I am fully committed to ensuring that every pupil in Reading East has access to an excellent education and believe that a key element of raising educational standards is to entrust people who actually know how to run schools – the leaders and teachers – to actually do the job. That’s why I fully support the continued extension of the academies programme.
There still exist many misconceptions about academy schools and indeed there are certain individuals who deliberately mislead parents into believing that, for example, academy status is privatisation of the school system by the back door, or that schools will no longer be accountable to parents.
Both of these are demonstrably untrue. Firstly, academies are free, state-funded schools which are charitable trusts and cannot be run for profit; secondly, academies are about enabling parents to be more engaged with their child’s education, not less, and by empowering frontline staff to run their own schools instead of detached managers in local authorities, this ensures direct accountability to parents.
Indeed, the latter point demonstrates perfectly what our academies programme has been about; giving excellent leaders and teachers the freedom to run their schools and deliver for pupils the best possible start in life. It is this autonomy that enables those delivering education to tailor provision, respond quickly to the individual need of pupils, implement more rapidly new innovations and assist the tackling of underperformance whenever it occurs.
This final point cannot be overemphasised, as in the past, both at local and national level, some schools were allowed to languish in failure, with chronic underperformance becoming entrenched and the life chances and ambitions of pupils being destroyed. This has, unfortunately, been the case for too long in Reading, with the Council having overseen an unacceptable decline in standards, as evidenced by two highly critical letters from OFSTED over the past 18 months. It has, therefore, fallen to others, myself included, to help boost educational performance and champion aspiration within the borough.
Over the past six years, Government reforms to education, of which academies have played a central part, have led to 1.4 million more children being taught in ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’ schools. These reforms, driven-forward by enthusiastic, like-minded groups, have helped boost choice and diversity in Reading East, spreading the benefits of academy status and providing leaders and teachers the freedom to raise educational standards.
Local families have warmly welcomed the academy schools which have offered much needed high quality secondary places in Reading East. Having led the effort to open the UTC and Maiden Erleigh Reading School, I'm delighted that they are oversubscribed and providing first rate teaching.
I, like the Government, want this to become the norm over the next six years, with this autonomy spread to all local schools, either as standalone academies or as part of a Multi-Academy Trust.
Since launching its proposals in the White Paper, Educational Excellence Everywhere, the Government has listened to feedback from MPs, teachers, school leaders and parents. As a result of these conversations, throughout which it has been clear that more and more schools are keen to embrace academy status, it has been decided that it is not necessary to bring forward legislation for a blanket conversion of all schools.
However, it will continue to require all underperforming schools to convert to academy status where they can benefit from the support of a strong sponsor; and legislate so that all schools within a local authority area are converted if the local authority can no longer viably support the remaining schools, or where a local authority is consistently failing to meet a minimum performance threshold and is unable to bring about meaningful school improvement.
I make no apology for demanding the very highest standards in our schools and trust that this will reassure those constituents who have contacted me about this issue over the past few months.