Future Academies is a multi-academy trust based in London and Hertfordshire in England. Together with reforms to the NHS, academies were part of New Labour’s quasi-market project. Over the past decades, an increasing number of young people have entered into higher education in the UK. Academies began under New Labour, but the programme was turbocharged by Michael Gove when he was Education Secretary. In 2010, the Coalition government passed a new law – the Academies Act – which allowed higher performing schools to convert to academy status, giving them greater autonomy and freedom from local authority control. Angela Rayner’s speech at Labour Party Conference in September was mainly about academies. We Labour Party members active in education. New Labour’s evolving discourse on exclusion from school: mere political rhetoric or promoting educational inequality? status. They were set up on a small scale from 2002 under Tony Blair and, under New Labour, targeted at usually struggling inner-city comprehensives where it was thought that a radical new approach to school improvement was needed. Most academies are secondary schools (and most secondary schools are academies). Michael Gove, the new education secretary, hopes academies become "the norm" and is urging all schools in the country to apply for academy status, ... 202 are academies. The primary objective of New Labour‟s governing project is to enhance administrative efficiency and governing Importantly, in the new regime, greater emphasis is put on the … Yo Dunn. The academies programme is itself part of a wider reorganisation of secondary education. The New Labour government opened over 200 academies between 1997 and 2010. Updated the list of open academies, free schools, studio schools and UTCs and academy projects in development to include February 2021. Labour has also promoted academies as a policy for raising achievement and plans to have 200 academies by 2010. This essay focuses attention on the UK government’s Academies project, and . Most academies were formerly under-performing schools with largely working class pupils. The part-private schools, introduced by Labour and embraced by the Tories, are funded by the state but operate outside council control. Figures 1 and 2 compare the characteristics of secondary schools that were approved to open as academies under the Labour government with those that have been approved by the new government. Staff opposed it and voted to strike. She listed a number of ‘interim measures’ that a new Labour government would take. effectiveness. The explanation for New Labour‟s education strategy can then be located at the macro-political level in New Labour‟s overall governing project. Originally introduced by New Labour back in 2000 in order to support failing schools in socially deprived areas, academies have long since remained a controversial topic. Also shown are the characteristics of schools that have applied to the new government for academy status and all state secondary schools. New Labour is congruent with a broader strategy for the modification of the British state. New Labour had 203 privately-run academies in place by 2010. My school remained a local-authority comprehensive, but across the country, other schools were transforming into another New Labour initiative: academies. Labour … Abstract. It contests the version of history that underpins these claims, Where a local authority considers that there is a need for a new school in its area, it must (other than in exceptional cases) seek proposals to establish an academy in the form of a Zfree school [. 5 March 2021. Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association New Researchers/Student Conference, University of Glamorgan, 14 September 2005. Over the past few weeks, all three candidates for the Labour Party leadership have written in Tes, outlining their ambitions for the English education system.. What is remarkable is that all three adopt an anti-academy position.Sir Keir Starmer said in his Tes article: “If Dominic Cummings completes his project, we face the farce of 25,000 schools in England being accountable only to Whitehall. An Academy school in England is a state-funded school which is directly funded by the Department for Education and independent of local authority control. Because of this remit, academies would always be finite and represent a minority. The shadow education secretary, Angela Rayner, announced to the Labour party conference in Liverpool yesterday that a future Labour government will scrap the creation of new academy and free schools. 20 years after the first academy opened its doors, the model accounts for 61% of English secondaries (Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland have choosen not to roll out academisation). New academies were also established under the label of Zfree schools [. In 2013 Labour councillors called for an inquiry after the new Pimlico primary school where Nash was co-chairman of the governors appointed an unqualified teacher as headmistress ahead of its opening with 60 pupils in September 2013. The subsequent Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition gov-ernment and Conservative governments rapidly expanded and reformulated the programme so that by 1 July 2016, 5,302 schools were academies while 1,061 were on the way to becoming one (DfE, 2016). Labour conference: No new free schools or academies, Angela Rayner pledges ... Labour would "immediately" end the government's academy and free … However justified Blair and his supporters may be in mounting a defence of New Labour on those grounds, this misses the point at hand. Under Labour, the academies programme was focused narrowly on transforming "failing" schools in deprived neighbourhoods. new style academies, as described in the 2010 Academies Act (DfE, 2010a), and how the Coalition’s academies compare to Labour’s Academies both in aims and practicalities. Thirty of Labour's academies are all-through; before academies, there were virtually no all-through state schools. Their answer — an injunction stopping the strike. But although the Labour government hugely talked up its academies programme, there were only around 200 of them – 1% of all English schools – by the time it left office in 2010. It is claimed that academy status will raise the achievement of working class pupils. 1 talking about this. The growth of academies was supported by both the Tories and Blair's 'New Labour'. Labour will today call for all state schools to be given some of the same freedoms as academies and free schools. It’s a matter of recorded fact that overall income inequality grew under New Labour. Yet, despite this growth, the UK still has a low ranking in international comparisons for the rate of participation in post-compulsory education.Furthermore, young people from disadvantaged backgrounds are greatly underrepresented. Under the current coalition, however, all schools - primary and secondary, good and bad, rich and poor - are supposed to become academies and compete with each other. It represented a conscious attempt to create a market of competing chains of schools, making it easier to slash education spending, especially on central services previously provided by local authorities, and to undermine national pay and conditions for school staff. At various points within the article we draw on interviews conducted in autumn 2010 Academies and New Labour’s version of history Abstract This essay focuses attention on the UK government’s Academies project, and more specifically on the claims that have been made for the project by its apologists. Aimed especially at giving a boost to Ofsted-type targets in disadvantaged areas, they signally failed to make substantial improvements and gobbled up a disproportionate amount of financial resources. Academies were originally set up by New Labour to give special measures to failing schools in order to help them improve. Labour says there are no contradictions between the Co-op's plans and its proposed academy reforms - and that under a different structure it will be able to sponsor new schools. One of the first academies was nearby to me — Willesden High School was slated to be demolished and a brand spanking new academy built on the site. We wish to be part of a network which campaigns to ensure that … interests cover labour and education economics and policy. They include no new free schools, and local authorities to be responsible for admissions and able to open new … Academies and New Labour’s version of history . The creation of new academies and free schools could be scrapped by a future Labour government, Angela Rayner has said. That was left to Blair’s New Labour. Although a number of new Labour‐type ‘sponsored’ academies have opened since, more than 80 per cent of the expansion of the academy sector has happened through coalition‐type ‘converters’. 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