The vast majority of people want to be consulted before their children’s school is converted into an academy, a survey of 1,350 parents suggests.
Some 97% agreed with the statement “Parents and the local community should be consulted when big changes are made to how a school is run. (For example, when a school becomes an academy or there is a forced change in academy sponsor.)” Nearly 80% agreed strongly.
The finding comes from a poll carried out this summer by the body representing more than half of England’s parent teacher associations, PTA UK, which has been disclosed to Education Guardian.
“Parents do want to be more involved in education but are concerned about what opportunities there may be to do so,” says Emma Williams, PTA UK’s executive director. This may seem unsurprising: don’t most of us want a say in how our children’s school is run? But it seems to pose a challenge to government policy, as legislation going through parliament will allow ministers to force through academisation under particular sponsors without parental consultation when a school is deemed to be underperforming.
Last week, Nick Gibb, schools minister, suggested during the passage of the education and adoption bill that consultations could be unnecessary. He may be in the minority.
Academy chain told to change admissions tests
An academy chain has been ordered to make changes to proposed admissions arrangements at four of its schools, including the banning of a literacy test that could discriminate against children with English as a second language.
The Aspirations Academies Trust – which first featured here in March with the revelation that a husband-and-wife team in senior positions were paid nearly £400,000 between them in 2013-14 – has received a string of adverse judgments from England’s schools adjudicator.
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The adjudicator has instructed the change to make nine changes to its 2016 admissions arrangements for Banbury academy in Oxfordshire. These include directing it not to introduce a literacy test as part of a “banding” system that is meant to produce a comprehensive intake, as this could disadvantage pupils still learning English. The trust will introduce more general “cognitive ability” tests instead.
Rivers academy, a comprehensive in Hounslow, west London, was told to make six changes, including scrapping identical proposals for the literacy tests and abandoning a move to guarantee places to pupils at two Aspirations “feeder” primary schools – Oriel and Oak Hill. These two primary schools were themselves ordered to make minor changes to their admissions criteria.
The trust said it accepted the rulings, apart from the adjudicator’s decision on feeder schools at Rivers, which it would be challenging at judicial review. The chain has had three Ofsted visits this year, it added, and all had produced “outstanding” verdicts for Aspirations schools, including Rivers.
2020: academies for all
Some of us did a double-take on hearing Lucy Powell, Labour’s new shadow education secretary, make her first comments on academies last week. “In 2020 we are going to face a very different ecology and landscape in terms of education. Nearly every school by 2020 will be an academy or a free school,” she told Radio 4’s PM programme.
Really? Even the DfE would not make that statistical claim, we mused, with five out of six primaries and almost four in 10 secondaries, among state-funded schools in England, currently not classed as academies or free schools. Our data analysis suggests the proportion of secondaries that are academies – currently 64% – grew only 4.5 percentage points last year and the rate of increase has fallen every year since 2011. The proportion of primary academies also rose by only four percentage points in 2014-15, to 16%, and at a slower rate than the previous year.
So is academy status inevitable for all, or almost all, in the next five years? Powell’s office tells us she meant only to talk about secondary academies, but even in the secondary sector, there is a long way to go.
When does parental consultation count?
Another radio appearance, this time by Dame Rachel de Souza, chief executive of the Norwich-based Inspiration Trust academy chain, must have caused a few raised eyebrows among parents in Norfolk. Speaking on the Today programme, De Souza defended proposals to give parents the right to trigger a process that could lead to a headteacher’s sacking.
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A large majority of parents responding to a consultation objected to DfE plans to force the Hewett comprehensive in Norwich into the arms of the Inspiration Trust. As readers of this column will know, the takeover happened anyway. Reacting to that, De Souza said only a “small number” of Hewett parents – 105 out of about 1,200 – had taken part in the consultation. So when do parental views become numerous enough to be influential, we wonder?
An Inspiration spokesman did not see any paradox. “The proposals … are to give parents a mechanism for flagging concerns that can then be expertly assessed. [This] is absolutely in line with the Hewett consultation process.”
War of words over Gatwick free school
A Conservative MP and a Labour council leader have been feuding in the local press about the handling of a free school’s application to turn its temporary site on an industrial estate into its permanent home.
Tory MP Henry Smith said Crawley council’s rejection of Gatwick free school’s application last month “seemed based on Labour councillors’ ideological objections”. The school, which opened a year ago, is operating from the site without long-term planning approval.
In a long letter to the Crawley Observer, headlined “Disgraceful suggestion”, the council leader, Peter Lamb, hit back. “Sussex police and West Sussex county council (hardly a bastion of socialism) had objected to the planning applications on various grounds including pedestrian (ie pupil) safety,” he writes. “When I met the school’s representatives … two years ago, I stressed that the site was probably the worst possible location in the whole of Crawley for a free school. Rather than throwing political mud, Mr Smith’s time would be better spent working with us to find a way to ensure the school can remain open, while addressing the very real problems involved in opening a school on an industrial site.”
The school did not respond to requests for comment.
Source:Ask us before turning a school into an academy, say 97% of parents