One freezing night this past January, 150 people packed into a church hall in the Hertfordshire town of Stevenage, some 30 miles north of London. Students, teachers, support staff, parents and grandparents had come to support their community’s secondary school against the Conservative government’s plan to hand control to a super-wealthy couple.
A young man called Dylan Jones, the school’s “head student”, stood up to speak. “I have been part of the school since 2012,” he said. “It’s the best it’s ever been. It’s just a shame that those who have not had the same opportunity as me to see every student, every class, and those who have not seen us for the true community that we are, have decided that they can push us around because we do not have a voice.”
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In England today almost 9,000 schools with more than 4 million pupils operate outside of their democratically-accountable local authorities. These schools are state-funded but independent of local control. The charitable trusts that run them are accountable only to the Secretary of State for Education, not to local people. They are, at least for now, “not for profit”. Here, we’re focussing on the 189 schools with more than 100,000 students that are controlled by wealthy businessmen and Conservative party donors mostly, through private contracts agreed with central government as part of the “academies” scheme.
