Charlynne Pullen
posted 5 January 2007

This conference was part propaganda exercise and part training session on how to run a local campaign; for those who agree with the anti-academies stance however, it was a great opportunity to network and listen to all the reasons why academies are a fundamentally bad idea.

The tag line for the Anti-Academies Alliance is 'A good local school for every child'. This precipitated a debate about what kind of social mix a good local school should have. Melissa Benn made her position very clear, unlike many other speakers. She felt that a local school should reflect the social mix of the area that surrounds the school, that there should be no attempts to socially engineer a politically correct mix of children, and certainly no question of bussing children across counties. Other speakers were less decided, but given this was only the second annual conference of the group, they should be forgiven for not completely agreeing on everything (given that many left wing groups never agree on everything, and nor should they).

The results of consultation on the Government's Education White Paper and subsequent Education Act have proved that there is little popular mileage in bussing children across counties to engineer artificially a social mix. Despite this, many advocates of comprehensive education still support the idea on the basis that it allows children from all social backgrounds to mix at school, and therefore creates 'community cohesion'. Since becoming a buzzword for the government, 'community cohesion' has been dropped by most supporters of comprehensive education who feel the plethora of types of state schools has damaged rather than enabled social education. It is this majority that favour simply 'a good local school for every child'. The simplicity of this makes it particularly attractive in today's climate of parental confusion and frustration at the number of different schools supposedly on offer, when that choice is quite clearly only a façade.

The prize for most facts in a speech at the conference definitely goes to Terry Wrigley, who very helpfully talked us through the GCSE results of academies, as they are presented in the league tables. He claimed that most academies have adopted GNVQs instead of GCSEs, and that because these qualifications have limited 'street value', that academies are fundamentally failing the children they are supposed to help. He discussed the case of Islington Green, an improving school, which is currently doing better than all the academies, both on average and individually. It is set to be closed imminently with an academy to be established in its place. If the government is really trying to improve school standards, then it makes no sense to replace this school with an academy, particularly as the community has already successfully rejected one academy bid. Another school in a similar position is Hurlingham and Chelsea School. If academies are so successful and parents really are desperately trying to get their children into them, why are there so many strong local campaigns against academies? This was quite clearly the message of the day, a message that has still not been directly addressed by the government.

Wrigley also told us the most common specialism for academies is enterprise. This is perhaps inevitable given the sponsors, but the extent to which this specialism dominates the curriculum in academies is phenomenal. In some academies, 25% of teaching time is spent on enterprise in certain years. Wrigley read out the list of subjects that those on the new 14-19 vocational diplomas (from 2008) are not entitled to study: history, geography, languages, drama, music, and art. The idea that young people are not entitled to study history, when the government endorses Sir Bernard Crick's view that teaching history is instrumental to the success of citizenship education, seems somewhat confused. It is surely bad enough in its own terms that at 14, it can be decided that you as a young person have no right to study these subjects!

Another debate at the fore of the conference was that of what education really means. The first speaker, Professor Stephen Ball argued that the creation of academies was part of an attempt to replicate the pre-1870 education system, based on philanthropy, faith, patchwork and diversity, liberalism, and enterprise. He argued that the three values underpinning academies in particular are entrepreneurship, Christianity and philanthropy. Whilst it was evident that we as the audience were supposed to agree that any attempts by the government to impose a nineteenth century system of education upon us should be firmly rejected, this interpretation leaves the question of what replaced it and how unanswered. Was the conference suggesting as a whole that somehow Forster's 1870 Education Act changed education so irrevocably that immediately as it was passed, a liberal humanist conception of education was established, and the old values of entrepreneurship, Christianity and philanthropy were kicked out?

From the discussions, it was not clear either how pre-1870 education was inherently bad, or what actually replaced it. The inference was a liberal humanist education, which teaches about as much as possible without credence to any particular ideology. The idea of balance, debate and discussion through the study of history, politics, philosophy and economics was the ultimate goal for education in any age; and what was abhorrent was an education which proposed one ideology over another, in this case free market capitalism. This is certainly a strong moral position, but an interesting position for those at the conference on the extreme left, who would presumably want one ideology, in their case communism, to be propounded above all others.

Rick Hatcher spoke about the implementation of the 14-19 Vocational Diploma and the involvement of academies in that provision. He argued that these diplomas institute a 'premature vocationalism' by streaming pupils age 14, suggesting that the English education system will be going backwards if it puts young people into work too soon. Hatcher said that 14 is too soon for young people to go into work (the 14-19 Vocational Diplomas will involve a high proportion of work-based learning ie. young people working for free, in order to 'train' them for the workplace at 16/19) if the school leaving age is 16.

The fight against the skills agenda has gotten stronger, with the Anti-Academies Alliance itself, but more importantly, the almost unprecedented event of all three teacher unions (NUT, NASUWT, ATL) working together. The focus of the campaign is exactly the tag line of AAA: 'a good local school for every child'. The simplicity of this statement belies how difficult it would be to instigate in this political climate in which 'choice' is the ultimate buzzword. In order to fight the spread of academies, it would seem to me that the three unions united have the power and strength to campaign and educate, and with the knowledge of some successful local campaigns, it would seem all the tools are at their fingertips. We can only wait to see if those tools are picked up, and a campaign erupts that truly has the power to fight the move towards academies and the private control of state education.