This post is not a "told you so", but I have made my views known publically, and in my resignation feedback, that Greensward, Maltings and New Rickstones opportunities have been squandered by an over-inflated, over-managed, monolith that dictates top down policies, instead of the highly successful classroom innovations of Greensward that shared best practice up the chain of command.
Once again I call on the three original academies to retrieve the Greensward Charitable Trust from being the vehicle that gives charity status to the AET and go it alone. This is about the children and not overpaid egos.
The independence of Academy chains seems to permit them to scrap their locally appointed school governors, and in the words of the academy chain, E-Act, replace them with 'academy ambassadorial advisory bodies'. What the heck is one of those?
The Academy structure was a brilliant idea that actually worked well in its initial form. Outstanding successful schools and staff shared best practice and procedures with local schools needing improvement. But now, the so-called 'not for profit' (but 'yes to high salaries for managers') organisations now run huge chains of schools in widely differing geographical areas. So the 'shared best practice' is now top down from out of touch monoliths without the initiatives formed at a classroom level.
In fact, what has been achieved are a series of mini-education authorities that are not even 'local', and they syphon off their overheads and vast paycheques from the money that should have gone directly to the school. By running schools north, south, east and west, the best interests of the community are no longer addressed. In addition, the ability of Advanced Skills teachers to pop down to a nearby school to assist, train and support their colleagues has now disappeared. I, for one, enjoyed visits from my local colleagues who were welcome to come into my classroom at anytime to see for themselves, and for me to visit them, which was a mutually beneficial experience.
In summary, I believe that academy chains have run their course, and before they do any more damage they should be broken up, with two or three local academies being clustered into academy support groups. Each academy to have its own Governing Body comprising parent and staff elected governors and a sprinkling of 'public appointees' who have expertise in the areas of finance, human resources, and fund-raising. An overseeing Cluster Governor Board comprising three governors from each school can monitor 'key performance indicators' and make suggestions and add support where needed.
It is time education in this country was finally changed for the better ,and not by Education Secretaries who have been solicitors (present incumbent), journalists (Gove), economics journalist (Kelly), postman (Johnson), a student in Cuba before only politics (Charles Clarke), and a lecturer in industrial relations (Blunkett). This is not to decry the professions they did follow, but I ask you, to run education for England? Honestly?
My interest in researching remote methods of delivering teaching and learning took a blow recently when I failed in my bid to get funding for a research project. The application is reproduced here for the interest of educators:
It might have provided me the evidence I needed to show that if Alice Springs School of the Air can do it, so could the UK education system: My application to travel to Australia for 6 weeks to research remote blended learning has hit the buffers:
"Dear David,
I am sorry to have to inform you, on behalf of the Advisory Council of the Churchill Trust, that you have not been shortlisted for interview.
This year’s awards generated considerable interest, and we received 989 applications for the 150 Fellowships we are offering in 2016. The overall quality of the applications has also been exceptionally high, and Council members had a very difficult task assessing and selecting a short list for interview."
Within my limited resources, I have found research that shows that the larger the school, the greater the instance of violence in schools. Unfortunately, the research is from other countries such as the US and it does indeed show a correlation. I cannot find any research in the UK which addresses this issue. Should we not have that evidence before we start to build super-schools?
Does anyone know of any such investigation into the correlation between pupil numbers and instances of violence in school? I would be interested to hear about it.
The Education Secretary, Nicky Morgan, continues to tinker with a broken engine. What do I mean? She is now proposing a National Teacher Service to take high-flying teachers out of their schools to parachute them into 'failing' schools.
In my experience, the loss of fantastic teachers to other schools dilutes the original school's success and demotivates those left behind. The 'failing' schools' staff are then perceived by parents to be incompetent and useless. The 'failing' schools are judged on the results of the most over-tested children in the World and rarely has anything to do with poor teaching. The socio-economic divide and the expectations of children are the real causes of 'poor' results. To be frank, as in my school days in the 50's and 60's, some children are just not up to getting 5 A*-C GCSEs, and the jobs they took after school were worthwhile but now degraded in value. To expect 90%+ plus to gain A* to Cs is unrealistic and setting some pupils up to fail.
In addition to removing good teachers from their schools, she intends increasing testing of Primary students. For goodness sake stop torturing them and let them have a childhood. We all find our level in the end.
Time for a moratorium on school changes and the setting up of a national task force to develop the paradigm shift in education that we desperately need.
