Academies for 2000 pupils: the DfES’s own school choice

nick cowen, 9 May 2007

The Sunday Times reports that the new Thomas Deacon Academy has not found room for building a playground amongst its (mostly taxpayer) £46.4 million funding. Justifying this move is the claim that all the pupils of this school will be so enthused by the curriculum that they will not require playtime in which to let off steam (a situation that one teacher blogger considers to be without precedent). The project manager of the academy even makes the further claim that removing all unsupervised time from the school day will prevent bullying. True in the same way that stomach stapling can be pretty effective at tackling obesity.
Looking at the school on Peterborough’s official website, the situation doesn’t appear quite as horrendous as the Times article implies. There is indeed no playground but a combination of grass and artificial pitches are there for structured sports activities (more than many schools can offer) and in the not unlikely event of this no-playtime policy falling flat on its face, these areas could probably be used to kick a football around.

There are still problems, however, with the way this project has been envisaged and organised. When people ask where all the Government’s extra investment in education has gone, the primary answer is new IT equipment with limited utility in the average classroom. Another major destination of taxpayer money, however, is new developments like this school that hoover up millions of pounds before they have even opened their doors to students. Three schools are being shut down to feed this grand project which will absorb 2200 students behind its gates. Like shiny computer equipment, like the millennium dome, like ‘beacon’ local authorities, these investments are more about showing off the government’s power to regenerate and renew (rather than delivering actual regeneration and renewal). These are the flamboyant baubles of a grandiose public sector. In previous generations, these demonstrative projects took the form of the tower blocks designed more to please Modernist design sensibilities than to provide pleasant social housing. Today, the sharp edges of modern architecture may have been replaced with fashionable organic curves, but the principle of using public money to satisfy the dreams of politicians remains.
Members of the public are conscripted in to help with these aspirations and become the plaything of forces that obey only the whim of central government. With limited provision for school choice, parents wishing to put their children where a disproportionate amount of investment is being made will have to ensure that they reside in the correct catchment area. By contrast, those wishing to escape this leviathan where fun has been officially excluded, will be compelled to seek out schools from much further a field than before.
Of course, experimentation within education is to be encouraged. Even experiments that fly in the face of received wisdom (that playtime is important, and that smaller schools foster better relations between pupils) might be fortunate and discover some new innovation that dramatically improves standards. But experiments by central government, as opposed to experiments by private organisations, have two involuntary (and often unwilling) guinea pigs: children and taxpayers!
The choice to embark on this grand plan for academies was not taken by its participants or its investors, but by officials at the Department for Education and Skills. The judges of the initiative are not those who will receive the consequences of the decision to go ahead with it. This makes these projects more likely to fail than their private counterparts but it also, as a side effect, makes them unjust and uncaring to individual children and families.
A silver lining has emerged today with the news that the Government has no plans to extend its regulatory reach over home schools. This leaves open one of the few means of leaving the state system, but only for those with the resources to teach their own children. Although taxpayers’ money invested in public education remains as a hostage, children themselves have a way out. It will be interesting to see whether the number of home-schooled students rises or falls in Peterborough once the Thomas Deacon Academy opens.