Academies

"specialisms" have been dumped by Gove. There used to be funding attached to being a specialist school and that has gone. One of new labours battier ideas.
Academies and free schools both get direct funding.
Free schools are completely new schools, rather than rebranded old schools.
I rang up the con candidate before the last election and he told me that free schools were going to solve the problems of failing schools!!!!!! Party line.
The idea being that dissatisfied parents would start their own rival schools and market forces would prevail. Like, yeh, right as they say these days.
Some of the new free schools are rebranded prep schools that were going broke!

On May 12th I did not make an exact statement re our position in the world ratings. I said I 'thought' we were 64th from 10th. I saw todays Politics Show, which was in fact discussing Academies and I would like to relate their figures which I am sure are more accurate.We are 25th-reading, 27th-maths,16th-science, sorry I got it so wrong but I have at least had the honesty to own up!.

I think you have to view the statistics as, at best, a very broad brush. Cultural norms, differences in the curriculum, size of cohort etc make it is very had to compare performance in different countries.
I understand that broadly the UK performance had stayed at the same level from the previous set of data, but performance in other countries had improved. Something that was said a lot at the time (I have not been able to find out if it is correct) is that England came 3rd in Reading and that it was Wales that brought down the UK score.