A man with a mic: David Weir and his CronxWatch YouTube channel has been out and about in Croydon, investigating the privatisation of the borough’s secondary schools
You might not have noticed. After all, any process done by “stealth” is, by definition, being undertaken in the hope that no one notices.
But since 2007, the state education system in Croydon has effectively been stealthily privatised, with every previously council-run secondary school in the borough now academised.
They’ve been handed over to MATs, multi-academy trusts, including one with its HQ in Croydon town centre, where their chief executive is paid almost £500,000 per year – money that is provided by tax-payers who have virtually no say in how the schools are run.
Across the country, 80% of state secondaries are now run by academy trusts, with the last Tory Government having set a target of 100% by 2030.
Most MATs are described as not-for-profits, which is a deliberately misleading discription, on a par with “affordable housing”. For while the MATs, such as Harris and Oasis, don’t ever declare a “profit”, they are able to spend vast sums on back office staff and executive salaries, while building up reserves funds – mostly from the millions handed over to them by the Department for Education.
David Weir’s entertaining CronxWatch YouTube programme gallops through the state of education in Croydon, and arrives at some worrying conclusions about how the MATs, led by the organisation founded by carpet multi-millionaire Lord Harris of Peckham, have been allowed to create grammar schools through back-door selection practices.
Weir says: “Everything about the academy system is motivated by the idea that putting the profit motive into education will improve things but by almost all metrics, it hasn’t and all the while a few dozen people in key leadership positions plus their expensive consultants continue to make bank.”
At least we think he says “bank”.
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