As schools change over to academy status, there are some staff who do not make the transition. This can be for a number of reasons. In some regions, several schools are turned into on academy, leading to excess teachers in certain subjects.
In Westminster, London, costs of paying redundancies have been more than £1 million. The Times Education Supplement claims that in three others, Liverpool, Newcastle upon Tyne and Sandwell in the West Midlands - the bill has topped £500,000.
Pete Jackson, of the Anti Academies Alliance, said: "It's quite outrageous that local councils are expected to foot the bill for redundancies when perfectly good teachers are no longer needed because schools are turned into academies. Not only do we lose our schools but we have to pay for the privilege."
The extortionate costs have led some councils to think about halting their academy programmes. Some feel that the goalposts have been moved as the bill for redundancies have been placed at their door. Many did not realise that, as former employers, local authorities would be expected to pay some of the redundancy costs.
But others have also had to foot the bill. In some cases, academies themselves have had to pay off teachers, and government itself has also had to pay some of the bill for getting rid of staff. In Westminster, £1,293,217 was paid out by the local authority to 54 staff when North Westminster Community School was replaced in 2006 by Westminster Academy.
While some teachers have lost their jobs as a result of schools changing over the academy status, those who have retained their jobs are finding that they are also losing out. In Carlisle, three schools: St Aidan's, Morton, and North Cumbria Technology College merged to create two academies, leading to the loss of 49 jobs - 15 of which were teaching posts.
Because of falling pupil numbers, academy bosses have vowed to boost standards in the two schools. In order to achieve this, they have introduced a new pay scheme that includes bonuses linked to performance and attendance records. A new £25,000 basic salary has been introduced for teachers - leading to fears that more experienced staff could lose anything up to £10,000 a year, as extra pay will depend on the performance of individual teachers, and on their attendance record.
Alan Rutter, of the National Union of Teachers (NUT), said: "To be quite honest, we're horrified at these proposals. What we're being told is that staff will be put on to ‘spot salaries,' so they won't get increments each year.
"One of our first concerns when the academies were first proposed was that they would be paying over the odds for teachers and stripping out all the quality staff from other schools, but it seems the opposite is happening.
"On the face of it, they seem to be offering such a poor financial deal, with so many strings and rigorous performance management elements for bonus payments, that it's hard to see why anyone would want to work there."
Academies are becoming so unpopular in some quarters that teachers are striking, and opposers have organized themselves into an Anti Academies Alliance (antiacademies.org.uk) to lobby against the changes.
The Anti Academies Alliance motion is as follows: "We oppose the creation of Academies and Trust schools because:
- They are not democratically accountable. The sponsor appoints the majority of governors and controls the school's curriculum. Ownership of the schools buildings and grounds are transferred to the private sponsor. They break up the family of local schools.
- They create more selection. Academies and Trust schools set their own admissions policy. As former Secretary of State for Education Estelle Morris put it, "Show me a school which has changed its admissions policy to attract more children from poor backgrounds with uncooperative parents."
- They reinforce competition based on school league tables. This will further divide schools into winners and losers, and add to the segregation of students on the basis of race and class.
- Academies are outside the maintained sector of schools and so they are not bound by education law that protects the rights of students and parents.
- Academies also set their own pay and conditions outside of national frameworks."
Only last month, a parent in Camden, North London challenged the right of councils and the government to name a preferred bidder for an academy.
Gillian Chandler claimed that the government was going back on its promise to hold tenders for new school sponsors by naming UCL as its preferred bidder. She went further to accuse the academy programme of breaching European law, which should require all new contracts to be open to bids from any EU company.
Chandler and her band of campaigners lost the case as the government argued successfully that European laws didn't apply because the schools are not for profit. But feelings are still running high, and the group my appeal.
Kevin Courtney (Branch secretary of Camden NUT, Vice President of SERTUC and trades union liaison officer for the Anti Academies Alliance) said: "The council and Andrew Adonis have together undermined the will of parliament - by using the undemocratic 'preferred bidder route'.
"We want UCL to share their expertise with all Camden schools and not just the chosen few in their school, which is situated on one of the most exclusive streets in London. We fear that the school will cream off the brightest students and this will damage other Camden schools and therefore have a negative effect on education overall."
Is the government's dream of a fairer education system beginning to come apart at the seams? Or is it a case that you can't make omelettes without breaking eggs? Cllr Andrew Mennear, Camden council believes that criticism of the scheme is detracting from the positives that academies can bring to the area.
"Camden has a recognised need for eight additional forms of secondary-school entry in the borough. The Building Schools for the Future programme is an investment that will modernise all our schools for the benefit of our children and young people," he said.
"We recognise that the claimant may still appeal against this judgment. We wish now to move forward, and urge them to bear in mind Camden's need to invest in our schools and the many local families who struggle to find places for their children, and not to use Camden's BSF programme as a way to strike out at national education policy," he added.
So who are the true winners of the academy scheme? The government says it is the students. The modern academies have more pupils on free school meals, from ethnic minorities and for whom English is not their first language than other schools. The detractors point out that the number of pupils on free school meals has fallen sharply. The schools too are benefiting from the facelift that the academy funds will bring them - some to such an extent that they can't afford not to become academies.
But the true test will be whether academies bring better results. The government's first report on the subject claimed a 20 per cent improvement. "Claims of a 20 percentage point improvement in results at age 16 depend upon a spurious equivalence of a GNVQ (Intermediate) pass to 4 A*-C grades," responded The Anti Academy Alliance. Unfortunately, it seems that only time will tell with Labour's vision for the schools of the future will turn out to be a winning or a losing one.
