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UCL should come clean on academy admissions
• I ATTENDED the meeting about the University College London academy with several friends and fellow governors whose children have successfully completed their primary and secondary education at Camden schools and are now at university.
I am sure I was not alone in finding aspects of the UCL presentation patronising about existing Camden schools and, as one speaker from the floor put it, ‘half-baked’ in terms of detail about the future.
Most of us are aware that there is still too much underachievement in our schools. As governors, we devote much of time to thinking about how we can tackle the root causes of that underachievement, which are often complex and lie in children’s home lives, poverty and disadvantage.
There was little in the UCL plan that explained how the university will succeed in overcoming these issues any more successfully than existing schools are, unless the university is planning to keep children from the lower achieving groups out of the new school.
The quick and easy way to get ‘better’ results is, of course, to manage the intake.
It was disappointing that neither the provost nor vice-provost would explain exactly how the UCL academy will admit its pupils.
It would make a mockery of Camden’s stated policy of open consultation if UCL is indeed planning, as vice-provost Professor Michael Worton suggested, to wait until after the public consultation has ended before they put flesh on the admissions policy.
Because academies are independent schools the admissions policy would then be subject to a confidential negotiation between the Department for Children, Schools and Families and the sponsor.
Parents, governors, heads and teachers in other Camden schools, who would inevitably be affected by how the new academy admits its pupils, would be cut out of that process.
If UCL does want to win the support of the local community, it should spell out whether it will be adopting the local authority’s admissions policy as set out in the original Building Schools for the Future consultation.
If that is not the intention, the university should answer the following questions:
Will applicants to the UCL academy have to sit any tests or exams? What will those tests consist of? Who will administer them?
FIONA MILLER
Vice-chair, Camden Campaign for State Education
Estelle Road, London NW3
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