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Why not give state schools cash boost?
• THE 400 academies proposed by the prime minister in December 2006 – at an average cost of £35 million each – will lead to a transfer of more than £14 billion worth of publicly owned resources into the hands of private sponsors.
Local authorities currently face an invidious choice. If they include an academy in their bid for funding under the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme, it will be built with no charge to the authority but at a £35-million cost to the taxpayer. It will also trigger much-needed funding for other schools in the authority through BSF,
Tony Blair and Andrew Adonis constantly claim that academies work, using parental demand for places as evidence.
But there are no control samples in the academies experiment, and any GCSE science student would see through this claim. There is no genuinely fair test. We therefore wish to put the following proposal.
The government would like to see improving schools closed down and replaced with academies. A fair test would be to give each of those schools the £35 million – the cost of an academy – and compare success with those of existing academies. Then it would be possible to evaluate fairly what leads to school improvement.
It is the involvement of private sponsors and academy status that really raises pupil achievement and makes schools popular with parents? Or would a massive injection of state funds have the same effect?
We challenge the government to take up this proposal.
STEVE SINNOTT
NUT General Secretary
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