Academies

Totally agree re grammar schools greatnan. Easy to get good results if you handpick the intake.
There are many excellent comprehensives and even the worst are incomparably better than the worst of the secondary moderns.
lilygran the economies of scale argument is a good one for primaries. Unreasonable range of tasks lands on the heads.
The sponsor to which I will hand over the school at the end of this term looks promising to me. It is run by people from education. They have really good IT systems set up for monitoring progress and quality (something the LA never had). They have recruited some very good "advisory staff" - and don't tell me all the advisors that the LA used to employ were value for money. They will, effectively, be a LA sized organisation but will have an incentive to keep their costs down. I am not saying that all sponsors will be good - this is the one we picked when told we had to find one.
The issue of the amount of data that is demanded centrally is another issue. There is an eternal conflict between government saying they are going to devolve power and then hanging on to it.
The national curriculum is yet another, separate issue. I am no fan - there is an argument maybe that it makes it easier for kids to move schools. But once into exam board syllabi that goes down the pan in many subjects.
Are you a fan of Gove's craziest idea then - free schools?

I read in our local paper that what is arguably the best comprehensive in our city (and in whose sixth form my daughter was lucky enough to get a place) is considering becoming an academy. The main reasons appear to be financial - the changes in sixth form funding mean that they are likely to lose around £350,000 a year once the changes are fully implemented. I have looked at their website and it appears that nothing much will change except that they believe they will be able to get better value for the money they get once they are freed from local authority control. It seems that another city comprehensive - also rated as outstanding by Ofsted - is also considering academy status.

Yes free standing academies will get more money - the idea being that the money will be taken away from the LA and given directly to the school.So a successful school has nothing to lose.
If you are an academy with a sponsor the extra money is passed on to the sponsor who in turn is supposed to help the "failing" school to improve.

I think most secondary schools will have to become academies for financial reasons. It will be interesting to see what "freed from local authority control" means for pupils with special educational needs.
Obviously Local Authorities varied - we had very tight systems for managing and using performance data and had a high level of intervention, which was targeted at the lowest performing schools. Every school in the LA opted in to the school support programme, although they could have chosen not to be a part of it.
Most of the people have gone from LAs now as Local Government budgets have been slashed, many of them to work for the organisations that will support academies.

I am a old cynic - my first question is 'What's in it for them?'
I fear that some schools will be run by people with a very restricted agenda.

What's in it for who? The sponsors?

Not sure about 'free schools' or academies. I can see what's in it for the school or the people wanting to set one up. I can also see that with a restricted pot of cash, if some get more, some will get less. As for being free of local authority control - my experience was that dealing with a central government quango was more demanding, time-consuming, expensive and frustrating than ever relations with the LEA were. About grammar schools, I supported the move to comprehensives because I believed it would mean more children had the chances I did and that some of the unfairnesses of the 1944 system would go. The result instead seems to have been to replace a rather imperfect process of objective selection with luck and chance for those who can't afford to move house to the right catchment! I think comprehensives do work where they get a good cross-section of the population but in large cities the 'good' ones seem to have been taken over almost entirely by the articulate pushy middle classes.

Sorry I didn't make myself clear -yes, the sponsors.

I don't see how you can get a good cross-section of the population as long as there are catchment areas, and parents - pushy or otherwise - who will struggle to buy properties there in order for their children to have good schools. In this city, the best schools tend to be in the leafy southern suburbs which have always been the preserve of the professional classes because of their ambience and the type - and price - of property they contain. It was always so, and it is now, but until comprehensives were introduced, most of these schools were grammar schools and surely represented a better cross section of the population than they do now, as working class kids from all parts of the city were given the chance to get there and better themselves; and the ones which weren't grammar schools were very good secondary moderns (oh yes, there were some). The question we should be asking (and one which has been asked before) is why should the quality of the school depend on where you live? Why can't all schools strive to be excellent and why are so many schools still failing? Where I lived until recently, there was a comp at the top of our road which was continually failing. A few years ago, it was completely rebuilt at an enormous cost, with new IT suites, gyms, science facilities and heaven knows what. There was a view expressed at the time that the new school would "motivate pupils to achieve". It is still failing and is now in special measure - again.

My master's dissertation was on the self-concepts of secondary school pupils receiving remedial education. After four years of research, comparing such factors as staffing, resources, organisation, social background, etc. I came to the conclusion which I had always known intuitively. None of the material things made much difference to the pupils, when like was compared with like. The big deciding factor in the success of the pupils at school was the attitude of their teachers. Those teachers who had embraced this type of teaching and enjoyed it were able to make a marked difference in outcome. Unfortunately, I had to work with many teachers who thought it was beneath them and despised 'my' pupils - sometimes even telling them so. I was asked a few times if I did remedial work only because I couldn't get a 'better' job. As I was usually one of the best qualified teachers in the school, I could afford to smile.

Possibly the schools in catchment areas with a high incidence of poverty and unemployment are differentiated by the calibre and attitude of the teachers.

There are lots of good and outstanding schools in challenging areas. There are lots of "good" schools that coast along with their results achieved partly thanks to parents paying for private tuition and partly because they have a middle class intake, with all children reading etc when they arrive. It is harder to achieve good or outstanding if you have an intake that is behind at 11 because the grading includes attainment. SOme helpful moves recently in terms of looking at "progress" rather than just raw exam results.
Very hard on the more challenging schools when the goal posts are shifted so often.

If you look at it from the point of view of turning failing schools around, then then the key factor is leadership. Some heads are good managers, but you need good leadership and management to succeed. You need high aspirations for all the pupils (and Greatnan I do think that attitudes to pupils with special needs have improved enormously since you were teaching in the seventies), relentless focus on the quality of teaching, efficient systems for managing behaviour (which everyone adheres to), clear roles and responsibilities for the whole school community amongst many other things. Good leadership is the key and this is not about parachuting in a superhead, but about the right training and support for the right people. One of the biggest problems schools face (especially in challenging areas) is the recruitment and retention of quality staff. The current climate of opinion towards teachers and schools is not going to help. Much of the criticism is unfair and unjustified and of the 10% of pupils fail rather than 90% of pupils succeed...

Yes, I agree entirely with your post. I was very impressed by the way my grandson's dyslexia was dealt with and the amount of trouble his school took to find the right subjects for him.
Headships can be well paid now, but they carry such enormous responsibility that some schools are having trouble attracting applications. The continuous criticism of schools and teachers by certain parts of the press must be very demoralising.

Yes I think so and when schools have spent hundreds of pounds on advertising for a head, to get only one or two applicants is very demoralising too.

My last school was very socially and culturally diverse. The staff team was excellent and we got such a good reputation for supporting children with SEN we eventually were asked by the LA to open a specialist unit at the school. We were judged outstanding but governors and I did not want to become an academy because we valued the support and input of the LA. Not day to day but with specific issues: managing HR issues,payroll, premises crises, legal problems, public liability insurance etc, etc there was always someone to offer guidance and support if needed. As an academy head that support may not have been as forthcoming. The extra cash would be needed to pay for all those services so probably not much more money available for interesting things like classroom equipment, trips, events or even a new roof!

I'm not clear about what exactly is meant by sponsors in this context. I know that the local academy has had to form an academy trust as a sort of umbrella organisation over the school, but I am not aware that they have any financial interest. Any info on this would be very gratefully received, as the primary school (to which I have just become a governor) is buying in executive headship from them and they are keen for us to join the academy in the future. I feel very underqualified to make such a decision as education was not my professional area - but it is very hard to get sufficient governors to be quorate in isolated rural areas, so I am better than nowt!

I am sure you are a very valued governor!
I had to look up the difference between free schools and academies. I am concerned that free schools (which will all be academies anyway) can be set up by all types of organisations, commercial, religious, charitable, etc. At least the rules have now been revised so they have to teach the national curriculum in English, Maths and Science - so perhaps no creationism?

Am I the only one concerned with the fact Britain has dropped down the World Table and employers have been saying for years now our children are getting worse at the three r's, to a point some are almost unemployable?

The inital point stated academies are able to serve cheap, less healthy meals and do not need to teach the national curriculum. We have seen the photos of the terrible state school meals as reported by a young pupil, it is impossible to think only academies are poor in this area .Now we know the rules are they have to teach the national curriculum.

I have no sway one way or the other on academies versus state schools but I cannot turn my back to the fact academies such as Mossbourne Academy,Hackney which is in a deprived area has transformed the lives of it's pupils. I beleive it has been reported every child who graduated from the 6th form went on to university last year! The credit goes to the teaching staff and I don't care if they are an academy or state school it is the dedication of it's staff I applaud.

Good post mamie. The big challenge once you have good leadership in place is to turn around the teaching. Getting the weakest to move on, recruiting some excellence and improving the ones in the middle. No quick wins here.
Mishap it is really blooming complicated, because there have been half a dozen versions of "academy" in about as many years.
In the case of my (soon to be an academy) school there will be a "sponsor" that will be an educational trust (called Academies Enterprise Trust) that is non profit making. It will act much like a local authority - it will support school improvement in a number of ways and provide a number of central services such as HR. The schools will all give them a % of budget to run these support services. There are a range of sponsor organisations and they are, as Greatnan has indicated, quite diverse.
Some schools are "stand alone" academies - they have formed their own trust to hold the land and assets and there is no sponsor. They get to keep all their money and may buy in services from a mixture of private and public.
Do PM me if you would like to.

POGS, I would say that data from global league tables is very hard to interpret as you are really not comparing like with like. Even PISA says that you cannot use their data historically beyond a certain point. Employers have always complained about the standards of school leavers, right back to the Victorian era. This is not to say that standards do not need to improve and keep improving. We still have a group of pupils who struggle with basic literacy and numeracy, but I don't believe that there was ever a golden age of universal literacy. It is very clear that there are many people from the older generation who make the same mistakes that we see in the writing of younger folk. The rules of spelling and grammar in English are very complex and many people get things wrong. I have posted elsewhere about how much easier it has been for my granchildren in Spain to learn to read, because reading and writing in Spanish is easier. There is even research that shows that readers of English use a different part of the brain. This is what makes comparisons between nations very difficult.

This is interesting on the junk food in Academies issue.
www.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/may/14/academies-sell-banned-junk-food

Oh dear Mr Gove - "giving heads freedom" is one of his mantras, but then of course politicians don't mean it because they want to control everything. Problem for him.
I agree schools should not sell unhealthy snacks and drinks.
This will not stop secondary school pupils consuming them. (most academies currently secondaries but this is changing)
School meals are the other issue. Knee jerk reaction to Jamie Oliver meant that secondary school pupils who are not on free school meals rejected school meals wholesale. The rules inflicted by the school food police were so strict that there was nothing left they wanted to eat. Even with a caterer trying hard to attract them - if they have reached the age of 14 without acquiring a taste for healthy food, a limited school meals option with no chips etc is not going to attract them.
I used to sneak out of school (against rules) to buy chocolate rather than eat my school meals.

The thing that bothers me is the way acadamies are encouraged to specialise in certain areas, languages, sciences, maths etc. This is well and good if you live in a reasonably sized town or highly populated which will have three or four acadamies each with a different specialisation and all reasonably accessible but what happens in less populated areas where your local academy specialises in science and your gift is for languages and the nearest specialist language academy is 40 miles away and inaccessible by public transport? Or at 11 your interests and enthusiasm are all forlanguages but at 14 you have developed a gift and passion for physics?

We have an over specialised school system in this country already, specialist academies will only make this worse.

I am not sure that the specialist academy concept has any meaning at all really. You cannot have a secondary school that takes pupils from a catchment and does not meet the needs of those pupils who have no interest in or aptitude for the specialist subject. I know that a couple of schools round here became specialist academies, but claim to cover the whole curriculum in equal depth.

From what I can gather from an internet trawl, there are 2 sorts of academies: ones that are existing schools and choose to become academies (and set up a trust to oversee) and free schools, which are set up from scratch by an particular organisation - might be a group of parents, or a religious organisation etc. - that's where I start to worry. If the free schools have similar freedom over curriculum to other academies heaven knows what they might be teaching!

It is very complicated (?unnecessarily so?) - we all just want the best for our children in whatever school.

Free schools I think are different again from academies. Existing LA schools can now choose to be academies, some schools are forced to become academies ( due to poor OFSTED/ their national exam results) They get their funding direct from DfE. The latter usually have a sponsor eg Harris, ADT, ARC who are some of the big players in this.
'Free' schools are brand new schools that have not existed in any way before. They too get money direct from DfE and can be set up by groups of parents /faith groups etc. They are 'Free' from the local authority.
The central pot of money for education has not increased very much so all the money for Free Schools & Academies is taken from money previously distributed to schools by LAs and used by them to provide services e.g SEN transport, psychologists, advisors, payroll etc etc. LAs have significantly reduced budgets so cannot provide the services as efficiently as they had before this 'era' . It is a way to get all schools to 'convert' to academy status.
The LA at east had oversight of educational provision in an area...not sue how this will work in the future.

When all schools are academies surely nobody is naive enough to think that will solve the problems that exist in a minority of schools??