Dubai-based firm plans to make high-class private schooling affordable for ‘huge swaths’ of the British middle classes

A for-profit company is setting up private schools that claim to offer the same quality education as top public schools but for half the price.

GEMS Education, based in Dubai, intends to open six fee-paying day schools for boys and girls aged three to 18 in towns and cities across England over the next two years.

The company plans to charge parents between £8,000 and £12,000 a year – about half or a third of the price of some of the country’s leading public schools.

Sending a non-boarding teenager to Millfield in Somerset costs £19,500 a year, while King’s College School in south-west London charges £17,520.

Mark Labovitch, chief executive officer of GEMS for the UK, Europe and Africa, said “huge swaths” of the British middle classes were keen for the opportunity to send their children to private schools, but could not afford what was on offer. Private school fees had risen well ahead of inflation, he said.

Fees for non-boarding pupils shot up by 27% in UK private schools between 2007 and 2011, according to data from the Independent Schools Council (ISC). Fees for boarders rose by 25%. Last year, average boarding fees were £25,152 a year, while day fees were £11,208.

Labovitch said fees had financed a race to upgrade facilities at private schools.

Dulwich College, in south London, has its own boat house on the Thames, while Millfield has two 18-hole golf courses.

Dr Martin Stephen, GEMS’ director of education for the UK and a former high master of St Paul’s School, said independent schools were “obsessed with doing things themselves”. “Do you, as a school, buy your own boat house or do you go to the local rowing club and do a deal with them? It obviously makes sense to do a deal with the local rowing club,” he said.

The company’s new private schools will be designed to suit couples who both have busy careers. Parents will be able to drop their children at school before breakfast and pick them up after rush-hour.

The schools will also have a doctor’s surgery on site.

Their location has not yet been finalised, but Labovitch said there were parts of the country that were “under-served” by the number of private schools they had. In some areas, parents either had to give up on the idea of sending their children to private schools or take them on “very complex daily commutes”, he said. “This causes great inconvenience to working parents.”

Some 45% of the UK’s fee-paying schools are based in London or the south-east, data from the ISC shows. Wales and the East Midlands have just 18 and 63 private schools respectively, while the south-east has 361 and Greater London 191.

However, the headteacher of Brighton College, which charges up to £18,675 a year for non-boarders, warned against what he said was a “cut-price education”.

Richard Cairns said independent schools managed to attract “outstanding teachers … by offering enhanced terms and conditions and smaller class sizes”. “These cost money and, inevitably, this is reflected in higher fees. Any school that thinks it can stint on teachers’ salaries and class sizes while still offering a first-class education is kidding itself,” he said.

He also questioned the wisdom of launching “cut-price” private schools in the current economic climate. “All the evidence suggests parents are tending to send their children to well-established schools with a strong academic track record and firm financial foundations. They don’t want to enrol their children in a school only to find it going bust a term later,” he said.

Kenneth Durham, the headteacher of University College School in Hampstead, north London, said many existing private schools allowed pupils to turn up early and stay late and provided regular “medicals”.

Labovitch said his company, which runs 100 schools worldwide, was still considering how it might devise entrance requirements for the new schools.

GEMS already runs 10 schools in the UK, but these were mainly acquired by the company, rather than purpose built by it.

What the new private schools promise to offer

• The schools will cost between £8,000 and £12,000 a year.

• Each will have a doctor’s surgery on site.

• Parents will be able to drop their children off before breakfast and pick them up after the evening rush-hour.

• The schools will have an international perspective, and emphasise team sports and traditional subjects.

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The dangers which Peter Wilby points out (Does Gove realise he is empowering future dictators?, 31 January) were recognised 70 years ago. Unfortunately secretaries of state know very little history. The Oxford historian Dr Marjorie Reeves, when invited to be on the Central Advisory Council For Education (England) in 1946, was told by the permanent secretary, John Redcliffe-Maud, that the main duty of council members was “to be prepared to die at the first ditch as soon as politicians try to get their hands on education”.

A war had been fought to prevent the consequences of such concentrated power. The 1944 Education Act, hammered out during the war years, created a “maintained system” of education as a balance of power between central government, local government responsibility, the voluntary bodies (mainly the churches) and the teachers. That balance is now disappearing fast, without the public debate it needs and with hardly a squeak from Labour. The existing education legislation refers to the fast-disappearing “maintained schools”, leaving academies and free schools exposed, without the protection of the law, to whatever whimsical ideas are dreamt up by the present or future secretaries of state, to whom they are contracted with minimal accountability to parliament.
Professor Richard Pring
Green Templeton College, Oxford

• The removal of 3,100 vocational subjects from the school performance tables from 2014 (Report, 31 January) has major implications. It is certainly the case that “perverse incentives” were created by the league tables to use soft options to boost school league table positions – the phenomenon known as gaming. However, the cull to 70 accepted vocational subjects, with 55 allowed on the margins, essentially destroys vocational and technical education. Given that the old basis is the one for the current (2012 and 2013) tables, a whole raft of students are on worthless courses.

The wider implication is that the government has no interest in vocational or technical education. However, there is a subtext that Mr Gove’s supporters may find less palatable. The schools that have used gaming most cynically have been academies. Indeed, take away 16-plus exam results and the academies are the least successful schools in the country – they had 7% of students gaining Ebacc last year against 13%of comprehensive students.
Trevor Fisher
Stafford

• While some courses don’t stand up to scrutiny, others have the potential to form the bedrock of future UK prosperity. The JCB Academy in Rocester is doing ground-breaking work inspiring young people from Derby and its environs to major in engineering and business skills. It was set up to provide future skilled employees for companies like Rolls-Royce, Toyota and, of course, JCB itself, as these companies have found that young people are not being given the necessary skills and experience in mainstream schools and colleges.

Is it too late for Michael Gove to recognise excellence where it exists, and stop tarring all non-mainstream courses with the same brush?
Lucy Care
Derby

• Let’s be clear about the pupils at Mossbourne Community Academy (Wilshaw’s rules, 24 January). Far from being “well-heeled”, 89% of the pupils – according to IDACI data from the 2011 school census – fall within the 20% most deprived in the country. Almost 40% of last year’s GCSE cohort were on free school meals, yet 76% of these disadvantaged pupils achieved five or more A*-C grades at GCSE including English and maths.

For too long commentators have implied that Mossbourne’s intake is predominantly of privileged, middle-class children. This is simply not true. The Pembury estate, next door to Mossbourne, is one of the capital’s most deprived housing estates.

Mossbourne is not alone in achieving outstanding results for a truly comprehensive intake. You need only look at neighbouring schools, like Bethnal Green technology college in Tower Hamlets, where results compare well.
Alan Wood
Director of children services, Hackney

• According to Susanna Rustin: “Even those community schools that have hung on to comprehensive status and stuck with their local authority rather than striking out as independents, have mostly reintroduced uniforms, streaming and head boys and girls” (Nostalgia for grammar schools is misplaced, 30 January). At Millom School, where I am chair of governors, we have very recently dispensed with the role of head boy and girl, never condoned streaming and remodelled our school uniform (no blazers, no ties, no braid) in the light of students’ preferences. We have also twice decided not to seek academy status. Neither nostalgia nor political opportunism has informed our decisions. We are not alone. Hopefully Susanna would approve?
Professor Colin Richards
Spark Bridge, Cumbria

• I am concerned about the decision to axe in excess of 3,000 GCSEs without appearing to consider the implications on the young people that benefit from such diversity of qualifications. Every child has the right to succeed. Success breeds success and consequently such a decision could affect people’s learning drive. One size does not fit all and I would ask the education minister to consult widely before making decisions that may backfire on our communities.

Firstly, and speaking as a principal of an academy whose attainment has grown over five consecutive years, it is important to recognise that a wide range of suitable qualifications are important to ensure we meet our learners’ needs. I think it is important to state that a good grade in a traditional GCSE should quite rightly remain a priority. However, it should also be recognised that passing an alternative vocational qualification is of a higher value to a young person than achieving a D or below in any GCSE. It is important therefore to get the right balance.

League tables simply drive behaviour based on wherever the emphasis is, but to date we have yet to find a way of securing accountability through league tables that also recognises the outstanding work that schools are doing to meet the needs of all of their learners.

Secondly, consider those returning to education of any age, which has been encouraged by successive governments. The eradication of so many GCSEs has the potential to create a chasm for people who are in this category. We cannot afford for this to happen as this is part of “building communities”.

Let us not wipe out these courses without widespread consultation with people whose feet are firmly on the ground, and who work at the coalface.
Kevin Rowlands
Principal, Oasis Academy, Immingham

• Alison Wolf suggests that “Institutions are under great pressure to do well in league tables” (Let’s end qualifications that have no value, 31 January) and Michael Gove has now reduced the number of vocational qualifications from over 3,000 to 135. The effects of this on pupils, teachers, employers and society will be extremely negative and confine pupils to courses for which they are not suited, frustrate teachers for having to offer courses that are not appropriate and deny employers future workers with job-related skills – and poor old society will have to pick up the tab for out-of-work, disillusioned young people.

An easier solution would have been to do away with league tables and let professionals do their work without government interference. Simple really.
Bob Dawson
Bury, Lancashire

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You have done us all a service by exposing the damaging cuts the government is inflicting on education (Report, 27 December). Those of us who work in education have been aware of this for some time. Let me highlight two areas. While the UK languishes in 25th position in the international Pisa reading rankings, a minority of headteachers are slashing school library budgets and even making school librarians redundant. What does this say about the importance of reading to Michael Gove and his colleagues?

Many school library services which support individual schools have closed and everyone knows the situation in our public libraries. For years there has been a thriving culture of authors and poets visiting schools, enthusing children about books, reading and writing. Budget cuts mean many schools are, for the first time, not organising these visits. Disregard the happy-clappy fibbery of the Department for Education. Real cuts are happening and they are likely to get worse. In the words of the Spanish civil war poster, if you tolerate this, your kids will be next.
Alan Gibbons
Author and organiser of the Campaign for the Book

• Librarians not only improve literacy by encouraging reading for pleasure, they also develop information literacy by supporting students in locating, evaluating and using information. This information literacy is now an essential life skill. 
Jean Parker
London

• The music and arts service in Brighton & Hove has long been rated outstanding and is valued highly across the city. Even so, it is facing a 33% cut over two years in its central fund. On top of this, the Green-led council is proposing the complete phasing out of the local subsidy.

Currently, more than 2,500 children benefit from instrumental lessons and ensemble workshops every week in the city. This includes more than 500 families on lower incomes, who are able to access up to 80% subsidies. The National Music Plan is full of good intent on widening access, but without financial support such opportunities will become wholly the preserve of the better-off. Without an adequately funded service offering area-wide provision for music and instrumental lessons for all, teachers of music will have no other option than to find employment elsewhere; public schools and the private sector seem the most likely.

Music and arts education is extremely valuable to the social, emotional and intellectual development of all children as has been emphasised by the Henley review and the National Music Plan. However, music services are at serious risk of falling through the funding cracks. Over 2,000 people have now signed a petition to urge Brighton & Hove council to reconsider its proposal to cut the local subsidy to the music service.
Dr Keith Turvey
Brighton, East Sussex

• It’s a pity your otherwise excellent article on how pupils are paying the price of austerity didn’t include the imminent loss of inclusive outdoor education services provided by local authorities. A UK-wide perspective reveals that 15 outdoor education centres have already been closed, with a further one in three facing closure due to government cuts in funding for local authorities. The loss of local authority financial support and the increased course charges which result will, predictably, hit families on the lowest incomes hardest, preventing their children’s participation in outdoor education courses and effectively rendering these services unviable.

It would be a shameful tragedy if this highly effective teaching and learning method was denied to all our young people, particularly as it makes a valued and proven contribution to their personal development, assisting them to become confident individuals, successful learners and responsible citizens.
Alistair Cook
National chair, Association of Heads of Outdoor Education Centres

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A special issue of the Guardian helped to win this year’s Steve Sinnott award for young campaigners

How about these for a few headlines that nobody would complain about: “Malaria wiped out”; “World population levelling off”; “Last shanty towns demolished in Mumbai”; and even: “Everyone in the world now earns at least $ 5 a day”. These were the stories in a special issue of the Guardian – dated 31 December 2025 – created by Eilidih Naismith and Billy Davidson, students at Hutchesons grammar school, Glasgow.

Their vision of how the future could look by 2025 if all children in the world were receiving a primary education by 2015 helped to win them the Steve Sinnott award for Young Global Education Campaigners of the year. They had identified universal primary education as the most important of the eight millennium development goals agreed by world leaders back in the year 2000 – and they were buzzing to spread the message.

“Education is the key to all the world’s problems”, said Billy, and his T-shirt backed him up. The judges were unanimously convinced by Eilidih and Billy, both 15, who showed that they had researched the issues meticulously, as well as demonstrating real passion for the cause.

The two students had also dreamed up some imaginative ways to spread the message in the UK about the importance of the millennium goals, including a schools advertising competition in which famous company slogans could be hijacked for the Send My Friend to School campaign: “Because we are worth it” and because “Every little helps”.

“Eilidih and Billy were so passionate, innovative, enthusiastic and knowledgeable in making their presentation that they stood out in a very strong field,” said Mary Sinnott, one of the judges. “I believe they will be tremendous ambassadors.”

The award was set up in memory of Steve Sinnott, Mary’s late husband, the general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, who died in 2008. He had been a passionate advocate of the Global Campaign for Education, which is supported by an umbrella body of charities including ActionAid, and by the NUT.

In February, the two students will travel to Malawi with ActionAid and the Global Campaign for Education to meet children who do not have a place at school, or who struggle to attend. When they arrive home, they will speak in the House of Commons and to the teaching unions, and create films and blogs, all as part of their new job as young ambassadors.

The runners-up were Tanisha Patel and Jasmin Sahota, of Soar Valley college, Leicester, Alexander Cotter and Bobo Kalungu-Banda, of Blessed George Napier school, Banbury, and Hannah Copeland and Reece Beale, from The King John school, Benfleet, Essex.

Next year, Send My Friend to School is inviting UK pupils to take part in a special Olympic-themed campaign. More information at sendmyfriend.org

Alice Woolley

• Alice Woolley, editor of Education Guardian, was on the judging panel for the Steve Sinnott award

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Why are sports personalities all men? Plus, a proposed free school hops boroughs, and a season of ill will at the London College of Communications

Stopwatch at the ready

The all-male shortlist for this year’s BBC Sports Personality of The Year met with outrage earlier this month. But the news came as no surprise to one academic, who after studying the awards ceremony for a decade has become something of an anorak on the subject. Dr Elizabeth Pike settles down to watch the show each year with a stopwatch, totting up how much screen time is devoted to men and women and then logging her findings on to spreadsheets.

Pike, who is head of sport development and management at the University of Chichester, says women’s sports get 10% of the screen time, and when the camera pans to the audience for close-ups, more than 70% of the shots are of men. “The year Andrew Flintoff got [the award] ahead of Ellen MacArthur was particularly galling,” Pike recalls. “The English cricket team had won the Ashes, but Flintoff rolled around drunk afterwards. Meanwhile, MacArthur had sailed around the world single-handed.”

Pike has written to the BBC to share her evidence and awaits a reply. When this year’s show airs this week, she will be glued to the screen, stopwatch in hand. “I’ll be interested to see whether there’s any attempt to explain the all-male line-up. I’m not getting my hopes up.”

Birbalsingh spreads her wings

In October, we brought news that ex-deputy headteacher Katharine Birbalsingh was struggling to find a site for her free school, due to open next September. Having found out that the building she had her eye on – the Lilian Baylis school – was due to be sold off to developers by Lambeth council, Birbalsingh had been trying to galvanise support from locals to find a site.

But now it emerges that Birbalsingh’s school could be located in Tooting, in the borough of Wandsworth. And while parents in Wandsworth may be delighted, residents of Lambeth – which had around 400 more applications for school places than were available last year – may not be quite so thrilled.

The academy is one of 63 free schools recently approved by the government. As part of the application process, proposers must demonstrate local demand from parents.

So in moving her school to another borough, can Birbalsingh still claim to be meeting demand? A Department for Education spokesperson said local demand was one of several criteria, “not the top or only one”. “The Michaela school drew on demand across a fairly wide area of south London. Although the initial site was in Lambeth this wasn’t essential to the proposal. They will consult local parents and others should that prove to be the final site.” Birbalsingh says: “The site is close to the boundaries of both Lambeth and Merton, which widens access. We hope the school will have a multicultural intake and a multi-borough intake.”

Failure to communicate

Seasonal goodwill seems thin at the London College of Communication, and, um, communications seem to have broken down. The press office has been strangely incommunicado of late, with inquiries diverted to the head of college, Sandra Kemp. Now it has emerged that the head of communications, Gillian Radcliffe, has left, escorted from the building after an apparent bust-up with her boss.

In her leaked resignation letter, Radcliffe claims she was subjected to “irrational criticism” and questions about her integrity after she raised concerns to Kemp about her management style. “It has become clear that you now view me in the same negative light as you do countless other decent and dedicated colleagues,” Radcliffe wrote.

A spokeswoman for the University of the Arts London, of which LCC is part, said it was “saddened by the tone and content” of the letter. The University and College Union says Radcliffe’s departure brings to 19 the number of senior managers to have left since Kemp’s appointment in 2008. It says five were sacked, nine resigned under duress and five left through redundancy. The university spokeswoman said restructuring had led to redundancies. The institution had “robust” grievance procedures. “It would be inappropriate to comment on individual members of staff,” she added.

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Independent girls’ school, whose past pupils include Barbara Castle, says it is time to ‘return to its community roots’

One of the north of England’s best-known independent girls’ schools is to apply to become a free school, which would end fee-paying and widen admission.

Bradford girls’ grammar school, whose past pupils include the radical Labour politician Barbara Castle, says that the time is right to “return to its community roots”.

The 136-year-old school hopes to join the publicly funded system in September 2013, with the aim of more than doubling its numbers from the current 400 pupils within five years. It would adopt the non-selective statutory school admission code but apply to use the “fair banding” system to ensure a proportion of academically very bright students.

Entrance is currently by competitive exam and senior school fees are £11,000 a year. The school is among the highest-performing in Yorkshire’s GCSE, A-level and university entrance tables. There has been some concern among parents at the proposed change, but the school said that support was strong, both at the school and in the wider Bradford community.

The headteacher, Kathryn Matthews, herself an 11-plus success from an inner-city community, said that the initiative promised “an exciting time”. She said: “The move to free school status would widen access. We would welcome the opportunity to work more closely with other Bradford schools to the benefit of children throughout the city. This offers an excellent opportunity to return the school to the community.”

The grammar school’s original endowment was for “public benefit” and aimed at educating a wide social range of bright girls, such as Barbara Castle whose father was a tax inspector. It became a partly state-funded selective grammar but went independent in 1976 after the abolition of the direct grant system.

The school said that free school status continued a tradition of widening access – through the 25% allocation of free places under the direct grant system, the later assisted places scheme and more recently scholarships and bursaries. A spokeswoman for the school said: “We are also determined to continue our tradition of girls-only education from 11-18. We are confident that there is demand for this in Bradford and that it creates confident young women who can become the leaders of tomorrow.”

Castle was another instance of this. After polling only 29 votes as Labour candidate in the school’s mock election of 1929 – shortly after her mother had run soup kitchens for striking miners – she was appointed head girl.

The school has faced financial strains in the recession after largely recovering from the effects of its neighbour and former “twin”, Bradford boys’ grammar school, going co-educational in 1999. The spokeswoman said: “Show me an independent school which is not facing strains at the moment. It is difficult for all of us.”

The school will retain its Christian foundation in an area with a large Muslim population, for whom girls-only education has particular appeal. It will also continue to occupy its leafy 17-acre grounds close to the city’s Royal Infirmary. The current preparatory school, Lady Royd, would be part of the transformation and would keep its separate name and intake, as a primary for both girls and boys up to the age of 11.

Independent schools were urged earlier this year by the education minister Nick Gibb to help challenged counterparts in the state system, with the suggestion that this was a moral duty similar to those expressed in so many private schools’ founding documents.

The president of the Girls’ Schools Association, Dr Helen Wright, replied at the group’s annual conference: “The government must be careful in drawing us in the independent sector in to bolster their new academies or to prop up other failing schools. We may be perfectly capable of succeeding where the state has failed, but we must not forget our own pupils and their parents. Why should our parents – most of whom struggle hard to pay the fees to educate their children – prop up the state system and so effectively pay twice?”

The former boys’ grammar school, whose ex-pupils include another prominent Labour figure, Denis Healey, is remaining independent.

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When I read your report of the demonstration by the British National party outside Grenoside community primary school in Sheffield, in protest at plans to give sex education lessons to pupils (Report, 25 November), I didn’t know whether to laugh or scream. I have been involved in child protection research for the past 25 years. In this time, I have become a fervent believer in sex education lessons for all schoolchildren, of whatever age. Such education is crucial in its own right – if children are to grow up as properly informed and well-adjusted individuals – but also essential if we are to prevent child sexual abuse (CSA). How, after all, are children expected to protect themselves from abnormal sex, if they do not know about normal sex?

On one level, the BNP action (and its threats of further protests at the homes of the headteacher and chair of governors) does, unfortunately, reflect not only an ignorance of how we should address CSA, but also a fear of sex and sex education, within society more generally. On another level, though, the BNP action represents a deranged and insidious attempt to intimidate individuals who are only trying to help children, and enhance their development and safety. The headteacher and chair of governors, with the full support of the teaching staff and parents of Grenoside, plus the local authority and wider community, must face down the threat from the BNP.
Dr Bernard Gallagher
Centre for Applied Childhood Studies, University of Huddersfield

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Councils are warning that the government’s academy programme is draining resources away from maintained schools – and vulnerable children may be the ones who lose the most

It is the government’s flagship education policy. But councils in England are warning that the academies scheme will drain resources from support services used by thousands of conventional state schools that have not left their local authorities.

Education Guardian has calculated that the huge expansion in the government’s academies programme could cost councils up to £820m over two years.

Councils claim that money to meet these costs will inevitably have to come from other services provided by local authorities, including support for the most vulnerable pupils, at a time when education is facing its sharpest spending cuts for 50 years, according to analysis last week by the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

Analysis of submissions to the government’s consultation on academy funding by the Local Government Association (LGA), which represents all English and Welsh local authorities, the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (Cipfa) and the umbrella body London Councils, supplemented by information from six individual councils, shows that councils believe too much money has been given to individual academies by the government, and that ministers are now trying to take cash from local authorities to meet these costs. The claims come after this newspaper revealed in April how some schools appear to have received six-figure windfalls after becoming academies.

Peter Downes, a Liberal Democrat councillor in Cambridgeshire who opposes academies, says: “The whole academies policy has been carried out without any serious assessment of the financial implications. It risks creating extra costs for the education system, at a time when we can ill afford it.”

Academies are funded directly from central government and operate largely without receiving local authority support services, including school improvement and behaviour support. The government says they receive the same amount of money for support services as they would have received had they been a conventional local authority “maintained” school. Academies can then buy in any support they need.

Since summer 2010, 1,525 schools have taken on academy status, or applied to do so. Ministers said last year that they expected only 400 new academies in 2010-12.

The government is therefore seeking to slash the funding for local authorities to provide support services since, ministers say, the growth in academies means there is now less demand for these services.

In January, the government proposed to cut local authority budgets by £148m in 2011-12 and by £265m in 2012-13. But following a legal challenge in May by 23 authorities, which argued that the reductions were calculated unfairly and flouted government guidelines on passing extra costs on to local councils, the government launched a new consultation on academy funding over the summer.

But the consultation proposed to cut local authority budgets even further to take account of the faster-than-anticipated growth in academy numbers. This would see councils lose between £940m and £1.06bn by 2012-13.

Although councils accept that there should be some reduction in funding for their services, they say the proposed cuts go far beyond any likely savings. Other budgets will therefore have to be raided to make up the shortfall.

The LGA surveyed 32 authorities and found them reporting average savings of £15 per pupil because of a falling demand for services as more schools in their areas became academies.

The LGA therefore says council budgets should be cut by a figure of £15-£70 for every academy pupil. But the government says this sum should be more than £200.

Calculations by this newspaper, based on the LGA’s estimated per-pupil savings, suggest that council budgets should therefore be reduced by a maximum of £233m over two years to pay for the academies policy. As ministers are seeking to make cuts of £940m-£1.06bn, councils believe they face an unjustified bill for academies of £707m-£822m.

David Simmons, chairman of the LGA’s children and young people board, says: “We are supportive of the academies policy, but we are concerned that at present the Department for Education [DfE] does not have sufficient funding in its budget to support the number of schools looking to convert, and therefore is looking for money from councils that are already hard-pressed. We need to find a new way to provide funding for schools when they convert.”

The councils argue that individual academies have been overfunded because:

• The government’s formula wrongly gives academies a share of some council budgets for functions which local authorities, rather than academies, have to perform, such as strategic planning and, in some authorities, children’s social care;

• Academies are wrongly given an equal share of funding for school improvement support. Councils argue that, with most schools that have become academies now either rated good or outstanding this is unfair, since councils in the past have rightly focused such resources on weaker schools. The LGA says the government has breached equal opportunities law by not considering the effect of this on disadvantaged pupils in non-academy schools;

• Academies receive a share of what the local authority was spending on its school support services the previous year. With council budgets falling year-on-year, this also represents over-funding.

In their consultation responses, the LGA, London Councils and local authorities including Kent, Somerset and Cambridgeshire have castigated the proposals as unworkable. They describe the government’s methodology variously as “irrational”, “completely unreasonable” and “fundamentally flawed”.

England’s largest local authority, Conservative-controlled Kent, says that, while academies are receiving £230 per pupil in support service payments, the true figure, reflecting the cost of extra services academies must provide once they leave the local authority, should be £40 per pupil. This means a secondary school with 1,000 pupils would gain £190,000 simply by becoming an academy.

Kent also calculates that the overfunding of academies is so acute that, if 30% of its schools were to convert to academy status, payments to them would leave it with no budget at all for services to support the remaining 70%.

Somerset council, another Tory authority, says in its consultation response: “The current proposals would place an unacceptable burden on local authorities and the remaining maintained schools.” John Osman, Somerset county council’s cabinet member for children and young people, says: “We support the statement in the consultation document that academies and maintained schools should be funded fairly and equitably and strongly believe that the current proposals would not deliver this equity.”

Cipfa believes the proposed cuts could be challenged in court. “The [government proposal] … would overstate the amount that should logically be transferred to academies. In that event, local authorities’ remaining maintained schools – and therefore their pupils – would be financially disadvantaged,” its consultation response said. “We believe that, if the methodology is not amended, it is possible that the size of this problem might be so significant as to trigger some further legal challenge.”

Local authority sources say that, in the longer term, academy funding must be cut to come into line with that of maintained schools, in order for the policy to be financially sustainable.

Simon Pickard, a member of Cipfa’s children’s services panel, says: “If more and more schools convert to academy status, sooner or later the policy is going to become unaffordable, so academies will find their budgets will reduce over time.”

A DfE spokesman says per-pupil funding is the same in academies as in maintained schools. He adds: “In the light of the greater numbers of academies converting nationally than initially anticipated, we need to ensure that they and local authorities are funded fairly.

“In July we published a consultation on the appropriate methodology for calculating the amount of funding relating to … relevant services that should transfer from local government to academies in 2011-12 and 2012-13. We are currently considering the responses in detail and will be making an announcement in due course.”

Councils do not know when they are going to get an answer. With budgets so tight, ministers seem unlikely to want to respond positively to the authorities’ claims. The reaction from local authorities, if their arguments are rejected, will be interesting to watch.

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Kevin Spacey and Lord Puttnam among big names from the UK’s creative industries who are supporting a report that highlights the importance of cultural learning and activities

Kevin Spacey, Lord Puttnam, Nick Hornby and Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota are at the head of a concerted cultural backlash against government plans to concentrate the British schools’ curriculum on a core of “traditional” subjects.

Spacey, artistic director at London’s Old Vic theatre, has joined leading names in theatre, art, film and education to support ImagineNation: The Case for Cultural Learning, a campaigning report launched by the Cultural Learning Alliance. The artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Michael Boyd, and Lord Hall, chief executive of the Royal Opera House, have also signed the document, alongside educationists and the heads of teaching unions.

Put together by a group of about 6,000 teachers, parents, artists, writers and performers, the alliance report shows that exposure to a broad mix of cultural experience from a young age improves attainment in all subjects. Taking part in arts activities, the report claims, can demonstrably increase children’s cognitive skills.

“A lifetime in teaching has taught me that giving children the chance to visit galleries and museums is invaluable,” said Professor Mick Waters, a curriculum expert and member of the alliance. “The report comes against the backdrop of the government questioning the value of the wider education. Children should paint, photograph, build, sing, move and dance, sew and cook. Surely we want our children to live their lives joyously?”

The alliance’s move was prompted by growing concerns that cultural learning is under threat from a new government emphasis on a handful of central subjects. This was outlined in a survey by the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers which has suggested that one in eight schools is planning to reduce the provision of arts, drama and music. The poll of 2,500 teachers revealed that 13% had already cut those subjects.

Critics blame the unintended impact of the government’s English Baccalaureate (Ebacc), which requires pupils to gain good GCSEs in two sciences, a language and either history or geography, as well as English and maths. They believe this will push schools away from arts subjects.

Waters argued that the threat posed by the introduction of the Ebacc in secondary schools could be compounded by the removal of all arts subjects from the curriculum – something he said was being discussed by the coalition.

The study lays out the evidence that students who take arts subjects have a higher rate of employability, and those from low-income families who participate in arts activities at school are three times more likely to get a degree.

It also suggests that arts activities increase students’ transferable skills by about 10% to 17%, and refers back to previous research that shows children’s cognitive abilities could be increased by 16% and 19% on average if they took part in arts activities.

A Department for Education spokesman said the Ebacc was designed to “open up core academic subjects to hundreds of thousands of pupils, particularly the poorest, who are denied the chance to do courses which top universities and employers demand”.

This weekend Waters countered that it was Britain’s poorest families who were in the greatest need of a wide curriculum. “It is particularly important for those people from deprived communities,” he said.

“It gives them the opportunity to see and think about things a little removed from their own aspirations. Children become very much more engaged and we find that their work in other areas reflects this same improved sense of self-confidence.”

The coalition says it has kept the number of GCSEs that students need to pass in order to be awarded an Ebacc deliberately small to leave time for lessons in other subjects.

But the chairman of the alliance, David Puttnam, said learning through culture led to creative thinking and better problem-solving. “If we fail to offer our young people the opportunity to participate in the arts and culture, then we fail to support them in becoming the leading thinkers, innovators, creative business and community leaders of the future,” he said.

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