ACADEMIES

Commenting on Schools Minister Lord Adonis’s speech to the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ conference Steve Sinnott General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers, Britain’s largest teaching union said:

"The move to encourage private school sponsorship of Academies is extraordinary. Lord Adonis’s effort to extract the ‘educational DNA’ from private schools with no cost to them stands as an explicit criticism of the lack of educational DNA of the current Academy sponsors.

"If the current sponsors are not contributing anything educationally to Academies why not remove them?

"I reject the implication that somehow private schools and the quality of teaching within them is better than that in state schools. Day in day out teachers in schools in socially deprived areas make an enormous and positive contribution to the lives of their pupils.

"I have to wonder how private school Academies are going to get any where near that kind of commitment and experience.

"My other concern is that cash strapped private schools will be tempted into Academy status thus transferring their financial burdens to the state sector.

"There is every argument for positive links to be established between state and private schools. Encouraging private schools to run state schools will not help those partnerships ".