Monthly Archives: December 2020

How To Dismantle the English State Education System in 10 Easy Steps

BY TERRY EDWARDS AND CARL PARSONS

‘A sharp and incisive account of how state education has been dismantled into a system of competing Multi-Academy Trusts. We were told ‘choice’ would deliver higher standards. It didn’t. It made the system more chaotic, wasteful and segregated. This book explains how it was done.’ Alasdair Smith, National Secretary, Anti Academies Alliance

New book by Terry Edwards and Carl Parsons tells the story of the takeover of England’s schools by the super-efficient, modernising, academising machine, which, in collaboration with a dynamic, forward-looking government is recasting the educational landscape. 

England’s school system is turbo-charged into a new era and will be the envy of the world, led by Chief Executives of Multi Academy Trusts on bankers’ salaries, imposing a slim curriculum, the soundest of discipline regimes and ensuring that highest standards will be achieved even if at the expense of teacher morale, poor service to special needs, off-rolling of students and despite an absolute lack of evidence that this privatised system works.

If you want to know more about the book you can listen to the podcast on Liam Davis Show:

Terry Edwards is a retired teacher who spent the last 38 years of his 41-year career in a ‘challenging’ comprehensive in East London. He was an examiner/moderator for A.Q.A. for 43 years and in this role visited hundreds of state and private schools throughout London and the South East. Since retirement he volunteers with Beanstalk in a local primary school in Greenwich, which his two sons attended in the 1980s, where he helps and encourages pupils to read. Terry has always campaigned for, and believed passionately in, comprehensive and co-educational secondary education and is now involved with CASE (Campaign for State Education). He is based in London, UK.

Prof Carl Parsons is a Visiting Professor of Social Inclusion Studies at the University of Greenwich. He was previously Professor of Education at Canterbury Christ Church University and Head of the Department of Educational Research until August 2009. His background is in research into exclusions, poverty and attainment and other equality issues in education. He is an experienced evaluator and social research methodologist.  Carl’s major professional preoccupation in recent years has been on strategies, structures, roles and practices to manage the continued education of children and young people who are excluded from school, at risk of disconnecting from education or are disadvantaged. In this, he makes the case for ecological thinking, whereby the school is one force for children’s care and development but cannot do the job alone. He is also examining the deleterious effects of the quasi-privatisation of education and the rise of ‘edubusiness’.