Like Peter Wilby (Education profile, 8 December), I like Lucy Powell, the new but apparently not New Labour shadow education secretary. I think she is smart enough to do good things. But to claim “I have two staff working for me. I haven’t got the resource to look at some of these big issues’’ risks missing two big opportunities. I don’t know all the best technical answers to testing, accountability, structures and so on, but I do know that many teachers and parents will want credible arguments before they campaign or vote in important local, city and national elections just 20 weeks ahead in May. So harnessing the available resources from supportive people who can offer help would make sense.
One example would be the well-informed campaigner for state education Fiona Millar, whose column on the opposite page showed there is detailed, principled and practical knowledge to hand to help implement overall directions from leadership and conference processes. If John McDonnell can have international expert economic advice, I hope Lucy Powell can also rapidly gather the best brains in the wider movement to open up and sharpen some smart thinking.
Clive Needle
Rowhedge, Essex
• People are rightly banging on about privatisation in the NHS, but a much greater privatisation of English schools is unfolding largely beneath the radar. In a little reported feature of his autumn statement (Report, 27 November), George Osborne is providing extra money for the conversion of state schools to academies. Taken alongside David Cameron’s throwaway remark to the Tory conference that “local authorities running schools is a thing of the past”, it is now clear that the government intends to take councils wholly out of education.
Every academy must now belong to a chain, numbers of which are appearing all over the place. They are normally private firms looking for profit, with highly paid chief executives and other non-teaching senior managers, all paid for by government subvention. It is they, not the state, which own school buildings, manage what goes on in them and pay teachers. They lack any form of democratic accountability. This commercialisation is a huge and unwelcome change, constitutional as well as educational, but it is going largely unremarked. Where do the teaching unions and the Labour party stand? And why have we not heard from the Local Government Association, the guardian of authorities’ rights and responsibilities?
Robin Wendt
Chester
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