The Guardian view on the education bill: needs improvement

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/22/guardian-view-education-bill-needs-improvement

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The government’s avowed intention in taking powers to force failing – and even coasting – maintained schools to become academies is to make sure that children do not spend a day longer than necessary in an inadequate school. No one could argue with that ambition. But with the education and adoption bill now in the Commons, the education secretary, Nicky Morgan, is putting her foot hard down on the accelerator despite question marks over whether the headlong rush to academy status is delivering the improvements she says she wants. It is true that there is some evidence that they deliver some better results, but it is far too soon to be confident that they will work everywhere, and too there is much history showing that one structure rarely fits all.

In the past year, the National Audit Office, the public accounts committee and the education committee have all flagged up the complex relationship between attainment, autonomy and accountability. The new regional schools commissioners and headteacher boards that are intended to monitor performance only came in last year and are still taking shape. The current system, the NAO warned, can miss failing schools for years.

The worst of the legislation is not only that it embeds the bias against local authority control and ignores the question of accountability, but that it then removes the right of local parents and teachers to object to plans to convert schools. The education secretary claims that it is necessary to streamline the process to sideline parents who might, rather than put their children’s schooling first, object solely for the ideological motive of keeping schools in local authority control, a claim that sits oddly with her own drive to encourage all schools to become academies. Meanwhile, as the shadow education secretary, Tristram Hunt, argued in the Commons, all the other burning issues in education, from the future of Sure Start to meeting the needs of 16– to 19-year-olds, are lost in yet another bit of structural change, the main purpose of which seems to be to paint Labour into a corner.