‘ALL ACADEMIES must be handed back to local council control’, Hank Roberts past national president of ATL said yesterday.
He was speaking after Tory Education Minister Nicky Morgan’s announcement that ‘failing’ academies will face being taken over by another academy chain. Roberts added: ‘Failing academies get passed on to academy chains, failing chains get passed on to who? other chains?
‘The answer quite clearly is this: Academies were wrongfully handed over to religious groups, hedge funds, spivs and charletans. They must be immediately returned back to the taxpayers and local authorities and the elected school governors who ran them and should be running them now.’
Meanwhile teachers manned a defiant NUT union picket line outside The Tech City college in Islington yesterday, after a unanimous vote for strike action against ‘intolerable working conditions’ at the academy.
The new owner of academy chain ‘Aspirations’, refused to respond to the teachers complaints of ‘scapegoating, bullying and severe stress’. Teachers said that they were working in intensely stressful conditions due to their lessons being under constant observations.
The strikers condemned outrageous Ofsted claims that the seven teachers, out of a total of 18, who resigned this term were ‘weren’t good enough at their jobs’. Another third of staff members were denied a due pay increase by the college this summer because ‘their teaching performance was not good enough’, accusations rejected as scapegoating by the union.
A spokeswoman, who declined to publish her name to avoid victimisation, told News Line that, ‘We are all out today to protest about our conditions of employment. We want union standard pay policies and observations policies.
‘Unlimited observations have a knock on effect with unlimited paper and teaching folder checks. We’re out two days this week and another three next week,’ she added.
