By Rachel Wood
The Eastside Arts Academy was modelled on the successful BRIT school in South London, pictured above.
Long serving schools minister, Andrew Adonis, has controversially been ousted from his post in Gordon Brown’s cabinet reshuffle.
Since becoming an advisor to former Prime Minister Tony Blair ten years ago, Lord Adonis has pushed for greater diversity in the state system through special ‘academies’ and results-raising initiatives. See background piece below.
Academies aimed to revolutionise educational performance in disadvantaged areas in England. They were partly funded by external businesses to curtail the high costs to the government’s budget, and were also granted greater independence.
Eastside Arts Academy
Adonis was adamant these new academies would be “sponsored by successful individuals, trusts and educational organisations” in order to raise the standards and aspirations of the young people involved. The Eastside Arts Academy in Birmingham, for example, was sponsored by Ormiston Trust and modelled on the highly successful BRIT School in South London.
PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP was commissioned by the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) to conduct an independent five year evaluation of the Academies programme. The latest annual report last year, showed the academies as significantly contributing to educational programmes. The report also revealed above-average improvements in GCSE results.
Despite these developments, Lord Adonis’s role has been switched to Minister of Transport, a role with which, political writer, Bill Jones, feels, Adonis has “no familiarity whatsoever, or indeed, affinity”.
Academies’s future
The DCSF claim that the government are still committed to building 400 new academies in the next four years. But oppositional parties strongly suspect that it was Schools Secretary Ed Balls who forced Lord Adonis out, largely due to his sceptism of the academies programme.
Liberal Democrats Children’s Spokesman, David Laws, laments what he sees to be the end of this educational reform: “The real losers here will be thousands of children in some of the poorest parts of the country who were being targeted by the academies programme.”
Click here to read about Lord Adonis’s contribution as schools minister.
Click here to go to my blog.
(Image courtesy of Wikipedia)
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