With 200 academies open today, this independent state schools programme – launched in 2000 by Tony Blair and David Blunkett – has certainly come of age. Ed Balls, the schools secretary, has marked the occasion by scrapping the £2m endowment required of new private or voluntary sector promoters. Universities, colleges and schools had already been exempted from the charge. This also makes government and Opposition policy more closely aligned, and might allow the government to announce some interesting new private sponsors ahead of a general election.
Academies had a double celebration last week, when preliminary results for the 2009 GCSEs suggested a five-point improvement in the numbers gaining five good grades including English and Maths. We don't yet know how much other schools improved this year, but last year the improvement was just 1.3 points. And that result doesn't take account of academies that started from scratch with new pupils.
One of these was Mossbourne in Hackney, built on the site of the Hackney Downs school that had become a byword for failure by the time it was shut down in 1996. Mossbourne recorded a truly remarkable 84% of pupils achieving five good grades in its first year of pupils sitting the exam.
Of course, there have been a few examples of academies that have required intervention when their initial plans haven't worked. Given that these schools are largely replacing the worst schools in the country, it would be astonishing if it were otherwise. But the overall trend is remarkably encouraging, which is why the programme enjoys the support of the major political parties - and of parents. But one group – the teaching unions – remains either opposed or churlish (as with Mary Bousted, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, this morning on the Radio 4 Today programme). Why?
These are schools transforming education in the poorest areas of the country, giving real opportunities to pupils who were largely neglected or for whom aspirations were limited too often in the past, a group the teaching unions claim to support. They are succeeding as a whole far better than any previous initiative of this sort. While they enjoy independence from local authorities, they are often very active in their local communities: some of the best work I have seen with minority ethnic groups has been in academies. They are legally forbidden from selection, although some seek a fully comprehensive intake through banding or lotteries.
Of course, their intakes have started to include more middle-class pupils, as any proper comprehensive must, but schools like Mossbourne have 40% on free school meals (well over twice the national average). They don't pay teachers less than other schools, indeed they often pay more, although some organise school days differently. They are hugely popular with their parents and students, as seen in applications and surveys by PricewaterhouseCoopers.
There appears to be a sense in the teaching unions that if you have opposed something once, you must remain steadfast in that opposition even when the evidence shows you were wrong. Of course, there are some academies that need to do better, but taken as a whole, the movement is proving a huge success – in large part as a result of the hard work of teachers working in them. Which teaching union will be the first to have the courage to admit it?
Read Conor Ryan's blog on Conor's Commentary
