- Conference
- Date
- June 16, 2017
- Decision
Conference agrees that the government’s academies and free schools programme:
- Redirects hundreds of millions of pounds that could be better spent on existing schools;
- Weakens local authorities;
- Undermines national pay and conditions for employees;
- Breaks up admission arrangements;
- Harms the democratic planning of school places;
- Is unpopular with parents and the public in general to the point where the Government has already rowed back from it’s recent position of forcing all schools to become Academies by 2022.
Conference believes that:
- There is no justification for passing publicly funded education to private companies who could profit from it;
- This undemocratic process removes the voice of communities, local government and parents – replacing them with unelected Regional Schools Commissioners and unelected, highly paid, multi academy trust chief executives;
- There is little evidence that academies and free schools improve achievement but they do encourage the exclusion of underprivileged children;
- This is happening when schools are facing serious funding difficulties and both academies and grammar schools are making redundancies.
Conference therefore agrees to:
- Call on the Labour party to create a policy to bring all state funded schools under some form of local authority control;
- Call on the Government to put in place a framework around the current policy that restores an appropriate level of oversight and influence to local education authorities;
- Call on local authorities to express support for one or other of these demands and to offer an alternative to independent multi-academy trusts to school governors so they do not feel obliged transfer in the mean time.
Plymouth in UNISON
NEC POLICY: SUPPORT AND AMEND
98.1
Delete point c) and replace with:
“c) Whilst some academies and free schools improve achievement, the majority do no better or are much worse than equivalent maintained schools and far too many academies and free schools have lower intakes of disadvantaged children and young people;”
Delete (iii) and replace with:
“(iii) Call on local authorities to express support for these demands and offer high quality support services to their own maintained schools so that school governors do not feel pressured to support the conversion of their school to an academy.”
National Executive Council