Anthony Seldon and the academy scam

Anthony Seldon’s call today for fee-charging schools to get involved with state education has nothing at all to do with helping children from poor homes. It’s got everything to do with fee-charging schools like his hanging onto the perks and tax breaks which the schools for the wealthiest have become dependent upon.

He advises them to sponsor academies, and when they wake up and realise what’s going on, they’ll rush to do so, for this is a wonderful scam, giving them a huge political and public relations boost and costing them little or nothing. Dulwich College in South London worked this out ages ago. It’s sponsoring some of Kent’s academies, and has reaped a considerable local public relations advantage from doing so.

So is it coughing up £2 million – which academy sponsors are supposed to do? No, actually, not precisely two million. No one in Kent wanted to tell me exactly how much, but I do now have the figure, as a result of a Freedom of Information request from Kent Messenger political editor Paul Francis. The actual sum of money this school is giving to the academies as its sponsorship is, er, nothing at all. Not a penny.

Nor is it handing over expensive equipment. It’s offering advice. Expertise. Chaps from Dulwich College, with years of experience of teaching the children from the wealthiest families in London, will trot languidly off to the poorest bits of Kent and tell state school teachers how it ought to be done.

This is a wonderful bargain. No one but the saintly-sounding Dr Seldon could make this sort of initiative look like anything but a cynical exercise in public relations, designed to divert proposals to change the ludicrous situation where fee-charging schools, which educate the children of the wealthiest, count as charities.

I suppose we will now see legions of private school teachers lording it round state schools, where the classes are twice as big as they are used to and the facilities half as good. The resentment this will cause in state schools will be enormous – especially as these bringers of wisdom to the poor are paid quite a lot more than their state school colleagues.

That, of course, is one thing the government could put right quite quickly. It’s far easier to teach in fee-charging schools, and it pays far better. The government could have put that right in the latest teachers’ pay settlement, announced yesterday. It could pay for the salary hike by simply diverting some of the money it’s wasting on the academy programme. This, of course, hasn’t happened. So as well as being considered better than their state school colleagues, and able to tell them how to do their job, fee-charging school teachers will continue to be far less stressed and far better paid. Who says we’ve got a government that gives a damn about state education?