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NEWS • VIEWS • INFORMATION • ADVICE





CORNWALL GETS CO-OPERATIVE



Schools in Cornwall have been fighting back against academy conversion and proving that there is an alternative



The Cornish have always had a reputation for standing up against ‘interference’ from outside. So when the Coalition Government began to impose its new model of academy schools, feathers began to get ruffled.



A handful of headteachers made an early decision to convert to academy status, putting great pressure on neighbouring schools in the area to go down the same route.



However, a second group of headteachers stood firmly against the academies programme and began to seek a safe alternative that would protect school staff and the values and ethos of state education.



Cornwall has a great number of small, often isolated, schools and the national funding formula was starting to become a threat to their survival. The local authority warned that they would be unable to continue to fund all schools. Something had to be done to keep these schools as part of their local communities so they began to examine ways to work collaboratively to achieve financial sustainability.



Becoming part of a Co-operative Trust offered a way for these schools to remain in partnership with the local authority while gaining the benefits and flexibility of shared budgets and staffing with neighbouring schools.



Trusts are run as mutual societies, enabling the retention of a democratic and accountable education service where staff, parents, pupils and the wider community all have an equal voice in how the Trust is run.



Jon Lawrence, headteacher at Sir James Smiths School, Camelford, was the first headteacher in Cornwall to look at the Co-operative model. He worked in collaboration with the NASUWT to draw up plans for the Trust, which ensured that national pay and conditions entitlements were retained and trade unions were recognised for bargaining and negotiation.



He said: “Making all schools academies doesn’t create diversity and promote choice – it is fundamentally anti-local and undemocratic, placing the control of education into the hands of fewer and fewer people. The Co-operative Trust model has provided a lifeline, a genuinely sustainable alternative enabling local people to work together to help the drive for improved standards and, for some small rural schools, survival.”



Dr Pat McGovern [above], headteacher of Helston Community College, put it succinctly when he said: “Education is a public service and a means of offering social justice for all. How dare anybody give our schools away to a small group of unelected self-appointed individuals?



“Schools that become academies become independent, work on the principles of the marketplace and, as a consequence, have the potential to create fragmentation of a national system.



“The Co-operative Trust is firmly founded on principles of cooperation, social justice, solidarity, fairness and partnership. It is about mutualisation, not privatisation, and groups of schools working strategically together towards a shared vision for educational advancement with the involvement of the wider community.”



More schools have since formed clusters and began the process of becoming Co-operative Trusts. Mark Clutsom, headteacher of Upton Cross Primary School, a small rural school with less than 70 pupils, which serves a scattered farming area on Bodmin Moor, came to the conclusion that establishing a Trust was the only logical way of offering the wider curriculum experience that only larger primaries could afford.



He commented: “The support of the NASUWT is testament to the way that the Co-operative Trusts’ ethos underpins all that is good within our system. A Co-operative Trust doesn’t alter the terms and conditions under which the staff collaborate, rather it strengthens and formalises the good and excellent work that has been happening across Cornwall.”



There are now more Co-operative Trusts in Cornwall than academies. Cornwall demonstrates that there is an alternative and achievable vision of education that retains the public accountability and ethos of state education and that puts the needs of school staff and pupils at its core.





Making all schools academies doesn’t create diversity and promote choice – it is fundamentally anti-local and undemocratic, placing the control of education into the hands of fewer and fewer people.





Education is a public service and a means of offering social justice for all. How dare anybody give our schools away to a small group of unelected self-appointed individuals?





A Co-operative Trust doesn’t alter the terms and conditions under which the staff collaborate, rather it strengthens and formalises the good and excellent work that has been happening across Cornwall.





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