By Nick Mann | 4 January 2012
Teachers’ unions have slammed Education Secretary Michael Gove for claiming that anyone opposing his push for more academy schools is ‘happy with failure’.
Speaking today at an academy in London, Gove said some local authorities were being obstructive about schools in their area becoming academies. He labelled those resisting the change ‘enemies of promise’.
Gove said: ‘The same ideologues who are happy with failure – the enemies of promise – also say you can't get the same results in the inner cities as the leafy suburbs so it's wrong to stigmatise these schools.
‘Let's be clear what these people mean. Let's hold their prejudices up to the light. What are they saying? If you're poor, if you're Turkish, if you're Somali, then we don't expect you to succeed. You will always be second class and it's no surprise your schools are second class. I utterly reject that attitude.’
In June, Gove outlined plans to accelerate the government’s academies programme, in a move he said would help to raise school standards. Two hundred struggling primary schools are set to be taken outside local authority control in 2012/13.
But the general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, Christine Blower, today questioned Gove’s claims about the benefits of academy status and rejected his criticism of those opposing forced change.
‘The secretary of state's assertion that the opponents of the government's forced academy programme are “happy with failure” is an insult to all the hard-working and dedicated teachers, school leaders, support staff and governors in our schools,’ she said.
‘If academy status brought the benefits claimed by the government, why have so few of England's schools opted to convert?’ Blower said the academy programme had a damaging effect on the services local education authorities provide for other schools. This, she said, was because the LEA loses funding for every school that becomes an academy, which in turn reduces support and funding for the schools still under its control.
‘It has nothing to do with school improvement but is part of an ideologically driven agenda to dismantle our current system of local accountability for education,’ she added.
Her concerns were echoed by the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, Brian Lightman, who said his union ‘strongly refutes’ Gove’s criticism of those not opting for academy status.
‘There are many highly successful schools working with their local authority and partner schools; they are not the “enemies of promise” but professionals dedicated to improving the lives of young people,’ he said.
‘The keys to school improvement are excellent teaching and leadership and a relentless determination to stamp out failure.’
