City Academies are new schools funded directly by the government with around 20% of the capital outlay provided by a private sponsor. It might be a voluntary organization, a charity or most likely a private company, although businesses should not apparently expect any sort of profit from their investment. ‘Hard to imagine…’ we thought, ‘…so what’s the catch?’ Well for only a fifth of the initial start up costs, the sponsors run the school for evermore. They have a majority on the governing body meaning that everything from the recruiting of the head downwards is in the gift of the head of the company. And if the school fails, who knows? Maybe that private company might make a claim on the site.

Ironically no business would ever surrender majority control to someone paying only one fifth of their original start up costs. Perhaps we should buy 20% of the shares in the sponsor company and argue that this gives us the right to decide company policy and thereby control of our kid’s school. But the proposed Lambeth City Academy doesn’t even have a backer yet. So here’s a crazy idea for a sponsor; what about the local education authority? City Academies are supposed ‘serve the local community’ so what better sponsor than an organisation such as the council that the community itself elects? Of course as the sponsor they might want their name on the school, so we would have to call it ‘A local education authority school’ or something bizarre like that. And you’d have to ask the council’s education officers if any of them knew anything about running schools, but my bet is that you’d find more individuals who were informed about education than you would on the average board of company directors. Imagine it; for only £2 million, (roughly the amount of money jammed in the lockers at the local swimming pool) Lambeth would have its own new school which would thereafter be funded by central government.

I rang the city academy unit at the DFES who were rather bemused by this novel proposal. No one had suggested anything like this before, but the immediate reaction was that it would not be appropriate because local authority money was similar to government money and the whole point of City Academies was that there was financial input from outside the public sector. But I still think it’s a good idea if only to test whether the public and private sectors are really competing on a level playing field. Or maybe our hopes rest on there being some rich philanthropist out there who will give our campaign committee £2 million so that we can turn ourselves into a charity and run the school ourselves.

Next >>