Academies

Academies are in the news today - so are they going to transform lifechances and offer a route to social mobility for students from inner cities or are they just ‘reproducing labour’ - the sort of labour needed for an economy which now needs far fewer manual jobs and has a bigger service sector?

I won’t necessarily answer this question for you, but I can provide some food for thought. Today I visited the RSA Academy - an academy school in Tipton in the West Midlands (near Wolverhampton). I haven’t got any exam figures for you (not yet, may get some later), but I was told that students from the school do OK, but aren’t getting the highest grades - certainly for AS and A levels - that we hear about all the time on the news.

The RSA Academy though, is pioneering what it see’s as a radical new curriculum. The ‘Opening Minds’ curriculum puts the emphasis on skills and competences first, and then fits them into subjects. The school also operates a 5 term year with 2 weeks holiday between each term and four weeks off for the summer. And - there are only two lessons a day - but they are 3 hours long.

I was rather surprised by that last detail - the idea that students who aren’t necessarily the most academic would enjoy 3 hour lessons struck me as surprising, to say the least. But staff told me that students did enjoy these sessions - because they get to finish things off. The most students had said was to ask for a half hour cut - and that was just a few voices anyway.

One other thing which struck me from my conversations: we seem to have large numbers of people/students in Britain who find the culture of schools and education - to be ‘alien’ to them. They aren’t familiar with the ways of speaking, the values, and the attitudes, which education values - and this is the culture of the educated upper middle classes. This, as well as economic inequality, puts them at a disadvantage. In a way, they help increase the chances that they will ‘fail’ by ‘opting out’ - seeing education as ‘weird’, or ‘boring’ and most definately something that is ‘not for them’.

So, here is my question for you all:

1. Do you think changes of the sort outlined above will be sufficient - if carried out in enough schools up and down the country - to make the education system fairer?

See also this link for the RSA and the Opening Minds project.