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West End Extra - LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Published: 19 September 2008

Academies? M’lord knows best, so we must keep quiet

• YOUR article (Pimlico Academy Goes Back To School, September 12) refers to parents meeting Lord Adonis in an effort to overturn the decision to impose academy status on the last remaining community school in Westminster.
Concerned parents and staff have in fact been trying to arrange a meeting to answer questions about issues which we feel are fundamental to the academy’s operation – governance, policies covering parental complaints etc, since January of this year.
While we are grateful to Mark Field for arranging this meeting we are disappointed that it comes only now, after the consultation period has long expired and after we have been forced to go to court in an effort to obtain answers to our questions.
The meeting with Adonis
did little to advance our knowledge.
Questions about where parents – now lacking an elected governing body and no longer having recourse to Westminster – might take a complaint were met with the response that they could write directly to the minister.
The fact that academies operate largely outside education law and that people wishing to return a stale loaf of bread enjoy greater rights and legal recourse than a parent wishing to bring a complaint against an academy’s actions was met with stony indifference.
There was no clarification on parental or staff representation on the governing body – numbers, efforts to ensure diversity and methods of selection are still a secret.
The minister, however, feeling that the make up of the governing body was probably now in the public domain, offered to arrange for details to be made available to us.
This, and a commitment to look into the question and cost of a PR consultancy firm being used to sell the idea of an academy to a select and secret group of Pimlico parents in an effort to drum up support, was about all Lord Adonis could offer.
His viewpoint seemed to be that academies are great and that rather than the need to discuss such things as the governing body or how Pimlico Academy planned to engage with parents, we should just accept this and shut up.
Indeed, so great is his belief in the power of the academy model to improve schools that he was able to attribute this year’s exam and SATs results at Pimlico to the fact that the school was on a “trajectory to academy status”.
Sounds remarkably like those “tramlines to an academy” that Westminster told us we were on during their consultation.
A system shaped by parents? It doesn’t seem like it – the government know best and we must accept what they impose without question.
Gloria Gately
Secretary, Pimlico School Association

Send your letters to: The Letters Editor, West End Extra, 40 Camden Road, London, NW1 9DR or email to letters@westendextra.co.uk. The deadline for letters is midday Wednesday. The editor regrets that anonymous letters cannot be published, although names and addresses can be withheld.
Please include a full name, postal address and telephone number.
Letters may be edited for reasons of space.

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