What a creation ...
When Doncaster's mayor and the Labour council wanted to replace a local comprehensive with a new 'academy' sponsored by fundamentalist Christians known to have the enthusiastic backing of Tony Blair, two mothers began a parents' revolt. John Harris reports on an unexpected outcomeSaturday January 15, 2005
The Guardian
Tracy Morton and Kay Wilkinson, from Conisbrough, a sometime mining community not far from Doncaster, have been engaged in a passionate fight against the government, Doncaster's elected Labour mayor and Sir Peter Vardy, a man recently described by the Times Education Supplement as a "Christian fundamentalist car dealer". Their battleground: a schools policy to which the government now pledges heartfelt allegiance, namely the replacement of "bog-standard comprehensives" with the gleaming new creations known as "academies".
In 2001, Northcliffe was inspected by Ofsted and credited with being "a good and improving school". Both that year and the next, the DfES gave Northcliffe a School Achievement Award. In 2003, the school's pupils produced the best SATs and GCSE results in its history. Three months later, however, Northcliffe was placed in Special Measures by the Schools Inspectorate - the category denotes a school that is "failing or likely to fail to give its pupils an acceptable standard of education".
"When we got the report, and we read it, we were just like, 'What school are they on about?'" said Kay. "'Are they really on about Northcliffe?'"
"It was really contradictory," said Tracy. "On the one hand, they were saying the head was providing good leadership, and he'd got the support and loyalty of his staff. But on the other hand, there were faults in his vision and forward planning. They said that the standard of teaching was too low; ridiculously low. Relative to two years previous, it just seemed to have plummeted. So it was quite a shock: it had just got its best ever GCSE results - and it was being put in Special Measures. I was stunned."
Five months after that, Doncaster's local education authority (LEA) unveiled plans to replace Northcliffe with an academy run by a charitable organisation called the Vardy Foundation. The announcement appeared in the pages of the Doncaster Free Press. "The idea was to catch the wave and say, 'You've got a failing school, but look - we're going to give you £23m and a lovely new school,'" said Tracy. "And a lot of people were like, 'Wow - wonderful.' But the paper was also canny enough to say the school would be run by evangelical Christian sponsors."
Academies, initially known as City Academies, were publicly rolled out in 2000 by David Blunkett, who aimed to use them to replace schools that were either in Special Measures or deemed to be "underachieving". Four years later, the government planted the idea at the core of its education platform for the general election, announcing plans to open up to 200. The idea is roughly this: for a fee of £2m - payable in random instalments - private benefactors are handed effective control of brand new state schools, although the taxpayer meets the lion's share of both building and running costs (which tend to involve an initial sum of at least £20m, and annual payments of around £5m). The relatively small size of their contribution has little bearing on the sponsors' clout: they can appoint the majority of the school's governors and thereby have the crucial say in the appointment of senior management, and shape the school's practices without having to worry about the national curriculum. Stranger still, academies are not bound by national agreements on teachers' pay and conditions.
Among those who had got in early was Sir Peter Vardy, a millionaire car dealer and evangelist from Durham. Under the auspices of the Thatcher government's not entirely dissimilar City Technology Colleges Programme, his Vardy Foundation, run by his brother David, had already seen to the opening of a school called Emmanuel College in Gateshead. Thanks to the City Academies initiative, September 2003 marked the arrival of a second school, the King's Academy in Middlesbrough. The following March, it was ceremonially opened by none other than Tony Blair, who was presented with a Middlesbrough FC shirt bearing his surname. Two weeks later, he enthused about his visit during prime minister's question time. "There is nothing more inspiring," he said, "particularly when one knew the old school that the King's Academy replaced, than to see the brand new buildings, the total commitment of the teachers and staff, and the pupils there eager to learn."
Both Vardy schools certainly lie some distance from the underachieving, anarchic stereotype with which the government maligns the old comprehensive ideal. Buttoned-up, disciplinarian, characterised by an almost corporate efficiency, they outwardly suggest enviable success: every year since 1996, for example, Emmanuel College's GCSE results have put it in the top 12 nonselective British state schools.
Unfortunately, that's only half the story. Vardy's Christian beliefs are shared by John Burn, sometime head of Emmanuel College and now education adviser to the Vardy Foundation, and Nigel McQuoid, principal at the King's Academy. Papers they have co-authored give a flavour of their stance: "If relativist philosophy is acceptable, then sadomasochism, bestiality and self-abuse are to be considered as wholesome activities," runs one. "It is very important that young people begin to realise that activities which are 'private and personal' often degrade oneself and are not necessarily good and acceptable." By way of clarifying the latter position, McQuoid recently told the Observer that "the Bible says clearly that homosexual activity is against God's design. I would indicate that to young folk."
Most notoriously, Vardy schools accord equal importance to both creationism and theories of evolution. According to McQuoid, though state schools are required to teach evolutionary theory, "also, schools should teach the creation theory as literally depicted in Genesis". The 300-year reign of the enlightenment apparently counts for very little: in his view, creation and evolution are both "faith positions". Blair, it should be noted, has claimed to have no problem with such a stance. In 2002, when asked by the Liberal Democrat MP Jenny Tonge if he was happy about creationism being taught alongside evolution in state schools, he replied, "I am very happy. I know that the honourable lady is referring to a school in the north-east [ie, Emmanuel College], and I think that certain reports about what it has been teaching are somewhat exaggerated. It would be very unfortunate if concerns about that issue were seen to remove the very strong incentive to ensure that we get as diverse a school system as we properly can."
After Emmanuel College and the King's Academy, the Vardy Foundation - in concert with Doncaster's mayor, Martin Winter, and the council - had proposed the opening of a third school in Thorne, a small town 20 minutes' drive from Conisbrough. Government approval of the scheme arrived in January 2004: David Miliband, the schools minister, told the Yorkshire Post he was sure it would result in "a successful and popular school [that] will do much to improve opportunities for the young people it serves".
By June 2003, Doncaster's authorities had drawn the consultation process to a close. Local people, according to a council spokesman, had "been given ample opportunity to voice any concerns". In vain, Brookes told local reporters that "these plans have been swift, some might say too swift" and sounded a note of alarm about the Vardy Foundation's motives and beliefs: "To me, they are using their £2m input to buy into children's minds." A local independent councillor named Martin Williams, however, was having none of it. "This cannot be a bad thing for the area," he said. "As far as the religious aspect goes, I don't think it will be brainwashing the children. Pupils are intelligent enough to make up their own minds at that age."
"There was a line of men in suits," said Tracy. "John Burn was there. David Vardy, Peter Vardy's brother, came to the parents' one. There were representatives of the City Academies programme from the DfES, various lawyers, and Mark Eales, the Doncaster director of education. And our local councillors would sit at the back saying very little indeed."
"If you asked a question, even if the panel said, 'I don't know', you weren't allowed to make another point," said Kay. "There wasn't any consulting," added Tracy. "Nobody asked us anything: 'What do you think of this? What would your preferred options be?' We were not consulted."
When parents asked Burn about creationism, he appeared baffled ("He just said, 'I don't know what you mean by creationism.' He asked us what it was"). At the parents' consultation meeting, Tracy quoted a speech Burn had given in which he had said that teachers at Vardy schools should be "full-time Christian workers"; he told her that it was a personal view not necessarily reflected in the Foundation's plans for Conisbrough and Denaby. "At the first parents' meeting," Kay recalled, "somebody asked David Vardy why they were contributing only £2m while the government put in so much more. And he said, 'Well, I can always take my money elsewhere. I can go and buy myself a yacht.'"
"John Burn began his answer by saying, 'Well, we think it's a sin,'" the teacher told me. "When the staff gasped, he tried to broaden his response by saying that they believed in including everyone, and they had people working in their schools of the Christian faith, other faiths, and no faith - no one would be excluded on the grounds of faith. Then the guy who had asked it was cut off by the chair of the meeting. But we had follow-up questions, distributed around the staff. They were along the lines of, 'You seem to have made up your minds about which staff members are sinful and which aren't. How far does that extend? We have Muslim teachers on our staff. What about them?' Burn said, 'I don't think that's something we need to discuss at this point.' He fudged it."
For all their resolve, I wondered how Kay and Tracy viewed the prospect of Northcliffe's closure, and their kids' induction into the world of the Vardy Foundation. "That is very frightening," said Tracy. "I can't even think about it. I can't bear the thought of my daughter sitting in the classroom being taught by someone who's trying to lace her education with these extreme kind of Christian ideologies. It horrifies me."
© John Harris, 2005. This is an edited extract from So Now Who Do We Vote For? by John Harris, to be published by Faber on January 20 at £7.99.
reposted from: Guardian
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