Government forges ahead with academy plans in Queen's Speech

The move comes despite protests from unions, and follows a partial back-tracking on plans to academise all schools.

The Bill includes:

• Powers to convert under-performing schools in "unviable" local authorities to academies
• Goal of making every school an academy but no compulsion to do so
• Head teachers, not councils, to be responsible for school improvement
• A new national funding formula for schools
• Schools to be responsible for assisting excluded pupils

Christine Blower, General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers, the largest teachers’ union, said, 'This Government has signalled its determination to pursue, without a mandate or evidence base, the goal of engineering all schools to move to academy status within six years.
 
'Today’s Bill claims that it promises "fairer" funding. In fact, schools face the first real terms cuts for a generation, a cut in the real value of funding per pupil of 8 per cent or more. The Government is freezing total cash per pupil but simultaneously increasing the money school governors have to pay to the Treasury for each member of staff they employ. The struggle to balance school budgets will be made harder by the Government’s plan to rush ahead with a National Funding Formula without the additional funding schools already need.  Local authorities in London, the Midlands and the North are expected to be hit particularly hard – but all areas will lose out given the overall real terms cuts in school funding everywhere.
 
'Having failed to gain support for the goal of forced academisation from parents, governors, teachers or head teachers, the Government proposes to take new powers to arrive at the same endpoint.
 
'Targeting schools in local authorities that the Secretary of State decides to call ‘unviable’ or ‘underperforming’ will fool no one. The scope for political partisanship is clear.
 
'Removing key roles from local authorities, in particular any involvement in school improvement, will not help to achieve a sustainably successful school system. This reckless plan to sever the link between local government, communities and their local schools puts at risk parental engagement in, and democratic scrutiny of, state schools. Unelected Regional Schools Commissioners, with a clear agenda for academisation, reinforces the democratic deficit.
 
'The Secretary of State is out of touch with teachers who are desperate for better policy making, proper support, and an end to ceaseless curriculum and assessment turmoil. Teachers await strategic responses from Government on teacher vacancies, pupil place shortfalls, falling pay, rising workloads and funding gaps. Skills for life and the world of work must find their place, but in a broad and balanced curriculum. The NUT agrees with the CBI and the Institute of Directors that schools should not be exam factories.
 
'To prevent children reaching the point when they are excluded from school requires joined up thinking by Government and a range of services to support schools. The focus should be on preventing exclusions, but by making the curriculum less flexible, and threatening the survival of CAMHS and other local support services, the Government is making this harder for schools, not easier.
 
'Introducing "new indicators for measuring life chances" is a smokescreen for the Government’s disgraceful record on child poverty. The Institute for Fiscal Studies project that the number of children in relative poverty will have risen from 2.3 to 3.6 million by 2020.
 
'On average, nine children in a class of 30 are growing up in poverty. It is high time that the Government realises how its austerity policies are responsible for this situation. Increasing numbers of children are turning up to school hungry. Tired, hungry children simply can’t learn effectively and parents in one of the richest countries in the world shouldn’t have to rely on food banks.
 
'This Government claims commitment to social mobility but its policy of deregulation, austerity and competition will set the cause of social justice in England back decades.'