Gove is being given the bums rush by schools

By Richard Watts / @richardwatts01

Thirty two. That’s the total number of new academies opening today under the government’s so-called “school’s revolution”.

There are around 20,000 schools in the country so a massive 0.16% of schools have joined Mr Gove’s brave new world.

It is an understatement to say that this paltry number will be a disappointment to hapless Education Secretary Michael Gove, who has said that he wants to see academies become “the norm” for every school in England.

Gove has staked his reputation on establishing a market in school places before spending cuts mean that the surplus capacity in the system necessary to give parents to kind of open choice of school place he wants is removed.

I’ve written before about why Gove is being given the bums rush by schools. And the more evidence that is published about the Swedish Free school and American Charter school system that he is trying to emulate, the crazier his plan seems.

It was clear there was going to be disappointing news for the Tory-Liberal government as soon as Gove cheerleaders in the Spectator and the Daily Telegraph started a blame game about why the policy was failing.

Apparently “trade union militants”, troglodyte local authorities and “useless officials” are to blame. There is even raging against the fact that schools have to consult parents before becoming an academy, despite the new system being intended to boost parental choice.

You can tell things are really going wrong when a minister’s “sources” start briefing against his own department’s civil servants. I can’t imagine officials at the Department for Education are that keen to bust a gut for a minister who is reported to think that they are “completely useless” and Labour minsters like John Reid and Stephen Byers found out that there can only be one winner when politicians go to war with their own department. After all there are thousands of civil servants in a department, many of whom have access to sensitive information, and only a few minsters and special advisors.

This fiasco comes at the same time as the publication of this year’s GCSE results show just how quickly the educations system the Tory-Liberals inherited from Labour is improving. Record results, which Tory minsters confirm aren’t caused by exams getting easier, are the result of hard work by staff and students, supported by record levels of school funding and new buildings provided by the Labour government.

I must give a special plug for Islington’s secondary schools. A few years ago our results were amongst the worst in the country. Last year our results were the most improved in all England. It’s too early to know whether we’ve kept that up this year, early indications are that 72 per cent of children in Islington schools got at least 5 good GCSEs, the majority of those including English and Maths. At the Islington Arts and Media School, which has one of the most deprived intakes in the whole country, 95 per cent of children got the equivalent of 5 A* – C GCSE passes.

This massive improvement in results is great credit to students and staff at the schools but does also show that structural changes aren’t necessarily vital to improving standards. Of the nine Islington schools entering GCSE candidates only one is an academy (Islington’s second academy is new and so doesn’t have year 11 children yet) but all show that strong leadership supported by high levels of funding and support is what really delivers for children.

Islington’s schools improved enormously in the Labour years. The Tory-Liberals seem determined to discard many of the things that drove that success – motivated staff, generous funding, new buildings – in order to force the introduction of a system that has categorically been shown to fail where it has been tried. It’s no wonder people call this government more ideological than Thatcher’s.

Update: An earlier version of this post suggested that 0.0016% of schools were new academies, this has now been amended.