YP Letters: Awkward facts about academies

From: Sir Peter Newsam, Former chief education officer, Pickering.
Should all schools become academies?Should all schools become academies?
Should all schools become academies?

SOME of your articles on academies (The Yorkshire Post, April 10) are, no doubt unintentionally, misleading.

“Academies are publicly-funded independent schools which receive their money directly from government instead of the local council,” says the Regional Schools Commissioner. In plain English, academies are Government schools. They are created by and contracted directly to a government minister.

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They are wholly dependent on that minister under funding contracts with that minister (not with the ‘public’), assignable by that minister to whomever he or she thinks fit.

An academy’s right to be called ‘independent’ derives from a definition of ‘independent school’ in the 2002 Education Act. In that Act, any school that is not funded by a local authority is defined as an ‘independent’ school. The then Labour government disliked locally-elected forms of government almost as much as the present one. But to define something by what it isn’t (for example to define a cow as not a horse) does not tell you what it is. An academy is not a local government school because it is a government school. It should be understood and described as such. Finally, no local authority has ever had the power to ‘control’ a school, as some persist in suggesting.

A local authority has a duty to ‘maintain’ the schools in its area, a very different matter. It also a duty to provide efficient education. In the past, the North Riding’s administrative costs were the lowest of any county.

The academy programme is an erratically-managed nationalisation programme.

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That is why, in Yorkshire as elsewhere, its administrative costs will continue to soar upwards.

From: Roger Backhouse, Upper Poppleton, York.

LIKE many “revolutions”, the rush to academies will have undesirable consequences. There is no solid evidence that academies perform any better than schools run by local authorities. We are on a magical mystery tour with children as the unwitting tools.

I worked with two schools to develop a play and sports park. They became academies. Although both were originally good schools and remain so, the academisation process took school leadership time that could have been better spent on teaching and pupil support.

Making schools academies is a power ploy by central Government to take away powers and responsibilities once enjoyed by democratically-elected councils. There is no democracy in the academy programme.

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Some questionable bodies have sponsored academies as the Department for Education has found out the hard way.

It is interesting to note that the Department for Education expects those in charge of multi-academy trusts to be paid considerably more than local authority directors of children’s services who have far greater responsibilities. Could recently announced cuts to schools budgets have something to do with budgeting for inflated salaries? An academy programme has to be paid for somehow.

One of my objections to the EU is that it made decisions that should be made at a national level. The same is true of the academy programme. Education is a local service and should remain so.

Baffled by degree costs

From: Ian Richardson, Beverley.

NO doubt thousands of young people and their even more bamboozled parents are currently trying to make sense of the complexities of financing degree study this coming autumn.

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All state funding for tuition and living costs now comes in the form of loans, there are no grants at all. This is a world away from the free tuition, and quite generous maintenance grant 
I received as a student in Leeds 40 years ago.

Now even the most thrifty can expect upon graduation to have incurred debts of at least £60,000. What a terrible way for our young people to commence working life. I have to say that I once met Nick Clegg and always found him charming and indeed very intelligent. So it is even more incredulous to me that he gave the green light to the system we now have while Deputy PM – and in the process ruined the electoral prospects of his party for at least the next decade.

Staggeringly, many graduates do not earn enough for years, if ever, to start repaying this debt. We have served up a total dog’s breakfast the like of which no European neighbour would countenance. Of course financing huge numbers of students is complex and there is no perfect system, but two words seem to sum up the farce we now have – national disgrace.

Bleak world of tyranny

From: Graham Branston, Emmott Drive, Rawdon.

WHAT an unstable and deeply worrying world we are currently experiencing. As if the global terrorist atrocities with innocent people killed aren’t bad enough, we have recently seen the grotesque consequences of 
the effects of chemical weapons on men, women and even children in Syria.

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The cliché that history repeats itself is so true at present. Every so often world peace is threatened by a tyrant and at the present time we have at least three who don’t seem to care about the needless loss of lives. They are Vladimir Putin, Bashar al-Assad and Kim Jong-un. Throw Donald Trump and Xi Jinping into the mix and the international picture is bleak.

Another well worn cliché is that those who live by the sword die by the sword – it has certainly been borne out historically. It may happen again in our lifetime, but the question to ask is at what cost to life when tyrants are deluded by their frightening power?

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