Selection returns by stealth

City academies are just a sop to the articulate middle classes

Roy Hattersley
Monday February 25, 2002
The Guardian

Plots thicken, mysteries deepen and confusion continues to confound. All of which we can be sure is that Stephen Timms, the minister for school standards, has no idea why city academies are to be created, how they will differ from city technology colleges or how they will be governed. His ignorance, in the great tradition of the office he holds, might be excused were it not for his habit of answering questions on the subject with gobbledegook - which has almost certainly been written for him by Andrew Adonis, the real secretary of state for education, who "reforms" secondary schools from 10 Downing Street.
In this month's edition of Parents and Schools, the Campaign for State Education publishes its attempts to decipher the Rule of Timms - "City academies are leading the way in breaking down traditional ideological barriers". CASE had first asked Estelle Morris to break the code during a meeting with her a month or two ago and the secretary of state had agreed to write with an explanation of what Timms meant. Her letter, in CASE's judgment, "did not specifically address the question". No ideological barriers had been defined nor was there an explanation of how the city academies would break them down. The claim that city academies would possess a unique power to innovate seemed inconsistent with the education bill, which expressly gave that power to all schools.

It was then the turn of Paul McLeod, head of the city academies unit, to attempt a translation of Timmspeak into basic English. His clarification is worth repeating verbatim. "City academies represent a unique form of partnership between the private and public sectors. City academies will be independent institutions, operating as part of the local family of schools."

That, you may feel, does not adequately explain the nature of the ideological barriers that city academies are intended to break down, how they are distinguished from technology colleges or why so much stress is placed on their power to innovate. But it does confirm that no one in the DfES has clarified the thinking on city academies since Estelle Morris engaged in an extraordinary correspondence with Mr WH Lightbrown of Long Compton, Warwickshire, last July.

Mr Lightbrown had read in this column of what I described as the government's intention to "sell off" some secondary schools, and he wrote to Ms Morris to express his opposition to that policy. Ms Morris took refuge in innocence. She replied that she had no idea where I "got the idea of selling off". Mr Lightbrown asked me to reveal my source and I obliged in a letter that I copied to the secretary of state herself. As with the oysters eaten by the Walrus and the Carpenter, answer came there none.

I got the idea from a document, City Academies: A Prospectus for Sponsors and Other Partners, published by David Blunkett in July 2000. It explained that city academies will be "owned and run by sponsors" who may be "businesses, individuals, churches, other faith groups or voluntary bodies". It made clear that the owners will be under no obligation to appoint local authority governors. Ownership - the government's own choice of words - will not therefore be constrained by the democratic accountability of public appointees.

I had to admit in my letter to Mr Lightbrown that I had been wrong in one particular. I wrote about the schools being sold to their new "owners at knock-down prices". It would have been nearer the truth to say that they are to be virtually given away. The new owners (remember, possibly private companies) can acquire a school by contributing 20% of its estimated capital value. After that "there will be no requirement for sponsors to provide a contribution to running costs". The head of the city academy unit at the DfES told CASE that the new institutions will have "the flexibility to innovate in the response to the challenging circumstances that they face" but "it is impossible to generalise about how that flexibility will be used".

No it isn't. The city academies will take their place as another tier in the hierarchy of secondary schools - more special than specialist schools, more technological than city technology colleges and, of course, superior in public esteem to the bog-standard comprehensive schools. This is just another item in the programme of covert return to selection - more often by interview than examination and therefore specially designed to meet the needs of the articulate and self-confident middle classes. It all makes me wonder if there was another coded message in Mr McLeod's reply to CASE. It referred to Mr Timm's (rather than Mr Timms' or Mr Timms's) original statement on city academies. Was an honest and conscientious civil servant trying to dissociate himself from the doubletalk?