IWW Education Workers help block 8 Academies in Birmingham
IWW
Education Workers were recently at the forefront of raising awareness
about issues surrounding the wiping out of budget deficits of
newly-converted academies. These issues have led to the City Council’s decision to put the creation of 8 academies on hold.
If the original plans had been allowed to stand, £1.3 million of
taxpayers’ money, which was owed to the council by the schools, would
have been written off with the new academies starting with a financial
clean slate. This would have meant the people of Birmingham subsidising
schools which are no longer accountable to the local community and which
are often run by private organisations which have little, if any, stake
in the areas in which their schools are based.
One
related issue which has not been raised so far concerns redundancies in
schools about to become academies. At least one of the 8 proposed
academies has made redundancies before conversion in order to pay off
its current deficit over a number of years and achieve a balanced
budget. When a local authority school, this money would have been paid
back to the Council but, once a school becomes an academy ‘independent’
of local authority control, this would no longer be the case. Thus, you
could have the situation where not only money which is owed to the
Council is lost, but also council taxpayers pay for the costs of
redundancies. This would then allow new academies to run a budget
surplus in their first year without having to do anything; a massive
transfer of money from public to private hands. It is a scandal if these
redundancies have been rushed through before conversion so that the
financial burden falls on the local taxpayer, rather than the new
academy.
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