Author Archives: Peter Downes

Opinion: Academies overspend revealed!

By Peter Downes | Fri 22nd July 2011 - 3:51 pm

Figures in a Government consultation paper on the funding of academies have revealed that Michael Gove’s policy of getting schools to convert to academies is expected to cost nearly £600 million more than planned over the two year period 2011 – 2013.
 
This confirms what Lib Dem activists have been saying for some time i.e. that the programme for converting schools to academies is costly and unsustainable, as well as being divisive and unfair.
 
When a school decides to leave its Local Authority (LA)  and become ‘independent’ (i.e. dependent on central government!), in addition to its standard funding it gets an …

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Posted in Op-eds | Tagged and | 18 Comments

Opinion: The coalition’s education policies are seriously flawed

By Peter Downes | Sun 6th June 2010 - 2:45 pm

Peter Downes, a former comprehensive school head-teacher and current Liberal Democrat councillor, examines the new coalition government’s education policies …

1. While it is encouraging to see that the Lib Dem case for a ‘pupil premium’ has been accepted as a policy by the coalition, how this will operate is unclear. The foreword to the Coalition Agreement stated:

extra money following the poorest pupils so that they, at last, get to go to the best schools, not the worst.’

Does it mean:

    a) that the extra money to be allocated to pupils who are considered poor because they are on Free School

…

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Posted in Op-eds | 52 Comments
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