DO BLAIR'S ACADEMIES ACTUALLY WORK?

Since the first city academy was conceived in the mind of the Prime Minister's policy advisors, there has been a good deal more heat than light in the debate about this divisive scheme.
According to the caricature, academies are run by religious fundamentalist car dealers who force children to study Creationism and flog their dodgy old bangers in the staff room.
Recent media coverage, based on Ofsted reports and league tables, also paint a picture of the schools as continuing failures.
Poor comps were closed down and replaced with shiny glass “palaces” but the results remain just as awful as before.
Yet some of the schools have been improving, as the latest tables show.
Last year, nine academies out of the 11 which were reporting national curriculum test results for 14 year-olds were in the table of the worst 200 schools in the country.
But this year the figure fell to seven - and there were more academies reporting their test scores this time.League tables will only ever tell part of the story.
A succession of inspectors' reports has also suggested that many academies are showing signs of improvement.
The reports also revealed that several academies still had serious problems in key areas, and, crucially, exam results remain exceptionally low.
When Ruth Kelly is asked why she won't evaluate the academies which are already open before pressing on with creating 200 at a cost of £5 billion, she replies that children in the poorest areas just can’t afford to wait.
But with results showing some signs of improvement in many academies (ministers claim by three times the average rate of other schools) the question may soon become not whether the programme works, but whether it is working fast enough.

WHERE ARE THE REVOLUTIONARIES?

Where did they go? I thought you had them? They must be around here some place...
Not so much as a hint.
Tony Blair's plans for a brave new breed of independent "trust schools" vanished without trace from the Education and Inspections Bill when it was finally published on Tuesday. Or the phrase "trust schools" did at any rate.
The Government insisted this did not mean that trust schools had been abandoned. The term is simply a way of re-branding an existing type of school.
You don't need new laws to create trust schools. A trust school is "a foundation school with a foundation", the Department for Education and Skills said. There are dozens of these already up and running.
At Downing Street on Monday, the Prime Minister invited a few journalists round to explain to the world why everyone should back his Bill.
We asked him whether he could name any really new powers that trust schools will have which are not already available to schools. He couldn't. All he said was that the powers which some schools have now will be made available to all those who want them.
There had been "evolutionary" change over recent years, resulting in things like foundation schools and academies with the kinds of freedoms over their own affairs he was hoping to give trust schools.
But the "revolutionary" bit will come by giving all schools the chance to have this autonomy and the opportunity to enter a partnership with a business or university "as of right", he said.
We also asked him how many trust schools he imagined joining this "revolution". Neither Mr Blair nor Ruth Kelly wanted to put a figure on it.
Given that trust status is only going to be an option for existing schools, not a compulsion, and given that there are very few new schools opening every year, you can begin to see why.