Acadamies Failing The Vulnerable

I've never been fond of the City Academy system. Giving control of our children's future to educational trusts form from religious nutters and businessmen leaves a knot in my stomach.

Says the BBC:

"..based on 24 early academies shows that the proportion of pupils entitled to free schools meals is down by seven percentage points to 35%.

This is precisely what all of the naysayers (me included) have been shouting for years: to mainly deaf ears across all three major parties.

City Academies are slowly but surely changing our education landscape: and not for the better.

There's a big difference between a rich family and a poor one - mobility. Pushy parents tend to come from more wealthy families - the sort of people who can afford to move into the catchment areas near to Academies as they appear. Little wonder these people are pushing the deprived kids out - and ironically, those same kids are left to go to the run-down schools whose funding has been spent on the Academy.

Rather than creating opportunity for the deprived, this is actually creating a very real class gap in educational opportunity between the haves and the have nots.

This experiment needs a non-partisan, critical examination now and it needs to be halted before it can't be reversed. I'm not holding my breath though.