George Monbiot has given national prominence to the forced academy issue
LINK which has attracted many comments on the Guardian website.
This comment sums up the issues very well:
Our local secondary schools were taken over by Harris, essentially
forcibly. It's no coincidence that Harris is a donor to the Tory
Party, and the Tory party are now repaying him. There's no clear
information on how much money is now being channelled through Harris
for these schools, but if you take an average secondary school budget
of £3m-£4m depending upon numbers, you can start to see what big
business this is. Harris is fast approaching £100m of taxpayers'
cash.
Of course, much of this goes to the schools. But Harris also has
set up two profit-making companies which he can instruct his schools
to use for provision such as buildings and maintenance. I'm sure that
there are also "preferred suppliers" for other services. In
addition, Harris provide some services centrally - of course they
would claim not to make a profit, but in 2011, the average cost of
each member of the Harris Federation staff was over £80,000. His
chief executive, and pet Gove advisor, Daniel Moynihan, paid himself
a quarter of a million pounds. This came from school budgets. That's
the salary of 3 headteachers, or nearly 10 new teachers.
This is just one academy chain. Dig into the others and you will
find some equally odious developments.
We need to recognise what this is. Under the guise of Gove and
Wilshaw's blatant lies about "falling standards", "dumbing
down" and "failing schools", and aided and abetted by
a mendacious Tory press happy to repeat obvious nonsense about
academy status granting "freedom from LEA control" in areas
in which the LEA never had any control, we are witnessing the
outright
privatisation of our education system.
Our schools are being handed on a plate to rapacious businessmen
under the guise of school improvement, yet the real agenda is to
marketise the system, remove schools from any local accountability,
and allow businesses to reap huge profits from siphoning off money
which we paid in taxes for our children's education. Gove and the
Tories know this would never obtain public approval, so the lie is
pushed again and again that this is a benign process to raise
standards, but the events at Roke, at Downhills, at Kelsey Park and
Cator Park, to name but a few, give the lie to this. This is a
sell-off.
Labour have cowered on this issue because it was them who started
this nonsense about academy status being the universal panacea, to
cover up what they were really doing, which was rebranding difficult
"sink" schools to try and change the intake. That policy
worked up to a point as long as the intake changed. But it was always
a nonsense to suggest that there was any connection between academy
status and results - plenty of academic studies have now demonstrated
this link is simply bogus. They are now facing the result of their
own propaganda, and to stop this sell-off, they will need to face up
to their own lies and mistakes, and admit that this is never what
academies were about. Can you hear Twigg saying that ? No, I didn't
think so.
Michael Rosen has also commented on the forced academies issue in his latest 'Dear Mr Gove' letter LINK
