Academies

School cuts

Struggling schools face a new cut of £1 billion, as the Tories attempt to claw back an overspend in its budget for expanding the Academies programme. Academy conversions have accelerated dramatically since the Coalition came to power, with an increase of over 1,000%. A special fund was set up to encourage schools to sever their ties to local authorities and convert to Academies, but due to the overspend, local authority schools are effectively being punished for not converting by having their budgets raided to plug the gap. Education Secretary Michael Gove is a belligerent proponent of the...

Teachers strike against Academies

Teachers in Worthing (near Brighton) and Leytonstone (east London) have struck to stop their schools becoming Academies. At Connaught School for Girls in Leytonstone, teachers struck on 16 and 24 October, and, as Solidarity went to press, were due to strike again on 7 and 8 November. The vote for Academy conversion on the school's board of governors was extremely close, with eight backing the proposals, six opposing, two abstaining, and two absent. The local council has accused the school's consultation on the conversion of containing "misconceptions and inaccuracies". Worthing High teachers...

Joint action fights union busting in schools

The joint action by the two biggest teacher unions is creating some sharp battles between classroom teachers and their immediate bosses across the country. For the most part, it seems that workers are winning back some control over their own workplaces and challenging the endless expansion of their workload demands. Probably the most common success is that limits are being put on the number of formal observations of lessons to which teachers are subjected. Union groups have also drawn a line under excessive planning, meetings and reports. Schools in several areas have cancelled mock...

Tower Hamlets Class Struggle #8 - October-November 2012

An industrial bulletin for education workers in the London borough of Tower Hamlets, including a report on a recent victory against inspections and observations at Bishop Challoner school. Click here to download PDF.

Educational achievement

One recent Wednesday, a planned lesson in which my year 9 class would have been spotting the persuasive techniques in a past editorial of Solidarity had to be postponed when I was told at very short notice that I had to attend a meeting of a group called PiXL. PiXL is a so-called not-for-profit educational consultancy organisation based around its guru-type leader, Sir John Rowling, a former headteacher with links to the Emmanuel Schools Foundation, whose academies got into trouble a few years ago for teaching creationism in science lessons. PiXL is dedicated to helping the schools in its...

Somerset governors sacked in forced academy drive

The latest move in Gove’s campaign of forcing academy status was the recent sacking of the entire board of governors of a Somerset school. The governors of Archbishop Cranmer C of E Primary School have been removed from their roles, on the grounds that they lacked the “skills necessary to drive improvement”, in the words of an LA representative. They have been replaced by a panel of temporary ‘managers’, a term which should raise a sense of foreboding in any school worker. ‘Manager’ carries strong connotations of the private sector, of organisations driven by profit and loss requirements, a...

Whose school? Our school!

Last year Education Minister Michael Gove rushed through legislation which allows him to force schools to become academies against their wishes. Now hundreds of primary schools which are not achieving Gove’s “floor targets” in Year 6 SATs are under threat of being taken out of the democratic control of local authorities, and put into the hands of private sponsors regardless of the opinions of staff, parents and governors. Schools are being told: capitulate and hand over their school to the private sector, or democratically elected governing bodies will be disbanded and heads told to clear...

Educating for capitalism's needs

In School Wars Melissa Benn lays out in details the increasing privatisation of Britain’s schools, the scale of an impending disaster. Benn begins by highlighting a 2011 Guardian article which revealed that “civil servants privately advised ministers that schools should be allowed to fail, if government was serious about reform”. The Tories’ vision rests on an ideological belief in a market system which will allow thousands of students in unfashionable schools, the ones with difficult pupil intakes, bolshie staff not keen on pay-and–conditions-smashing privatisation, or parents not willing to...

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