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Remove the academies trapdoor from our schools
BARACK Obama took a couple of understandable parting shots at his predecessor on Tuesday afternoon – I wonder, will Gordon Brown ever pluck up the courage to do the same?
Brown remains tied to New Labour’s academy school programme – the policy of using outside sponsors to wrest control of traditional comprehensives from local authority management.
Even with teachers, governors and parents imploring a slow-down, the approach goes on apace.
Every new academy school is celebrated as if ministers finally have the silver bullet to target all the education system’s ills.
And now there’s a predatory glint in the eye of Education Secretary Ed Balls, as he comes up with what, on the face of it, looks like a crafty wheeze to create even more.
Ed’s bright idea is simple enough: any school where less than 30 per cent of pupils pass the crucial GCSEs will be closed and turned into an academy where the sponsors will decide matters like staffing and admissions. No argument (see page 21).
It’s a crude assessment of failure and the simplicity of this do-or-die judgment is potentially highly demoralising for schools that are grafting away in challenging circumstances. Unbelievably, this trapdoor into the world of academies has been placed precariously under Haverstock School in Chalk Farm – which provided a good launchpad for life to former Labour MP Oona King and the Miliband brothers, Ed and David.
Balls law takes no account of the special factors facing schools like Haverstock, where dozens of languages are spoken and many pupils qualify for free school meals.
It has been rejuvenated in the past decade and praise is due to the head, John Dowd. Now, why don’t they let him get on with the job?
Nobody would argue with the desire to make all schools – including those in Camden – the very best they can be.
But placing a gun to the head of schools like Haverstock and threatening the ultimate sanction – closure followed by a heavy-handed reorganisation – will only heap pressure on hard-working teachers and staff whose efforts to turn struggling pupils into high achievers often go uncelebrated.
Good cops, but...
OUR borough’s commander Chief Superintendent Clout is right to celebrate the improvements in policing, which mean fewer victims of robbery and burglary in particular (page 8).
The government’s decision to put community teams in every ward in 2005 was a good one and officers in Camden have worked hard to tackle drug dealing.
But policing does have to be by consent. The number of people – mainly young people – stopped and searched by police in the street has tripled in the past year.
Fewer than 1 in 20 of those searched is arrested. That’s a very broad net with which to go fishing.
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