Andrew Adonis, the schools minister, wants to accelerate the government city academies programme.He says it could be possible to continue opening 100 academies a year after 2011, when the target of 400 city academies is likely to be met. Furthermore, he now says they should become "akin to private schools," with strict disciplinary codes, a broad curriculum and 12-hour days.
The Green Party is against the idea of city academies. Education is for the public good, and should be publicly funded.
City academies empower private-sector sponsors to have control over admission policy and the curriculum. State schools should remain under the democratic control of local education authorities.
Neither the Tories, nor the Lib Dems, are opposed to city academies.
But more importantly, when Gordon Brown became Prime Minister, did you think that key Blairite policies, such as city academies were going to be kept in place?
2 comments:
How anyone on the Labour benches can justify city academies is beyond me. It just goes to show how far they've travelled into the Tory camp.
Good post, Scott. We in the Greens definitely need to put out the message that public services are only ever properly financed and democratically accountable to the public when they are funded with public money. Obviously the Tories aren't going to make that argument, nor the Lib Dems - so we have an opportunity to build it up as one of our major policy planks.
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