SO Oxfordshire County Council ’s cabinet believes that all Oxfordshire (state-maintained) schools should become academies.
Melinda Tilley, the cabinet member for education (no longer for ‘schools improvement’), is quoted (Oxford Mail, July 18) that “any school which does not wish to convert, we will support”. How? What support? Financial? Moral? Educational? Spiritual? Mrs Tilley is a devoted follower of Education Secretary Michael Gove, and should therefore know that schools which have attempted to resist academy conversion, for example in Birmingham, have been subject to a variety of central Government executive orders, which have led to the removal of resister heads, deputies and governing bodies.
And parents who oppose (have opposed, as recently at Cheney School in Oxford) conversion are dismissed as irrelevant or vexatious, or both. False promises and delusions of grandeur are not going to help the pupils of Oxfordshire against the avalanche of academisation, the founding of free school (cuckoos in the educational nest), and the creation of resource-draining university technical colleges. The abyss calls to the abyss.
BRUCE ROSS-SMITH, Bowness Avenue, Headington
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