Upcoming event

‘Government education reforms will lead to a lack of accountability and greater inequality’, Melissa Benn will say at the forthcoming ‘School Wars’ debate.

The debate takes place in Islington on Thursday 9 February and is being organised by the National Education Trust, the leading education charity. It will be led by Melissa Benn, author of ‘School Wars’, with responses from Sally Coates, Principal of Burlington Danes Academy and Roy Blatchford, Founding Director of the National Education Trust.

The event will be chaired by Fiona Millar.

Melissa Benn commented:

‘Michael Gove has set a revolution in train, in the name of radical improvement of state education. But nothing is quite as it seems with the Coalition’s school reforms.  

In the name of autonomy and freedom, the government has gathered to itself unprecedented powers. Local authorities are being drained of funds and key powers, only to be replaced by democratically unaccountable providers, including the powerful educational chains.

Grammar schools are set to expand even though the correlation between selection and inequality is now well proven.

My fear? A return to a version of the failed 1944 settlement, this time via the market not the state’. 

Roy Blatchford, Founding Director of the National Education Trust, said:

The National Education Trust has for some time been a leading platform for critical debate about today’s key education issues, so we are delighted to be staging this timely event.

I look forward to hearing – and perhaps challenging – Melissa Benn’s version of ‘market versus state’.

Notes for Editors

http://www.nationaleducationtrust.net/events_BookOnline.php

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