Primary is changing to ACademy status, what if anything will change?

[LovesBloominChristmas]

Met with tge head of the primary I want dd to go to. It's fantastic and very popular but is changing to academy next year before dd attends. Does anyone have any experience?

Tia

My personal opinion is that almost everything is down to having a good HT and not whether you're an academy or a maintained school.

However a good HT in an academy has more freedom than a good HT in a maintained school, and by defn of being 'good', will use this freedom well.

But I still care more about how good the HT is then anything else about the school.

And if you have a bad HT, you need to run a mile. The LEA can't save a bad HT, although they can possibly mitigate their impact a little bit (if they choose to - which they frequently don't). But not enough to make sure the kids get an adequate education and the staff get treated fairly.

The govt is offering all schools that autonomy - by allowing them all to convert to academies......

We have a good HT and good staff but won't if we are forced to become an academy

snowball3 - Academies are required to conform to the Admissions Code. They cannot introduce admission criteria which are unfair. Trying to limit the admission to middle class children, for example, would be a clear breach of the code.

mrz - but because you're well above the floor target no one's forcing you to become an academy.

But by choosing to not become an academy, you're also choosing not to have the same autonomies as academies.

Which is fine. It's your (GBs) choice.

It depends where the floor targets are set Indigo

A HT is meant to lead the school and inspire the staff.

I would not be impressed if a HT either flounced out when a school was forced to convert, or failed to keep the majority of the staff. If they did that I would not call them a good HT.

It's the HT's job, as leader of the school, to sell the positives of the conversion to staff (and parents).

It's not their job to play politics. This is the govt we have at the moment, and this is their policy.

If you can't change that you need to do the best you can with the hand you've been dealt. No good complaining about it.

There are positives and negatives to converting. It's up to the HT to make it work.

We investigated academy status a few years ago and neither governors or SLT saw it as a positive option when all things were considered at that point.

We've been forced to expand. It's not a positive option. Nobody wants it. We still have to do it.

In the end all we can do is put a brave face on it and sell the positives....

No good moaning about it.

If the governing body, teachers, parents or any other interested parties don't agree that such a major change as converting to an academy is in the school's interest at the present time, then resisting it - not 'moaning' about it - would seem to be an eminently sensible course of action.

OP, some schools hardly change when they convert to an academy. Some change loads. Hard to say what will happen.

Rosebud,
I think that we need to differentiation in any discussion on academies between the sponsored academies and converter academies.
Sponsor academies are by definition schools that are in need of help and therefore you might expect and in deed hope that they would change a lot. Converter academies have only been around a little over 12 months and were based on outstanding or good schools. As such i would not expect that much to have changed in them yet. That might or might not happen in the future.
As for resisting such changes, if you are in a school where the results are not good then to use a well known phrase "resistance is futile" because it is going to happen. The current Secretary of State for Education has decided that the worst schools perceived by him will be converted to sponsored academy status and he has the right to do so. Whether it will make all the schools into good schools is a rather different argument.
A decision by a school to convert to an academy is one that is the Governing Bodies to decide, not the head, not the staff, not the parents but the Governing Body. A good governing body will consult all interested parties before making a decision, those that are not so good will probably be only listening to their head teacher and the siren calls of the extra funding.

My point is that standing up for what you believe in is a sensible course of action.

Nothing that you've said contradicts that.

Our schools are now academy's , hadn't made much difference . House prices may go up though ( bloody expensive already!!!)