Phoenix parents ‘would be taking a risky gamble’ - union

A TEACHING union claims that Phoenix Free School would use Oldham children as guinea pigs in an ideological experiment.

Tony Harrison, secretary of Oldham National Union of Teachers, added that parents would be taking a risky gamble with their children’s one shot at education.

He said: “The sponsors of the proposed free school claim that most of our current schools are failing pupils. This is nonsense.

“The reality is that 70 per cent of our schools are rated by Ofsted as good or outstanding. Most of the rest are satisfactory. Therefore, where is the discipline crisis?

“There has to be a balanced approach to discipline and trained teachers are best placed to deliver this. We do not want to turn our schools into youth detention centres.

“Phoenix claims that it has based its proposals on strong research evidence from the Troops to Teachers schemes in the United States.

“However, the research that they quote relies on the perceptions of certain individuals. More reliable research shows that students of traditionally-trained teachers outperform students of teachers without teacher-training qualifications.

“The American scheme is different to the one proposed in Oldham. At least in the USA the ex-troops take classes alongside qualified and trained teachers.

“As far as we are aware there is no other school internationally where all full-time staff will be ex service personnel.

“Why should the children of Oldham be the first worldwide to be subject to an experiment which has no educationally proven track record?”

Mr Harrison said the curriculum would be narrower than in state schools, adding: “They claim that they will educate to grammar school standards but in reality they will offer more limited subjects than comprehensive schools. They say that they will refuse to teach geography as a distinct subject because they consider this to be environmental propaganda.

“This perhaps goes some way to explaining their political motive for opening the school.

“They seem to be proud of the fact that staff will not be teacher trained because they dismiss teacher-training as liberal nonsense. They reject all of the wealth of knowledge and skills developed in teacher training colleges over decades. They reduce teaching to using “common sense”.

“I do not believe that the parents of Oldham’s children will want their child to be taught by an untrained person with untested skills in the classroom. The plan is to open the school on the site previously used by Breeze Hill School. This rubs salt into the wound because the new school will be privately run but will not have to pay for the building. The people who will pick up the bill are the taxpayers who are already hit hard by the recession.”