Council urged to shelve academies

OLDHAM’S new Liberal Democrat council is being urged to “have the bottle” to shelve plans for controversial academy schools.

Generations of pupils are set to benefit from £230 million plans to refurbish and rebuild the borough’s crumbling secondary schools under the Government’s Building Schools for the Future programme.

This includes replacing five schools with three city academies run by sponsors which has attracted a storm of protest. 

Blackmailed

New consultation on the proposals is now planned for September after the Lib-Dems were unhappy with the previous process under Labour.

Campaigners claim councils are being blackmailed into having academies in order to get BSF funding.

But Stuart Paulley, secretary of Oldham Campaign Against Academies, insists ministers have said councils can have funding without academies. He added: “We are pleased there will be more consultation and we hope the consultation will be effective this time.

“It would appear the Liberal Democrats have decided to go ahead with the academies scheme which we feel is a big disappointment. They are ignoring the weight of opinion.

“It’s high time our council had the bottle to say no to the Government and to insist on having the money without academies. Other authorities are managing it, why not us?”

However, Councillor Kay Knox, Cabinet member for children, young people and families, said Oldham would receive considerably less money if its proposals did not include academies.

Under the complicated funding system, the council would have to find roughly 50 per cent if the proposal did not include academies while it would receive 90 per cent of the funding if it did, with each academy worth around £30 million.

She added: “The debate to be had now is do we have a proposal that gives every school in the borough an opportunity to have a total rebuild or a refurbishment?

“If we do not take the academies we cannot do every school.”

“This isn’t just about money.

“The headline should be the opportunity for our young people and what do we want to give them: the very best or some of them get nothing?

“I always keep at the front of my mind ‘why do I do this?’ It is to get the best opportunities for our young people because that’s the only way this borough will prosper.”


‘We don’t want to be worse-off’

A NEW campaign group has been formed amid concerns about plans to merge Counthill and Breeze Hill schools into an academy in Waterhead.

The academy is among three proposed for Oldham and and would be built at the Orb Mill site and run by Oldham Sixth-Form College.

However, parents behind the campaign group “The Best for All Our Children” fear that it would not have the range of sports and other facilities currently available at the two schools.

They are also concerned about lack of accountability to the local authority and parents, poor consultation about the proposals, traffic problems, school transport and that standards could be dumbed down with vocational qualifications.

Spokeswoman Ghazala Koosar (27) has three children who would expect to attend the academy.

She said: “We are not anti-academy but we are not pro-academy. We have a broad spectrum of views.

“As a group, we feel we need more information before we can make a decision.”

She said that sports facilities were essential to getting children from different backgrounds to integrate but said there would be far less at the academy than the current schools.

“We do not want to be in a worse situation than we are at the moment,” added Ghazala.