The talk was very informative and detailed, and he even handed out lecture notes, which I shall endeavour to publish here as soon I can get a digital copy of them.

Suffice to say, the overall news is not good for the UK education system, and as he pointed out, he would much rather see all the time, effort and resources being expended on the beaurocracy related to converting to Academy status being better deployed in classrooms teaching kids.

Peter Downes has been a Head Teacher twice, so if anyone is qualified to speak on this subject, he is certainly one of them.

**********

Examples of differences given between Schools and Academies include the following.

Under Academy status, there is no local recourse for complaints/matters arising above the Academy itself other than going straight to the Education Secretary.

CURRENT SYSTEM:
School/College > LEA > Education Secretary

ACADEMY SYSTEM:
Academy > Education Secretary

The current system has the advantage that an LEA (Local Education Authority) will collectively have local knowledge and be able to deal accordingly (and hopefully a little more sympathetically) with matters arising.



It was also pointed out that the one-off payments being offered to Head Teachers as a bait/sweetener for converting to Academy status have to come from somewhere, and are in effect being sliced off Local Authority (LA) budgets.

This is on top of the current round of LA funding cuts we have, so this is already having a real impact on jobs and services in the public sector as a result.


We also have absolutely no gaurantees that when the 'golden handshake' eventually runs out, if an Academy runs into financial troubles that they will not resort to bringing in private sector 'help' to cover the shortfall.

Science classes sponsored by Proctor and Gamble anyone?

However, it transpires that if a school has too big a deficit they may not be allowed to change their status anyway!

Conversely, Academies can also opt out of the National Curriculum, then pick and choose what classes to run.

In principle this sounds good, but in practice you may end up with an Academy running Creationism classes and filling your childrens' heads with this stuff. Bearing in mind also that these classes may be quite openly sponsored by a thematically linked patron, we may end up with a situation where a local Church (or Mosque etc) is funding part of your child's education at an Academy.

Of course, you may also find out that an arms manufacturuer is sponsoring say, a military history class (for example).

Under the current LEA driven system this kind of scenario is not allowed to happen.

Many other related subjects were covered, but hopefully this summary has given you all a taste of what was covered (if I can get the lecture summary notes in digital form, I'll publish them soon).

In short, for all it's flaws, it's fair to say that you would probably much rather have your child's education under the care of an LEA and school than an Academy!