Forcing schools to become Academies

The days when you had a big bribe to become an academy are gone.

Lilygran - yes, it seems logical that once all schools are academies, everything will be back to square one. Except that they will not be bound by the same rules re pay and qualifications for teachers or support staff, or standards of nutrition for school meals. Doesn't seem like a progressive step to me.

My husband is the head of a large and very popular, successful comp now academy. The effect of Gove has been they have been given one Bible with Goves name on it, they have had their budget slashed as the funding formula for sixth formers has change i.e. downgraded and aa a school with 600 children in the sixth form this will have a devastating effect. Fewer hours of a level teaching, no enrichment activities for sixth formers, redundancies and staff who leave will not be replaced. Meanwhile "free" schools with a few children in them have been given vast sums of public money and friends of Gove have high salary jobs trying to give more public money away to unaccountable individuals and commercial sponsors. It is strange that several of the Harris bigwigs have been given gongs and knighthoods recently.
No wonder my husband has decided to take early retirement this year as he doesn't want to have to take apart all the things he has spent years building up.

eloethan - in theory they will be getting money that was badly spent on large LEA teams. But schools will still have to buy in services and much of this will in future be private sector e.g. instead of LA HR advice, you have a private adviser.
suzied i really dont know why anyone wants to be head of a challenging school these days. The goalposts seem to change every year and they are constantly labelled as "failing" if they cannot keep up with those moving targets.
"my" school improved english and maths results every year for about the last 6. We finished just one percentage point below the current "30% should get 5 a to cs including english and maths" - which would still be branded "failure". Of course that has changed again, and the whole ebac thing meant that option plans had been drawn up and then had to be changed again when there was a climb down. "my" head had and continues to have an exceptional level of energy, comittment and resilience but such creatures are rare.

Hope that isn't a universal judgement on LEA teams, Jess. Obviously some large, some small, some good, some bad, some excellent. There was certainly room for improvement in some services in some LEAs, but sweeping away the good ones is pretty counter-productive I think. LEAs like schools have been the target of sustained criticism from government and media. Doing a difficult job on ever decreasing budgets is never going to make anyone popular.
Of course many of the people who have lost their jobs as local services have been slashed, have gone to work for the private companies now, so I don't suppose the actual people will change much!
Sympathies Suzied, that must be so hard.

The last three posts are an indicator of some of the things that are going wrong since Gove accelerated the process of privatisation. suzied you and your husband have all my sympathy.

mamie the clue was in the "the theory is" which is different to in my opinion
From my position, ours was not great. Bit of a bonfire and then they started building a new team with more than half a dozen appointments at head level salaries. Then all the advisers were got rid of - we recruited the best 2 I think.
Then the newly appointed assistant directors were got rid of.
They never added a great deal to our progress but for small primaries it is essential to have that backup.
The future looks like "successful" secondary academies teaming up with a group of primaries I think. One of my concerns is that "successful" often means lots of middle class families that get their children coached. And it also relies on having really good governors. And the head being willing to work with them.

suzied, my dad took early retirement out of education (teacher training) during the Thatcher years for similar reasons to your husband – he felt that all he had worked to achieve during his career was just being trashed. Crazy world.

With the increasing number of academies and the loss of LEA advisers, my concern is for children with special needs. The SEN team in 'my' authority worked well with schools and in my time chairing the committee (this was before 'cabinet' government at local level) we made considerable progress with integration especially in primary schools. I wonder how such arrangements will survive in the brave new competitive world of Mr Gove.

Yes sorry Jess. Thought maybe the sense was "in theory, badly spent", but wasn't sure. Over-sensitive, moi?
I agree that generally primaries probably got more out of the support and certainly many of them valued it more.
You are quite right Anno. I think you can already see evidence of people saying "why doesn't the LEA / council do something about xyz?", when the fact is that the people are no longer there. I think I see much of this agenda as a long struggle for power between central and local government, which central government has won. People talk of freedom from Local Authority control when the reality is that everything now comes from central government.