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Thinking Academy Status is a Good Idea? 6th April 2011


We know that there is a lot of discussion at the moment about the possibility of schools applying for Academy status. All the major organisations that represent classroom teachers and school support staff think that the spread of Academy status to the point where Local Authorities are undermined will be bad not just for staff, but also for governors, parents and communities. We would like to explain why.


The Government likes to characterise becoming an Academy as escaping from the control of a local authority. In truth, the local authority has very little control over what schools do, but it is a safety net for a lot of things, and a provider of services that are not easy to obtain anywhere else.


These are only some of the services provided by the local authority that any school becoming an academy would have to fund and organise:



Academies are funded on a similar basis to local authority maintained schools, except that they receive an amount of money in return for no longer automatically receiving these sorts of services from the local authority. The Government says that “becoming an academy should not bring about a financial advantage”. Many of the services that schools receive from the local authority are either difficult to obtain elsewhere, or are more expensive, or are provided by smaller organisations and are of uncertain quality. The school certainly cannot expect to organize all of these things for itself. A primary school will have to pay proportionately more for a service than a secondary.


Making sure that the school’s needs in these respects are covered would become a whole new aspect of management for the headteacher and governors, magnifying the risk that running the school as a deliverer of education is overshadowed by running the school as a business.


We are particularly worried about how schools would cope in an emergency situation such as a fire, a flood, a problem with asbestos, a difficult or complex legal case arising from an accident to a pupil, an allegation against a member of staff or a budget crisis for the school.


The National Governors Association says “governors expect to be able to turn to local authorities for training and advice, and value the support provided by them.” Are we confident that we do not need this support?


We are also as your union representatives naturally concerned about the security of your employment and of your terms and conditions in the future.


As a Local Authority Maintained, Voluntary Aided, Voluntary Controlled or Foundation school, you know what your rates of pay are and how they are decided; what your terms of employment such as our days and hours of work are; and what a lot of other important conditions of employment such as sick leave and sick pay, maternity leave and maternity pay are. Many of these conditions are the outcome of discussions between organisations representing staff and the local authority. Others come from national consultations. We would not want to lose the certainty that we have about these things.


Your current employer has a legal duty to seek to redeploy you if the school can no longer afford you because of falling rolls, budget crisis, reorganisation, curriculum changes etc. The Local Authority would have to meet the cost of retraining and of redundancy payments if redundancies were necessary. As an Academy, your school would have to meet its own redundancy costs and would not have access to a redeployment scheme. With spending cuts coming up, this is a very real risk. As a single employer, there is a real risk that financial constraints would cause it to worsen redundancy terms and still find itself in continuing difficulties because of meeting these costs.


We are conscious that your present governors may not want to change things to your detriment, but also conscious that they cannot make promises binding on a future governing body, or guarantee that future governors will have the skills to take on the greater responsibilities of running the school as an Academy.


Lastly, we are not certain that the perception of parents about Academy status will necessarily be a positive one, given that one of the uses of Academy status in the Government’s eyes is to deal with schools that it regards as failing, and this has been one of the uses in the Bradford district.


It is not possible to “try out” being an Academy. The school has no option to change its status back again.


For all of these reasons, we do not believe that it would be good for your school to become an Academy. Given that things are moving very fast, it would be a good thing for the staff collectively to express these concerns to the head and governors. We are very willing to come and talk to you about the issues raised in this article.