Tuesday 12 October 2010
Exaggeration and academies
It is good that a significant number of outstanding maintained schools wish to become academies. I hope many others choose to do so. But the Education Secretary Michael Gove and his media briefers should stop pretending that the speed with which an excellent school goes through a relatively simple legal process is somehow comparable with the task of replacing a failing school with something wholly new and with strong sponsorship, or establishing a business-sponsored city technology college. Indeed, the danger of Gove's approach is that he ignores the hard graft required to turn around those schools that are failing and which remains essential to school reform. We need to hear what's happening with those schools - which were the main focus of Labour's academies drive for good reason.
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More or less agree. However from interviews it would appear that Gove does understand the challenge. The question is what is he going to do to add push and drive behind the inadequate schools. It would appear he is going to rely upon local pressure - without focus and capacity in LAs therefore begging questions about whether such local pressure will materialise. The risk is that weak schools will be bypassed and allowed to die - perhaps no bad thing if in the meantime children and young people are not sacrificed to Gove's faith in bottom up pressure and structural change.
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