Academies - am I right to be worried?

I'll be honest and admit that I'm not sure about academies. I have a few worries.

One is about how it is being rushed through. I suspect the media are playing a but of a political game with this, but there is no doubt that this is being rushed for September. I'm slightly curious as to what the big rush is.

I'm also concerned for my local area (where I live, more than where I teach). We have 3 schools in town. 2 are officially outstanding, and well established. The third is offically satisfactory, with good featrues, and improving, as well as relatively new. It was also inspected quite early under the new framework, when they were being tougher.

It's the third school I'm worried for. It's the one my daughters ought to go to, asI'd like them to go to the most local school. If the other 2 become academies, and they do not, it is not going to do their reputation any good, and so they will continue to be the third choice for many in town.

With both these point in mind I sent a tweet to my local MP - I also RT'ed it under ukedchat, you may have seen it. I actually got a reply, which I'm impressed by, but am not sure where to go from here.

UKEdchat - trying to bring more into the fold.

Below is the text of an email I've sent to my team and SLT. It's an attempt to get more people from school involved.

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Dear all,

No Monday Notes proper this week – as I said last week, that was the last of the year. There are however, a couple of things I want to mention going forward into the holiday.

There was an online debate last Thursday night called UKEdchat. It’s every Thursday night (this was the 3rd). This week was about creativity, and what it means, and how we can encourage it. It threw up a few interesting ideas.

Firstly, there was some discussion about exercise books. Why do we use them? What’s the point, and whose benefit is it for? Now I’m not about the suggest that we don’t use books (although we seem to get through an awful lot), but maybe we need to look at how we use them. Most students (in my opinion) don’t ever look back at their stuff, and that’s something to look at. This is leading to this link… http://kn.open.ac.uk/public/document.cfm?docid=12916 which is a research document about Learning Journals. I’d like to consider next year how we could use something like this.

Also looking at creativity, the same person who wrote the above research paper blogged “creativity in the maths classroom”. It’s at http://mainlyschool.blogspot.com/2010/07/creative-maths-classrooms.html and makes for quite an interesting read, and there are things I want to try (but probably not this week).

People’s summaries after the event can be found at http://ukedchat.wordpress.com/2010/07/17/participants-reflections-from-15072010/ .

Each week a different person shortlists 5 question’s and it polled. The poll is at http://twtpoll.com/pv56x8 . This Thursday’s promises to be interesting. Leading the vote (as I write this) is How do we make IWB’s truly interactive. As you can imagine I’ve got a few ideas to contribute, and look forward to learning more. Second place (currently) is “How do we encourage student ownership of their learning”, also something I’d like to discuss, so it looks to be a good evening either way. I’m certainly planning to take part fully.

If you want to know how to either lurk, or to take part fully, give me a shout. It’s well worth it!


Chris