Political footballs

That it was Tory shires that forced Nicky Morgan’s hand (though not Wiltshire under the ineffectual Jane Scott) speaks volumes. However I bet Ms Donelan doesn’t lobby Osborne to reinstate the last budget’s massive cut in the money available to local authorities to sustain support for their schools. A back door academisation attempt if ever there was one.

Not once in Ms Donelan’s article last week on academy status does she mention the importance of parents. Of course her government has deliberately allowed a perverse position where parents are denied a place on many academy governing bodies and the right to seek redress on complaints with their elected politicians. She falls into the typical Tory trap of ranting against “bureaucrats” showing a complete ignorance of the high regard that Wiltshire’s late lamented education officers enjoyed with all schools before the curse first of grant maintained schools and then academies was forced upon local education authorities in a bid to bring market forces to bear on a system that simply does not lend itself to such meddling.

That practically all secondary schools and a third of Wiltshire’s primary schools are academies has everything to do with the financial bribes (she would no doubt call them “incentives”) to convert and is statistically totally skewed by the fact that her government will not allow Wiltshire to open a school unless it is an academy. That so many schools nationally refused to take the bribes to convert should have told Cameron, Osborne and Morgan something but they chose to ignore the warning signs, I see that Westwood with Iford actually set up a national petition against being forced down the academy route – good for them! Ms Donelan clearly hedged her bets when she knew her party was onto a loser but one asks why even contemplate such a disastrous political position in the first place.

Parents are actually a vitally important component (except, it seems to Ms Donelan) of a triangle I always described when my team dealt with school admission queries as the three Ps – Parent, Practitioner and Pupil. If any part of that triangle is not performing well you will not get a rounded child or school, and academy status has nothing whatsoever to do with the importance of that triangle.

It also does not become Michelle to peddle inaccurate statements about academies and how good they are for our children when that is patently untrue. Tories consistently gloss over the fact that there are many academies failing our children, the latest being an academy chain in Northamptonshire, hardly a deprived county.

If that had happened in Wiltshire when I was working for them in the 1980s that would have been dealt with swiftly and unequivocally by our education officers and advisers under the superbly supportive leadership of the Chief Education Officer, Ivor Slocombe.

Let no one forget, all his senior officers and subject advisers had huge experience as teachers in running highly regarded schools – they were out and about in schools supported by an efficient lean administration back at County Hall. So let’s have a stop to any more brickbats thrown by the likes of Ms Donelan about “bureaucrats” implying pen pushers providing little worth for Wiltshire’s pupils, practitioners and parents. Ivor presided over a coherent planned system of improvement and school planning that schools came to appreciate, all the more so when they see the chaos of the current free-for-all system that severely struggles to cope with the demands placed upon it because of the swingeing and unnecessary cuts.

Moreover, local management of schools meant that every headteacher had a very large control over how they spent their allocation of the expenditure, not as Ms Donelan would falsely have you believe that academisation provides the necessary financial freedom – schools already had it in abundance years ago under local authority “control” and also played a vital part in determining the formula under which it was distributed.

The truth is that, although politicians of all parties will try and deny this until they are blue in the face, a major determinant of school performance outcomes is the socio-economic grouping of the parents and that comes from decades of my involvement in the examination system. Ivor Slocombe was the first CEO to recognise that there needed to be a local system of comparative examination statistics and under his leadership, I helped develop, with Devon advisers and the University of Bath a highly regarded and effective local and then national examination performance system that exists to this day. The fact that the then Department for Education & Science (and subsequently Ofsted) piggy backed on Wiltshire’s founding local authority system (done secretly behind Thatcher’s back as she hated local authorities with a vengeance) is testament to Ivor’s vision. We wisely used those statistics well before Ofsted was invented to raise school standards and it didn’t need any financial bribes to take academy status to lift them, believe you me. What we didn’t do though was set schools one against the other in league tables which are a nonsensical way of assessing any school’s worth.

The other key determinant of outcomes is the quality of teaching staff and leadership but you then might want to ask why this government, especially under perhaps the worst Secretary of State, Michael Gove, deliberately allows academies to undermine professional excellence by employing more and more unqualified teachers because it was cheaper to do so and then tries to justify the unjustifiable.

Ofsted also used to inspect local authorities regularly and I was proud to work in my final education officer years for 4-star Shropshire but that grounding came under Ivor Slocombe’s leadership in Wiltshire.

You might then want to ask why Donelan’s party has systematically destroyed much of what was good within our local authorities despite maintaining that they are the party for education.

Remember Cameron’s words were he wanted to “finish the job”? The truth is that, as stated in her article, MPs like her see no worth whatsoever in “bureaucrats and politicians” running our schools when the truth is completely different.

John Baxter, Deverell Close, Bradford on Avon