It was the same with Grant Maintained Status and Specialist Schools Status. These “Reforms” are Politicians showing how much they have improved education.
If being free from Local Authority Control is such a good idea, why are any still under Local Authority Control? Gove is no better (perhaps worse)than the other Education Ministers I taught under since 1980. They all introduced “initiatives” and “reforms”, and apparently improved Education. I recently retired, I feel sorry for my ex-colleagues who have to make yet another reform work.

” In practice, the decision to convert is often fuelled less by passionate fervour and more by tired pragmatism.”

That may be the case, but it will take more than this one anecdote to prove it, I’m afraid.

People driven by the need to face reality tend to make better decisions than people driven by “passion”.

3
Perhaps you can give us an example.

A revolution sponsored by Rupert Murdoch, Bill Gates, a handful of right-wing Billionnaires and Michael Gove is about as revolutionary as XXX’s rather pathetic derailing comment. I visit schools for my job and I can confirm that, where they are converting to academy status, it is being done with as much, or less enthusiasm, as this.

A revolution which invoilves centralisation and more government control, more government prescription and less local control and control by parents is not a revolution at all.

Is it true one free school only allows students whose parents earn collectively £70,000.

XXX

I accept your point – as a teacher rather than a policy researcher, I don’t have any comprehensive evidence on this. What I can say is that my story is one that I’ve heard repeated by many others. I can also imagine that the financial calculations made by my school are very similar to the calculations being made by many others across the country.

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Without schools being passionate about their independence, I can’t see them making much use of it.

Natacha

Really interesting to hear that this reflects your experience.

My party created academies, but if I had anything to do with it they’d be gone in a second. Taking schools out of local authority control is an attack on democracy and having more than one kind of secondary school is ridiculous. Comprehensive schools are the future.

For the better? He can use unqualified teachers, thus saving cash.

@ Paul Pennyfeather

Under New Labour, teachers used to complain a heck of a lot. The two things they complained about most were:

1. Being snowed under by a seemingly endless stream of central government initiatives that left them too little time to get on with teaching, and which, by their prescriptive nature, robbed teachers of the ability to exercise creativity in the classroom.

2. The over-detailed and intrusive National Curriculum – whose demands swallowed up every minute of classroom time, limiting or even obliterating the possibility of a more enriched education.

Gove’s Academy programme is designed to meet these two criticisms – by setting teachers free from the top-down stream of prescriptive orders from the centre and by radically reducing – to bare essentials – the requirements of the National Curriculum.

Many international studies have shown that giving heads and teachers greater autonomy can improve teaching and learning.

It does, of course, mean schools have extra responsibility – which can create fear….
but Academies do deliver what teachers were asking for and they should conquer their fear, accept responsibility, and get on with it. Reading between the lines of the OP, I get the feeling you do. It’s a shame so many of your colleagues are stuck, stuck, stuck in cynical carping mode.

“People driven by the need to face reality tend to make better decisions than people driven by “passion”.”

I cannot think of any succesful person who didn’t have passion for what they did.

@ 11 Planeshift

“I cannot think of any succesful person who didn’t have passion for what they did.”

I think it’s fair to say that passion will lead you to achieve more, but if you’re not grounded in reality you may be achieving things in the wrong direction. See the no-doubt passionate attempts to force Creationist teachings into science classrooms in the US, for one of a million examples.

Perhaps most importantly, though, pragmatism and passion are not mutually exclusive. ad @3 has implied a bit of a false dichotomy there.

I think it’s fair to say that passion will lead you to achieve more, but if you’re not grounded in reality you may be achieving things in the wrong direction.

WB Yeats re-written by a Church of England vicar? And in the original:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

@ 13

Precisely!

The courses have been dumbed down. The content has been dumbed down. The average teacher entering the profession has been dumbed down to a frightening extent, and of course, the exams have been dumbed down.

On the plus side, schools are now called academies, results keep going up, non-qualified teachers can be employed to ‘teach’ (no need to know much – see above), cover supervisors are effectively teachers (but largely not effective teachers) and are hiding a multitude of staffing problems, and pensions have been effectively reduced.

The academies in my area are run by headteachers who seem to be rather less intelligent and more poorly-educated than 20-30 years ago, lack tact, have poor grammar, seem to lack an overarching vision of what education is for (past getting the school results up and creating cannon fodder for the economy) and are generally uninspiring people climbing the greasy ladder.

Still, the holidays are good.

@12, and 13 – yes it isn’t the only characteristic for success, but read carefully what I wrote. Passion is a pre-requesite for success, can you think of a succesful person who wasn’t passionate about what they did?

Flowerpower
“Gove’s Academy programme is designed to meet these two criticisms – by setting teachers free from the top-down stream of prescriptive orders from the centre and by radically reducing – to bare essentials – the requirements of the National Curriculum”

If you think that Academies will really have freedom to teach I think you are very naive. Gove’s ideas on History teaching tell us what he knows and understands abour education.

The school I retired from recently, has introduced a new uniform skirt.The Head has seen fit to put a PDF doc. on the school’s website about it. It even details how you can wash it and hang it up to dry overnight, so you don’t have to buy more than one skirt. David Quoosp tell it like it is, education is not what schools are about. The Heads like to control everything about “their” school in pursuit of the correct exam results. The Holidays are under threat now as well.

Jim at 17

Do schools exist just to ram knowledge into kids or are they there to teach broader socially useful skills as well?

So we can assume from the original post that Paul’s school have something of a communication problem. For a start, a statement of this importance should surely be coming from the governors (including the teacher governor, as there should be one). And the headteacher clearly does not inspire or seemingly trust the staff.

I am not sure how conversion to an academy will automatically help this situation, but if there are sponsors or mentors involved with a bit of acumen behind them, they would clearly see this as something that could be worked on to improve morale (you realise that teachers who feel happy are more effective – shocking really). I doubt this will happen though – it sounds horribly like poor leadership (apologies if the headteacher, governors etc are really very good) taking a step for financial reasons.

@ 16 Planeshift

” Passion is a pre-requesite for success, can you think of a succesful person who wasn’t passionate about what they did?”

Given that the definitions of both “passionate” and “success” can move around a lot, I’m not sure it’s a particularly valid enquiry. Say I found an example of someone who worked a well-paying job that they hated, and gained financial success that way, would you say that this person had achieved success without passion, or would you redefine what they did as “earning money” and say they were passionate about that?

Passion is a pre-requesite for success, can you think of a succesful person who wasn’t passionate about what they did?

Cincinnatus. Or, slightly more up to date, Sir Alec Douglas-Home. Mike Brearley too (always considered playing cricket was a bit childish).

@ Flowerpower

As I hope my post showed, I am not closed to the possibility of this being a success. My concern is that autonomy in itself is not an end goal; both teachers and school leaders need to have a vision for what they are going to do with it. My experience in my own school has been a lack of such a vision.

National Curriculum is an interesting case in point. Yes, we as teachers do moan about its restrictiveness. I guess the challenge is whether we are capable of turning that discontent into constructive innovation.

@ Watchman

I think you assessment is pretty fair. Communication has been horrendous throughout the conversion process. I believe that has been intentional. The school has sought to play down the significance of the shift for fear of creating opposition.

In our case there are no new mentors or sponsors. Perhaps this lack of new blood is part of the problem.

To respond to a number of points above: almost every great disaster of the last century or so was caused by people who were passionate (Stalinism, WW2, Maoism etc).

On the other hand, every great success depended on someone paying attention to reality (a lot of passionless logistic planning went into OVERLORD).

So when it comes to the crunch, I want rulers who pay more attention to reality than to their passions.

@ 22 Paul Pennyfeather

Yes, your head + senior leadership team seem a pretty pathetic crew. All too typical, I’m afraid, of the school leadership found in schools that are not academies. You’d never find that visionless, craven evasiveness from the Michael Wilshaws and Sally Coates…

One other advantage of academy status is the extra oomph it grants to the governing body. But it is no use keeping on board the horrid placemen the LEA has appointed. Ditch the lot and get in governors with passion……. and skills….. and include more parents. The governors should hold the SLT to account in a way the LEA never did. They should also set up governor buddies so each teacher has a direct route to the GB. That can come in useful if you have the sort of weaselly SLT who repond to reports of behaviour issues with the retort that it is always the teacher’s fault – when everyone knows it really was Cherisse’s fault she pulled that knife.

One good test of the head’s genuine commitment to making things better will be whether or not he continues to top slice the school’s budget to keep subsidising the LEA’s spurious services – school improvement comedians and so on….. BAD IDEA.

Another test will be whether he ditches the crap box-ticking methods of assessing pupil progress and allows teachers to do formative assessment in their own more useful and practical ways.

Good luck!

Academies are in place to save money.
They sound great. Independence from LEA’s. Less paperwork. I am afraid the opposite will occur. More admin staff, less teaching staff and the biggest problem is the unknown factor.
A school building burns down, a disgruntled parent sues the school. All of these major problems were covered by LEA support. Trusts were independent until they came across the unknown factor, then crawled back to the LEA or they closed. Anyway education will change radically over the next 30 years.
The future is video conference super teachers blaring their ideas across the net, with low paid LSA’s or security men monitoring the little darling’s behaviour.4
Watchman
All decisions in education are now financially motivated.
Flowerpower
“I’m afraid, of the school leadership found in schools that are not academies. You’d never find that visionless, craven evasiveness from the Michael Wilshaws and Sally Coates…”
Come off it that is silly generalisation. The old SLT’s and academy SLT’s are the same. For instance in central Bedfordshire every school is becoming an academy. There have been no massive regime changes in that county.

One other advantage of academy status is the extra oomph it grants to the governing body. But it is no use keeping on board the horrid placemen the LEA has appointed. Ditch the lot and get in governors with passion……. and skills….. and include more parents.
Yes more parents. Most schools cry out for governors but it is time consuming and thankless task. Governors that run their own companies have more important fish to fry. The vacuum is filled with the parent with a grudge, the unemployable, the bored, the political or religious fanatic, and the old. Sometimes it is not a bad idea to have someone on their governing body, like an ex head who isn’t involved in the school politics and cliques.

“The governors should hold the SLT to account in a way the LEA never did. They should also set up governor buddies so each teacher has a direct route to the GB.”
They do that already. It is part of the OFSTED framework.

“That can come in useful if you have the sort of weaselly SLT who repond to reports of behaviour issues with the retort that it is always the teacher’s fault – when everyone knows it really was Cherisse’s fault she pulled that knife.”
Actually the LEA usually backs the school. The problem is ambulance chasing lawyers who were deregulated in the eighties that offer parents no fee, no win arrangements.

“ne good test of the head’s genuine commitment to making things better will be whether or not he continues to top slice the school’s budget to keep subsidising the LEA’s spurious services – school improvement comedians and so on….. BAD IDEA.”
I agree but it was cheaper and great thing about the LEA professional developments was the networking of ideas between schools. Unfortunately there is no money for CPD, so no one goes on courses, apart from the head.

Another test will be whether he ditches the crap box-ticking methods of assessing pupil progress and allows teachers to do formative assessment in their own more useful and practical ways.
That happens now; in fact you will even get a satisfactory lesson grade unless you mark formatively.

Sorry not even get a satisfactory grade

@ Flowerpower

You say that Gove wants to reduce the burdens of the national curriculum … in which case, why does he not just reduce the burdens of the national curriculum? There’s no reason why he couldn’t have given ALL schools those freedoms, instead of using the prospect of freedom from bureaucratic tyranny as a lure to bully/blackmail schools into converting to academies. The irony is that schools and academies alike are increasingly finding that they have the freedom to teach only what Gove wants them to teach, and if they have the temerity to use that freedom to choose any other direction they will be summarily slapped down. Clearly a new and unusual definition of the word “freedom” that we don’t normally use.

You extol the virtues of having parent governors, which I completely agree with, but you’ve missed the point that most academies have fewer parent governors than community or foundation schools, which are by law required to have more than academies are. Converting to academy status is more likely to reduce the local accountability of the school within its community than increase it.