Seeking to marginalise outside voices is a mistake for the academies policy –and for the teaching profession as a whole

I dipped into a discussion on Facebook this morning, hosted by a local councillor for a town which has seen the academies policy become a live debating issue.

The town is St Neots, in Cambridgeshire, whose only two state secondary schools are run by the same academy trust, Astrea, which is based 100 miles away in Sheffield, and which has generated large amounts of controversy over the past couple of years.

Longsands, the bigger of the two schools, has seen a large exodus of employees over the past 18 months. It lost nine teachers last Christmas, with the National Education Union estimating that a third of its staff departed over a one-year period. Ernulf, the other secondary in the town, has not been immune to controversy, either. Staff unhappiness has sometimes centred on the often highly-standardised teaching and behaviour management approaches mandated by the trust. NEU members at Longsands held two days of strikes in the summer term.

At a pre-election hustings in June, none of the six prospective parliamentary candidates in attendance appeared unequivocally supportive either of the academies system as a whole, or of Astrea’s running of the schools specifically, with plenty of criticism on display. This, presumably, was based on the local knowledge, in the town, of the effects of the trust on the schools.

At Longsands’ inspection in February, nearly nine out of 10 parents who registered their opinion sadly said they would not recommend the school to others. Nearly half of staff who were surveyed by Ofsted said it had got worse since its last inspection, which had rated it “requires improvement”. Yet Ofsted upgraded the school’s rating to “good”.