Sir – Fran Bardsley’s piece on Cherwell School’s possible conversion to academy status (Report, December 1) reflects the perfectly reasonable view of Cherwell headteacher Paul James and chairman of governors Kirsten Robinson that potential financial gains are “the key reasons” for conversion to be considered and that, post-conversion, “little would change” at the school.

As Cherwell parents, my wife and I have received extensive consultation documents which also stress potential financial gain, at least for three years, which might in the short-term go at least some way to mitigate (long-term?) declines in national educational funding; and perhaps any changes per conversion will in the short-term be marginal.

However, the biochemistry of any school which converts to academy status will be altered forever in one extremely significant respect, through a school’s new ‘contract’ with the Secretary of State and central government.

At the moment all seems and sounds plausible, with release from what are already tenuous links with Oxfordshire County Council and so greater autonomy in how Cherwell is governed and can develop. Good so far. What must remain to be seen is how Michael Gove and his successors choose to exercise their direct and powerful lines to academies and their cognates, free schools, where a school’s range of choices over the curriculum and how it’s delivered, for example, could be narrowed or prescribed; where, indeed, autonomy could prove illusory.

For no one should doubt that the current government’s ambition to create ‘new style’ academies and free schools is as much political (listen to David Cameron) as educational or social, with the potential for what former Cherwell head Martin Roberts, in his history of the school, called “the Cherwell experiment” to be swept down the rocks and rapids of reckless ideology.

There are risks for any school now contemplating academy conversion; how great these risks could be remains unknown, so care and caution should be the order of the day.

Bruce Ross-Smith, Headington