When the school where I taught for 23 years went “grant-maintained” in the early 1990s, I had an uneasy feeling that it was putting children in charge of the tuck shop (Editorial, 14 March). The Blair government’s conversion of grant-maintained schools into foundation schools, largely independent of the democratically accountable local education authorities (LEAs), and the conversion under subsequent governments of most schools to academies, largely independent of the LEA (unless, of course, they were deemed to be failing), was just another example of casting around for alternative solutions instead of making a perfectly adequate model work properly.
It has now ended up with so-called multi-academy trusts, with superheads/CEOs ultimately accountable to central government in what are, to all intents and purposes, privatised LEAs. We need to scrap all such unaccountable organisations and return state schools to LEA control, whose sole purpose should be to provide schools for the local community.
John Marriott
Lincoln
