Green Party councillors on Oxfordshire County Council will be presenting a motion to the County Council meeting later in April, to oppose further expansion of Academy and free schools.
Councillor David Williams, leader of the Green Group on the County Council explains why:
“Our County Council should be noting with dismay the continued expansion of the Academy and Free Schools programme, endorsed in the 2015 manifestos of the Conservative and Labour Parties. The Green Party wants the Council to call on the Leaders of the Parties to follow the example of the Swedish Government and end these experiments in Governance and return all schools to democratic control and accountability with clear universal professional standards, commitment to a similar curriculum, non-selective criteria and general equity in funding.
“Specifically, the Green Party is concerned at the billions of pounds that have been diverted from mainstream education to try to make Free Schools work and the negative impact this has had on local authority schools funding. The County Council should seek to illustrate to the Secretary of State for Education the advantages of maintaining and enhancing the 'Local Education Authority' with its excellent central role in providing collective services to schools in a wide range of areas. The Council should express its concern that the obvious advantages in collectively improving the quality of local education provision provided via the LEA are being wasted in the fragmentation and atomisation that Academies and Free Schools generate.”
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