EVALUATING ACADEMIES

That this House is concerned at the enormous potential expenditure in taking the academy programme to 400 schools with its heavy subsidies to miscellaneous private sponsors provided on the basis of unproven, possibly unjustified, assumptions about resulting improvements to education in disadvantaged areas; urges the establishment of an independent inquiry to evaluate the performance of academies, compared to modernised state schools, to assess whether any improvements are more than a temporary Hawthorne effect, to assess the effects of academies on neighbouring schools, and the overall performance of the education authority, to examine the value for money of academies as opposed to spending the same sums on secondary schools more generally, and to look at ways to merge the two systems, academies and local authority schools, in order to ensure the unified development of the system and avoid further divisions in public education.