Primary Schools and Academy Status

Thanks to Michael Foot for this letter sent to Michael Gove MP regarding Conservative Party policy on Primary Schools and academy status  – 28th April 2009

Michael Gove Esq., MP

I note and applaud your wish to free our primary schools from the micro-management of their curriculum so that they are better able to innovate and better able to meet the differing needs of their pupils.

But I am concerned that you wish to achieve this by encouraging primary schools to become academies. My concern derives from the fact that, although academies are state-funded, they are subject to a greatly reduced degree of local and democratic accountability.

There are other ways, besides the academy route, of improving our primary schools. An appropriate root and branch reform of the National Curriculum and its assessment would represent a considerable step forward and would not involve a reduction in the local and democratic accountability that many of us value so highly.

In this context please find enclosed a copy of ‘Let Our Children Learn’ which I co-wrote a few years ago. In it you will find a description of the improved primary education that we both wish for. It is set within the story of a couple of days that we spent working with aprimary school class.

Your thoughts about ‘Let Our Children Learn’ and about my reservations concerning academy status would be appreciated. I look forward to hearing from you.

Yours sincerely
Michael Foot

P.S.’Let Our Children Learn’ was published by ‘Education Now’which has become ‘Personalised Education Now’. Do you know of ‘PEN’s work, and how many books it has published under the imprint of ‘EDucational Heretics Press’? I do commend them to you.