‘Schools sleepwalking into honeytrap' says the NASUWT

The blatant myth of more money is duping some schools into taking an irreversible leap out of their local community and family of schools and into the unknown.

Under the Coalition Government’s ‘academies programme’, schools are promising teachers and parents more money in a desperate effort to persuade them to support conversion.

However, these promises are nothing more than a honeytrap.

Figures being bandied around are being grossly exaggerated, are totally misleading, not backed by accurate figures, and mean schools are being misled.

The latest school to face the threat of academy conversion is Ecclesbourne School in Duffield, Derbyshire.

Chris Keates, the General Secretary of the UK’s largest teachers’ union, the NASUWT, is joining teachers on the picket line today (Thursday 13 January) to warn parents and the general public to look again before supporting any proposed changes in their area. She said:

“Some headteachers and governors are sleepwalking into a honeytrap set by the Coalition Government.

“Academy conversion is an irreversible leap into the unknown.”

The academy programme is being billed as offering greater freedoms and bigger budgets to schools. However, it’s not being made explicit that:
• evidence from Sweden and the United States that have adopted similar systems shows that educational standards were NOT raised;
• academy schools do not have to adhere to national pay frameworks, meaning that schools will be in competition over staff, instead of focusing on raising standards;

• taking schools out of local authority control is dismantling this country’s state education system. Academy schools are effectively private schools, funded directly by the Government;

• by opting out of a local authority system, education becomes fragmented. Local authorities’ ability to provide specialist services for disadvantaged children across the area will be impaired; and

• once a school is converted, there is no going back.

Parents, governors and members of the public are being urged by the NASUWT to:

• look carefully at, and query, all proposals on the matter;

• raise the issue with your local MP, and write to them if you oppose it; and

• ask themselves do you really want to isolate your children and school from the local family of schools and help to break up the state education system which is so successful?

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