So-called "free schools" in England are not "free" at all. They are part of a world-wide assault on schooling and on organised labour in education. _____
Morning Star.png A Failed Experiment Editorial, The Morning Star, London, 2 August 2016 The sorry tale of free school fraudster Sajid Hussain Raza is drawing to its conclusion. The founder of Kings Science Academy in Bradford — now Dixon Kings Academy — faces a possible jail sentence alongside two former colleagues after being found guilty of pocketing Department for Education grants to the tune of around £150,000. The news ought to be an embarrassment for the government. Kings Science Academy was not just any school: it was among the very first free schools to be established. David Cameron personally visited the school, lavishing it with praise, in 2012, and over recent weeks the courts have heard that Raza exploited his connection to former education secretary Michael Gove, threatening to call him when challenged over accounting details by a civil servant. The ex-principal’s conviction is unlikely to make waves now. The government has changed: with Cameron and Gove both gone, a direct link to serving ministers is severed. It’s also old news: evidence of fraud by the academy’s founders was mounting three years ago. Suspicious delays in Gove’s response to reports of wrongdoing, the Department for Education’s (DfE) failure to release its internal report into “financial mismanagement” until a copy was leaked to Newsnight and conflicting reports as to why it took so long to report anything to West Yorkshire Police were raked over in Parliament in 2014. Brazen crook Theresa May’s administration will seek to present this as an anomaly, one bad apple in the free schools orchard. May is already cultivating an image as a more cautious leader than her predecessor — refusing to sign off on the nuclear plant deal at Hinkley Point, for example. Proof that Cameron and Gove were enthusiastic cheerleaders for a brazen crook can be passed off as the result of their personal character flaws. The wiser May, the government will imply, would not be so easily taken in. But that would be to misread the significance of the Raza case. Fundamental problem Too many of the issues at Kings Science Academy illustrate the fundamental problem with the entire free schools project. Like all free schools, the academy was not subject to local democratic oversight — and was plagued by nepotism from the start, with the DfE’s report revealing that relatives of the principal were appointed to key positions. Conflicts of interest abounded, with one of the patrons, senior Conservative Alan Lewis, renting the site to the school for £296,000 a year, a sum MPs on the public accounts committee later heard was around three times the market rate for the area. The DfE and the Education Funding Agency came under fire for their lack of oversight. But free schools are practically designed to be a cash cow for the unscrupulous. It may still be illegal for the schools themselves to be run for a profit, although this is a principle top Tories have repeatedly hinted is up for sale. Outsourcing But many schools have found, after conversion to academy or free school status, that they are required to outsource provision of key services — cooking, cleaning, maintenance. An Observer investigation published last month found evidence that schools at two academy chains were commissioning services from firms owned by the same people who ran the chains. Free schools have never lived up to the hype. Five years after Gove’s “revolution” began, there remains no evidence that they perform any better than local authority-run schools. Sectoral bargaining agreements attacked Their right to set their own pay and conditions for staff strikes at the heart of sectoral bargaining agreements and helps to fragment and marketise our education system. And they are clearly a magnet for shady businessmen who see an opportunity to fill their boots with public money. It’s time we put a stop to this wretched experiment. From: http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-57cb-A-failed-experiment#.V6BLh_l9601 __________ Information from ESET NOD32 Antivirus, version of virus signature database 13895 (20160802) __________ The message was checked by ESET NOD32 Antivirus. http://www.eset.com -- -- You are subscribed. This footer can help you. Please POST your comments to [email protected] or reply to this message. You can visit the group WEB SITE at http://groups.google.com/group/yclsa-eom-forum for different delivery options, pages, files and membership. To UNSUBSCRIBE, please email [email protected] . You don't have to put anything in the "Subject:" field. You don't have to put anything in the message part. 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