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Let’s have ‘pragmatic’ decisions for all please
• TEN years ago, Karen Buck and the local Labour Party sat on their hands while Westminster City Council and the Department for Education and Skills, aided and abetted by the then chair of governors Jack Straw, attempted to push Pimlico School into a Private Finance Initiative (PFI) scheme led by a property developer.
The victory by parents, staff and local residents drew early attention to the scandalous cost of PFI schemes in education and the NHS.
Only this week a Radio 4 programme pointed up the inflated profits of these schemes – a gravy train of guaranteed high returns to business, paid for by taxpayers.
Particularly shameful is the way in which keeping up the payments to the developers eats into the funding which would otherwise go on treatment, in the case of NHS hospitals, or education, in the case of schools.
Once again, Pimlico is under threat, this time of being closed and turned into a city academy.
And like PFI, public money is being poured into educationally and financially untried schemes, the main beneficiaries being unaccountable business interests.
North Westminster Community School was broken up and turned into two academies at a huge cost, one set up by Chelsfield, a property developer in the lucrative Paddington Basin development; the other by the United Learning Trust – an offshoot of the Church (of England’s) School Society, despite the fact that more that 80 per cent of pupils at ULT Paddington are from a non-Christian background.
This increased the number of Christian denominational schools in Westminster to six out of eight, leaving just two state comprehensives, Pimlico and Quintin Kynaston.
In her letter (May 25), Karen says she supported academies on “pragmatic” grounds.
Yet so bad was the situation at ULT Paddington, despite the vast resources poured in, that she withdrew her son for a time, a pragmatic decision not open to other parents.
Now that Pimlico is under threat of being turned into an academy – and ULT is one of the groups who have expressed an interest – is Karen willing to come to the defence of a community comprehensive fighting once again for its survival?
Will she support us in arguing for a level playing field: giving community comprehensives, such as Pimlico, the same spending boost as the academies and then compare results.
We could then have some of that “evidence based” policymaking which the government proclaims.
Or are the principles of locally accountable, comprehensive schools, open to all faiths and none, to be jettisoned in favour of pragmatic adaptation to the business (and other) lobbyists around 10 Downing Street.
PADRAIC FINN
Secretary, Westminster National Union of
Teachers
Burrows Road, NW10
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