays we live or die by our pupils' KS2 assessment results and, sadly, it's the content of those high-stakes tests that dictates what children learn between the ages of five and 11. The removal of HR and legal services could be a problem for many smaller primary schools and I worry that their leadership teams will be forced to spend more time addressing those matters rather than addressing the needs of their pupils.

But what is really unclear, and a little scary, is what it will mean for admissions. There already exists a chaotic and confused landscape around school places. Many academies already appear to discriminate against lower-achieving pupils and their families, even though they're not really supposed to, by claiming they are "unable to meet their needs." What will happen if all the schools in an area, now granted the freedom to do so, start discriminating in the same way? What will happen to the children no one dares accept, lest they bring down their test scores? My biggest fear is that local authorities will be forced to hastily set up large numbers of pupil referral units and special schools to educate all the children no one else will take, creating an underclass segregated by ability before they've reached their fifth birthdays.

There's no evidence that academies are any better or any worse than local authority schools in terms of educational outcomes - so the big question for most teachers I speak to is this: why take such a big gamble with our young people's futures? Whatever the explanation, it's hard to believe the government really has children's best interests at heart.

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cestlavielife · 17/03/2016 13:21

so will the centralized dept for education have to massively increase its staff to "oversee" the academies? so a civil servant in London can make decisions that will affect an academy in Sunderland ? and what of the special schools and SEN system?