You reported on Thursday that Oxford Spires Academy was to lay off 16 staff due to £500,000 spending cuts.

We now see clearly what happens to a school, which was previously funded directly by the local authority and democratically accountable to the community, when it is run by a non-accountable body of appointed trustees, ie CfBT.

According to Philip Graf, chair of the trustees of CfBT Education Trust, the organisation has “an annual income of more than £150m”. The trust, according to its website, is a not-for-profit education company, with an annual turnover exceeding £100m.

CfBT is, nevertheless, still allowed to make a financial gain from the educational services it provides.

In its most recent annual report and accounts, this amounted to nearly £5.5m. Among its 2,500 staff (including the support staff and teachers at Spires), 74 earned annual salaries of more than £60,000 and four of them are at Spires.

In the past, a school could have called upon the local authority for direct support and assistance in order to protect resources and staffing, but as an academy this is not possible. The whims and vagaries of the free market are now the determining forces.

Those who suffer in the first instance through redundancy are the staff. As a consequence, the next group to suffer will be the students.

In an educational system truly concerned to meet the needs of every young person, a situation of low student and high staff numbers would be welcomed, in order that every individual pupil would receive the maximum amount of individual attention possible.

But in a market-led system this is out of the question.

As a retired teacher and former member of the NUT national executive (2008-2012), I urge all the unions representing support staff, the most immediately at risk, and the teaching staff, to oppose these proposed redundancies through a united campaign of industrial action.

DR CHRIS BLAKEY, Warneford Road, Oxford