city academies | ukwatch.net

This turmoil is good news for schools

Ellie Keen — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 13:09:37 +0000

In the long term, Britain’s economic woes could be good news for our schools, for two reasons.

First, they will decouple business from academies, which may mark the beginning of an end to the most damaging and divisive education policy Britain has seen in six decades of universal state education. One business is already reported to have withdrawn its academy sponsorship. Amey, once a
construction company which now describes itself as an “asset management consultancy”, wants to end its sponsorship of Unity city academy, one of the first academies, and one of the least successful, with just 12% of students achieving five A*-C grades this year.

Second, they will weaken the stranglehold business has over education. It is essentially to appease business that the government seeks to divide children at 11 or 14 into successes and failures, expanding the number of schools that are allowed to select some or all of their pupils. It damages the children, but it is convenient for their future employers.

Top business people will have less time to spend dictating how schools are run. And if they have any shame, they will be less inclined to consider themselves qualified to lecture to schools. Just possibly, Gordon Brown and his ministers will be less inclined to suppose that anything the public sector does, the private sector is bound to do better.

So there is, for the first time since Harold Wilson ruled in Downing Street, a chance of building an education system which will be a route out of poverty, not a poverty trap – a comprehensive system. Yet when I say that I’m off this weekend to speak at the annual conference of Comprehensive Future, the campaign for an end to selection in secondary education, some people look at me pityingly and mutter about “lost causes”.

It’s certainly true that those who believe passionately in not branding children as failures at the age of 11 no longer have the support of either main political party. But if causes were only worth fighting for when supported by one of the two ruling parties, many great reforms would never be talked of.

We know that when you select, you select out the poor – selective schools have a tiny proportion of children poor enough to be eligible for free school meals, for such children go to the neighbouring secondary modern.

We know that when you force one school in an area to take only the children another school does not want to teach, as they do for example in Kent, then you are setting that school up for failure.

A school, if it is to succeed, needs its share of the motivated children. A child in a household living below the poverty line is less likely than other children to succeed at school and to gain the qualifications which allow them to escape from poverty. The children of the poor are less likely to get places at selective schools, less likely to do well in public examinations and gain qualifications, and less likely to attend university. And the more prestigious the university, the smaller its proportion of students from poor families.

In short, poverty is hereditary. You get it from your parents. And it will be a splendid irony if the nation’s unexpected poverty were to release its poorest citizens from their dismal inheritance.

Smash School Privatisation

Ellie Keen — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Next Step In The Anti-Academy Campaign

Following last week’s actions against the privatisation of UK education in Wembley, North West London, a new call out by campaigners to re-squat the land and put another obstacle in the way of Blair’s profitable education program, centring the campaign against school privatisation right under the nose of the new Wembley Stadium.

For two years the Wembley Park Sports Ground site has been a constant pain in the butt for the local council, for the private investor, charity Ark, whose founder is multimillionaire French/Swiss financier Arpad “Arki” Busson, and for the UK Brown fronted government.

Now campaigners and activists not associated with the previous campaign are calling on people to converge on the sports ground, re-squat the site and put a halt to this, the latest corporate grab of UK education, sending a clear message to the investors and the government – hands off our schools and our children.

Residents and teachers have continually squatted the land, halting development, since 2006. In recent weeks local teachers, business owners and residents instigated direct action to draw attention to Ark gaining control of the public sports ground, in order to build their next privatised Academy school, one of six they plan to open by September 2008.

The previous campaigners have now been hit with huge costs and fines, are banned from the site for two years and face prison time for even remotely being involved in any further campaign against the Wembley Ark Academy.

The sports ground has been used by local schools and residents at £1 per session for decades, the local schools in the area do not have their own playing fields. The land is also home to protected trees and various wildlife, including colonies of bats.

When private investor Ark takes over they claim the use of the sports ground will be “affordable” and also claim their will be more amenities there for the local community.

But, as parents have been finding out while visiting the site, expecting to see a nice big shiny new school – the school is not built yet. In the meantime, from September 2008 60 pupils, 200 pupils by September 2009, will be temporarily housed while the school is built around them, leaving them in the middle of a construction site, breathing construction dust and put at risk from overhanging cranes and other construction machinery. And all the while, at the expense of people’s safety, private investor Ark will start raking in the profits, straight from the UK taxpayer.

Local residents have been continually lied to on all issues surrounding this development. The main argument by Brent Council and Ark for the need of the school was 200 children would have no school place, thus no education, if the Academy was not built. But Brent Council neglected to inform residents, and Ark themselves, that there were two other sites in the borough where the school was more needed and appropriate land was available.

Brent Council also neglected to tell residents there were other investor options in the school. Residents were only informed of the Ark investor.

Now it has come to light that Brent Council have been stealing children from other local schools, canvassing parents to change schools to the new Academy, thus reducing pupil numbers at the two remaining state schools in the area. As pupil numbers fall at the state schools, so does the funding, leaving those two schools under threat of closure, leaving only the privately-run school open for business.

Brent Council also promised to relocate all the small local businesses affected by the Wembley Academy development program. To date they are still waiting, despite their imminent eviction of current premises on 31 July 2008.

The age old question now sits on the mouths of those directly affected in the area, and more so by all across the country questioning UK school Academisation – if they are lying, deceiving and cheating at this stage, can these people be trusted to run UK schools?

Tony Blair set up the Academy school system in 2000, where private investors were asked to come up with £2 million investment to buy their very own state school. The further running and redevelopment costs of the school would be footed by the UK taxpayer, usually a fee of around £30 million per school. The government argument for this was with state education failing on many levels the only answer to save UK education was begin a process of “Academisation”, in other words, privatisation.

Now the £2 million is not being paid by the investors. Academy schools no longer have to follow the school curriculum. They are failing worse than the remaining state schools. Expulsion rates are sky-rocketing and the private interests are increasingly gaining control of what is being taught in their schools, leaving children’s education in the hands of some of the largest most powerful companies in the world, as well as some religious groups, which, looking at closely, can only be considered fundamentalist.

The Wembley Park Anti-Academy Camp will be open from this Sunday, 27 July 2008. The plan is to maintain a presence on the site and halt all preparations for the school, sending a clear message to local authorities, the national government, and the private investors, you are not welcome in our schools.

Join the campaign. Save our schools from the hands of the corporate elite. Smash School Privatisation. No to education for profit.

Details:
Wembley Park Sports Ground, Bridge road, Wembley, NW9
Nearest tube: Wembley Park (metropolitan and jubilee line)
Turn left out station, walk up to main junction of Bridge Road and Forty Lane, turn left, walk up to left-hand gate where car wash sign is and you’re there.

Buses:
From Mill Hill or Kensal Rise – 302 (get off at Blackbird Hill)
From Golders Green – 83 (get off at Wembley Asda or Wembley Park tube)
From Brent Cross – 182 (get off at Wembley Asda or Wembley Park tube)

Down, Wembley Way

JamieSW — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 19:22:46 +0000

Campaigners against a new city academy in Wembley (see SchNEWS 639) are keeping up their protest despite the camp they set-up being evicted on Wed 16th July.

On Tuesday, a court hearing against Wembley Tent City in North London served an injunction against one of the protesters, Hank Roberts, and fined him £3,500. Undaunted Hank and others swiftly returned to the camp and moved their tents on to the roof of one of the buildings facing demolition. He was later joined by other protesters resisting the eviction.

City academies were dreamt up by the government as a way of offloading some of that terribly burdening cost of education, and turning it into a money-making scheme for wealthy types wanting to set up their own schools. As they are privately owned they don’t come under the same strict guidelines faced by state schools, allowing them to come up with their own curriculum. And, of course, there is no evidence that they are any more successful than standard state schools.

The Tent City is part of the campaign against the Wembley Park Academy, an American and British educational charity sponsored and run by The Ark, a group of millionaire merchant bankers and hedge fund speculators. It will still require £30 million of taxpayers money as initial funding. If the building gets the go ahead it will see the demolition of a community centre and a sports field used by local children.

On Wednesday, cops turned up to issue an injunction to the protesters with threats of arrest if they were ignored. Displaying their usual over-zealous tendencies, they even threatened to arrest some journalists who had joined the protesters on the roof.

As well as getting a lot of media coverage for their campaign – with journos from the BBC and ITV turning up to have a nose around, Wembley Tent City has also received a great deal of support. A spokesperson for the camp said there were over a hundred supporters on-site after the court case on Tuesday, and there were still about 50 people there when council bailiffs turned up later in the day. Perhaps in light of the strong support, the bailiffs slunk away without removing so much as a tent peg.

Much of the support has come from the neighbourhood, with many recognising the good the campaign is doing for the local community. Bailiffs are expected to remove the last of the protesters on Friday at the just plain unnecessary time of 6:30am, but protesters are quick to point out that this is just the beginning of the campaign and on Friday the High Court will decide whether their court case against the company will be heard.

Find out more about the campaign and how you can get involved at www.tentcityoccupation.co.uk

The Great City Academy Fraud

Ellie Keen — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 23:52:55 +0000

book Review

The Great City Academy Fraud, by Francis Beckett

It is impossible to commend this book highly enough. When the whole City Academy saga started Brent was chosen as one of the first 3 proposed in the country. As local NUT Secretary I was intimately involved from the start. We witnessed the deceit, the spin, the secrecy, the bribery and the downright dishonesty and lying. I collected the papers and the evidence and thought of writing a book. In common with most people I never got round to it. I’m glad I didn’t, I couldn’t have done the job a tenth as well.

It’s an elegantly written book packed with killer quotes and facts. I have the rather desecrating habit of turning the ears of pages down if they have a particularly important or germane fact or quote. By the end of the book almost every other page had been dog-eared.

I read the book whilst camping out at the occupation ‘tent city’ we have set up to oppose an Academy on the Wembley Park site. You can imagine that I and my colleagues have been absorbed in studying and finding out as much information as possible about the academy programme, yet still I found out so many things I didn’t know and gained more insights into the depth and perfidy of these would-be state education privatisers.

Amongst many things, the book shows how Primary schools will not escape and will be included in the academies’ increasing trend to be all-through 3-18 schools (the bigger the school, the cheaper the cost per unit – sorry – child); how private schools are being allowed to become academies; how academies are now being built entirely with public money with so-called sponsors only being expected to make annual revenue contributions to the academy trust; how Local Authorities, as being responsible for education, are to be ended; how democratic consultation and procedures have been trampled into the dust and the legal goalposts bent, ignored and moved with the regularity and speed of atomic clocks; and how there is a determined plan by religious groups to turn the clock back.

So, to quote two brief extracts from the book, the first regarding the role of religion in education, and the second regarding the role of charity, or rather the role it shouldn’t have, in education (but if you use them I want you to promise me that you won’t do it without buying the book, because you’ll miss so many other good ones).

He points out that long before the academies became the vehicle for it (1995) a booklet from a Mr Burn and Mr McQuoid, now involved with the Vardy foundation, said, “In Britain the Christian churches were active in the field of schooling long before the state took over….in retrospect it is a matter of regret that the churches so readily relinquished control of education to the state….”. And there you have it says Francis, “the state must be driven out of education and it should be handed back to the churches, our function as tax payers should be confined to providing the money with which people like McQuoid and Burn can make sure we can bring up a generation in their own image”.

He quotes Clement Atlee, who was later to become Labour prime Minister in 1945, writing in 1920. He said, “If the rich want to help the poor then they should pay their taxes gladly. A right established by law, such as that to an old age pension, is less galling than an allowance made by a rich man to a poor one depending on his view of the recipient’s character and terminable at his caprice”. He quotes Robert Louis Stevenson who called taxes “the true charity, impartial, impersonal, cumbering none with obligation, helping all”.

“ Charity” , Atlee wrote, “is always apt to be accompanied by a certain complacency and condescension on the part of the benefactor and by an expectation of gratitude from the recipient which cuts at the root of all true friendliness”

Francis then writes, “For these reasons, in the early part of the 20th century it became the view of the Labour Party – and broadly speaking remained so until 1997 – that the rich should aid the poor through the tax system, rather than by charitable gifts; and that education, health care, social security – all the elements of the 1945 Atlee settlement – should be paid for from taxation”.

“What city academies represent, therefore, is a return to the idea, condemned by Atlee, that the rich should contribute voluntarily, rather than through the tax system. But there is a new twist. The sponsor can get all the things a nineteenth-century philanthropist could get, and which Atlee grudged him: control of how the money is spent, a ‘monument’ to himself, the gratitude of the recipients. But unlike the nineteenth-century philanthropist, he does not have to pay the cost of the thing he is ‘giving’ – or even a substantial contribution towards the cost”.

Francis, you have done a service to all of us, full credit to you. As you point out, “Each funding agreement contains conditions upon which the Academy can be returned to the public sector”. We should repay you by defeating this attempt to end state education. This means all out war to stop new academies being built, and campaigning and fighting by any and all means to bring all existing academies back into a fully integrated state education system. Over to you, readers. A journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. We have started and this is an excellent guide.