Downhills Primary – important questions on Gove’s education agenda

This week in Parliament David Lammy MP will challenge Education Ministers’ plans to force a primary school in his constituency to convert to academy status against the wishes of the local community. The topic raises important questions about Michael Gove’s education agenda.

The school in question, Downhills Primary, was given notice to improve 12 months ago. Nine months later it had significantly improved and Ofsted is due to return within 16 weeks. Yet despite this the school has been told it will be forcibly taken over by the Department for Education unless it agrees to convert to an academy by January 20th. The governors, head teacher, staff, parents and local community are opposed to the change and are considering legal action.

This situation is mirrored up and down the country. Last year in my own Wigan constituency a secondary school in a similar position was forced through the academy process at enormous speed, much like the tactics which were used to push through the legislation on which it is based. The Academies Bill, which paves the way for forced conversions, was pushed through the Commons in just a matter of weeks under powers normally reserved for the threat of terrorism.

Michael Gove defends this urgency on the basis that we should not tolerate failure. That would be a powerful argument were there any proof that his new academy model raises achievement. The evidence that academies raise achievement remained inconclusive (Price Waterhouse Cooper 2008) until last year’s LSE study which Gove is fond of quoting. The study found that Labour’s model of academies had raised achievement slightly between 2002 and 2009, although during the same period their intake changed to favour more advantaged children. The National Audit Office Report of 2010 bears this out: academies take fewer pupils on free school meals, select more and exclude more pupils than other schools.

The speed with which this programme is being forced through should therefore be of deep concern, not just to parents and teachers at schools like Downhills, but to the surrounding schools too. They may be left with a higher proportion of disadvantaged children and – because Gove’s new academy model removes pooled funding to support those children – fewer resources to meet their needs.

In defence of his recent actions at Downhills Primary, Gove quoted Tony Blair: ‘an academy belongs not to some remote bureaucracy, not to the rulers of government, local or national, but to itself, for itself.’ How strange then that he should find himself imposing a national model of schooling on communities that don’t want it in the name of local empowerment.

These latest developments highlight the gap between Gove’s often welcome rhetoric and the reality of his policies. He talks about the importance of teaching, but allows the new academies and free schools to lower teacher pay and conditions. He promises accountability but replaces local democratic scrutiny of schools with an undisclosed, private contract between the Secretary of State and the school. He celebrates freedom and autonomy for schools, yet introduces the deeply unpopular EBac which tells schools what they must teach and children what they must learn.

The international evidence tells us we should be moving in precisely the opposite direction. The OECD’s international assessment of education performance tells us that lifting the status, pay and most importantly, working conditions of teachers is the critical factor in raising performance. It also concludes that allowing schools freedom to choose what and how they teach is a good thing, provided it is combined with strong accountability.

David Lammy’s debate this week is important because it provides a voice for those communities who are being forced into an untested model of education with alarming speed and little scrutiny. If the Secretary of State believes in local autonomy, I hope he will listen.

Lisa Nandy is the MP for Wigan