not to mention, and to my utter horror, all schools in England will be turned into academies, and in doing so pass out of public hands into private ownership. A naked landgrab. Fucking disgusting.
Is anything wrong with it? I don't get it, they still get government funding & don't need to get sponsors even though they can? The issue is that the assets are transferred to these trusts and they don't follow the local education authority..
The hoped-for good outcome is that they'll be run by competent technocrats who will do a good job while being insulated from politics. The worried-about bad outcome is that entities with no democratic oversight can end up captured by their administrators, and drift increasingly away from the needs/wants of the local population.
In practice, the national government retains some kind of oversight of UK academies, in part because it controls most of their budget. So they can't completely go off into doing whatever they want. But local government no longer does. So another way of looking at it is that the move represents a centralization of educational oversight, removing oversight power from local government authorities and investing it in the national Department for Education instead. In my personal opinion that's the wrong direction; I'd rather have schools be more locally run.
if it were some product falling through that cracks, who the hell would care, but that's some kids future.
I spoke to a couple of brit teachers and they say it lets them use their own teaching ideas & get more teachers (apparently no one wants to be a teacher).
So i'm guessing it can improve schools dramatically as well as make them worse. It can improve them, though.