Introduced by Blunkett under the guise of helping inner city deprived children with the paternalistic and benevolent aid of private capital, Academies have distorted and disrupted educational planning in the areas where they have been built. They have involved the wholesale handing over of money and the control of education to a collection of evangelical Christians and rich businessmen.

A quick glance at the history of the Academies programme reads like a story of wanton waste, combined with an aggressive policy to disrupt and undermine state education.

The first remarkable feature of the Academies programme is that is a direct development of the City Technology Colleges (CTCs), introduced by the Tory Education Minister Kenneth Baker in 1986. This scheme developed twenty colleges with sponsors from businesses, the churches and educational trusts. The schools then set up would be owned and run by these sponsors. The Major government later abandoned the CTC programme as an educational failure. It is therefore the more surprising that it is this same model the Academies have been built on. There are, however, some differences.

The Tories demanded that the sponsors, soon to own the new schools, should put up £8 million each for the pleasure of being given a £30 million school to own and control, along with continued funding for staff and resources from the government. New Labour has been more generous, only asking for £2 million, clearly trying to outdo the Tories in terms of their generosity to the business community. Equally, while CTCs had governing boards included teaching staff and parent representation - although always a small minority - academies have none of these 'restrictions'. The governing boards of these schools are wholly determined by the new owners, who can appoint who they like to run the schools, ignoring the educational experience of teachers, the representation of parents and any planning and coordination input from local education authorities in each local area.

Part of the government's presentation of the Academies programme is that it supposedly will enable private money to help fund education, and by implication increase the overall pot of funds available to education. Leaving aside the whole issue that if more money is needed it could be raised by taxing the rich, the idea that helpful money is coming from other sources is nothing but spin. Firstly, the £2 million is in reality only £1.2 million, as these companies claim tax relief. Secondly, most donators in 2007 have yet to pay the money. Thirdly, the type of payments that have been made have largely been 'in kind', through such machinations as lending the schools the company's directors at a large consultancy fees, or supplying goods to the school which the company itself makes and which are then taken off the £1.2 million bill they are supposed to pay.

In reality, rather than money coming from business, the reverse is the case; large chunks of the government's education budget is being given away to these privatised schools, diverting funds that could go to developing all the other schools in the local area, and who continue to be starved of adequate funding to meet the educational needs of their students.

An example of this can be illustrated by comparing the capital cost for building a state-sector secondary school for 11-18 year olds - between £15 and £20 million. By contrast, City Academies are costing an average of £35 million, with the one at Bexley estimated to exceed £50 million. Precise costs are likely to be more, but are conveniently hidden, as the government refuses to release the details under the incredulous claim of 'commerical confidentiality'! However, recent leaks to a local paper in Blackburn has indicated that the new Darwen Academy, currently being built, is now estimated to cost around £49 million, some £15 million over the original budget. And figures published by the Sunday Telegraph in August 2007 indicate that the 106 current Academies, which make up just 1% of schools, received 8.2% of the capital school building project for schools in England and Wales.

Beckett also points out that, "A pupil's place at an Academy cost £21,000, almost twice as much as the cost of a pupil place at a state school, which is just under £14,000." At the same time, while local authority schools have restricted staffing numbers and resource budgets, Academies have been allowed free-rein to claim from the government's education budget, enabling them to boost staffing and year-by-year resources. However, evidence suggests that most of the additional staffing costs have gone on excessive pay for the senior executives of these new schools, and a higher proportion of classroom teachers have been placed on temporary contracts, undermining pay and pensions for ordinary teachers.

The example of the Bexley Academy illustrates the type of individual who now owns these schools. Bexley is owned by millionaire property developer, Sir David Garrard, who would have been Lord Garrard but for the cash for honours saga - he was personally recommended by Tony Blair for a peerage, but he later withdrew from the list as the honours crisis broke. Garrard gave a secret loan to the Labour Party of £2.3 million in 2005. But more significantly, he also funds the call centre at Conservative Central Office, which played a key role in the last general election hoping to secure a Conservative win. Garrard owns the company Minerva which, as Beckett points out, was given the go ahead by John Prescott, to build "the controversial Park Place shopping centre in Croydon, which will become one of the country's ten biggest shopping malls". Experience in education, zero. Sleazy influence with New Labour, probable!

Another main character is Sir Peter Vardy, who so far owns two Academies, but wants to own a whole lot more. He is a fundamentalist Christian and a secondhand car salesman who made it big, and now has some 98 dealerships with 6,000 employees. He is another close friend of Tony Blair and wants to teach creationism in his academy schools. It will not be surprising if, following the example of creationist controlled schools in the United States, that 'unsuitable' and irreligious books will be banned - although not openly burned. Reports have already leaked out that a school student at one of Vardy's Academies was disciplined for not carrying the Bible in their hands at designated times.

If the scandal of the financing and privatisation of education were not enough, in educational terms the Academies are also proving to be a failure. The point should have been rather obvious, that if you hand over the control of education to people who have no knowledge, skill or experience of education, they are not likely to do the job of running schools very well. Would you hire a carpenter to fix your gas central heating? Yet this is precisely what has occurred.

There has been a whole string of statistics and information produced that throws light on the doubtful educational practices in these academies. Far from developing cutting-edge education, evidence suggests that under the direction of the new owners, a 1950's style of teaching and learning is re-emerging, with electronic whiteboards merely replacing the blackboard as a surface to write and copy notes from.

One source of evidence indicating the extent of the poor quality of education in the Academies is the UNISON booklet, entitled Academies Called to Account. Quoted from by Beckett, it provides evidence using the government's own quality measures. The UNISON report indicates that in the 2004 GCSE tables, five of the eleven Academies showed no improvement, and one had the second worst results in England. There is also additional evidence suggesting that several of the Academies would have failed their school inspections for poor management and teaching quality had it not been for 'behind the scenes' pressure that they should be seen to be successful. Nevertheless, one academy was so bad that it was failed.

If these figures of the Academies' performance are considered alongside the huge funding and resources that these schools have received, the performance measured by OFSTED stands out even more starkly. The question should be asked: How much more could have been done by state sector schools and teachers if they had been given this money and resources? Many of the state sector schools are currently doing a fantastic job, with far less funding and in more difficult circumstances than the richly resourced academies.

However, when using these figures on 'performance' we should be clear that this data only illustrates failure based on the government's own criteria. Educationalists have, and continue to, dispute these false measures of educational quality which attempt to incorporate competition and a race for results; educationalists and teachers are convinced that they are detrimental to the educational development of children. Nevertheless, given the millions of pounds poured into these Academies, the government is faced with an end result that is an indictment on their own terms.

Overall Beckett's book performs a great agitational role in exposing the sleaze, corruption and educational failure of the Academies programme. The book has a series of case studies, a large number of facts, and interesting interviews with a range of people involved with Academies, including revealing quotes from those currently running some of the schools. The book, however, is far less effective in terms of proposing a way forward and in theorising the reasons for the development of this New Labour policy. Perhaps this is to be expected, as Beckett is primarily an investigative journalist; the book fits neatly into this type of reporting and is worth reading for this purpose. However, if you cannot afford to purchase the book (it retails for £15) or get it on loan from your local library, a significant amount of the data in the book can also be found online at the NUT website under campaigns/Academies in two documents titled: Academies: Looking beyond the Spin and Academies Briefing. Equally, a range of articles and information on local campaigns can be found on the Anti-Academies Alliance website: www.antiacademies.org.uk

Moving beyond the scandalous facts, as socialists, trade unionists and political activists we also need to evaluate why these policies were developed by New Labour, and then actively campaign to change the policy.

On the surface, the story of the City Academies reads like a sit-com of incompetent government ministers who haven't a clue what they are doing. Yet, this tragedy is underlined by a more serious intention: the policy is an attack on state education, and one that distorts the educational opportunities for children in the local areas where they are built. It shifts government money towards the privileged, but inefficient, Academy schools. But the policy is also the spearhead of New Labour's broader privatisation of state education; the Academies programme is the equivalent to the privatisation policies in the health service and local government services, and as such presents a major threat to state education.

It is of little surprise that the Tories have dumped the policy of creating new selective Grammar schools and announced their support for the Academies programme. In spite of the initial hostile responses to the Tory leadership's proposals from its own ranks, the anxieties of these less far-sighted Tories are misplaced; Grammar schools will continue, and will even be allowed to expand. The major drive to create a new selective system, however, will come through the Academies programme.

There are only 164 state-funded Grammar schools in England and Wales; there already exist over 100 Academies, and Ed Balls has recently announced proposals to create a further 400. The real future for selective education lies with the creation of a new national tripartite education system based upon independent Academies, each deciding their own curriculum and student admissions policy.

One Academy will be developed to be 'academic', another 'vocational', and the remaining, well let's call them 'the rest', will consist of the children that the academic and vocational Academies refuse to admit, or exclude as unacceptable. The first signs of this development are already present where two fee-paying schools, William Hulme's Grammar School in Manchester and Belvedere Girls School in Liverpool, have been accepted to run Academies stating that they will focus on 'academic' students. At the same time student exclusion rates from existing Academies are running at ten times the national average, with evidence of many more going unrecorded. Other Academies are being groomed as vocational centres. All this is possible because Academies do not have to deliver the National Curriculum and are free to design their own curriculum, with the governing body of each Academy appointed by the sponsor and unaccountable to the local community, parents or teachers.

Currently Academies are allowed to select 10% of their pupils, but this is the crest of a larger molehill. It is implicit in the structure of Academies that the percentage of students that are selected can be increased. It takes no stretch of the imagination to see that the creation of more Academies will allow the argument for greater selection, based on the 'differences between the academies'. The spin words will be 'children's aptitude', or 'choice', or even the meaningless term 'diversity'; but the reality will amount to selection, for it will not be parents who have the ability to choose, but the admission policies of the Academies.

The New Labour ideological vision sees the national state-owned education system done away with and replaced by this new model of independently run schools based on areas of specialism -academic, vocational and 'the rest'. The vision is the outcome of the broader New Labour ideology that society is best run by the market mechanism, with government playing a minimum role. However, it is not the parents or children who are the idealised consumers shopping in the market place; rather, the market mechanism of choice is operating to pick and choose which child is to be given an academic or vocational education. It is the Academies who will shop around for the choicest children.

Marxists will understand that this process is a reassertion of control by capital over the reproduction of labour. It works its way through into the policy of New Labour by their attachment and relationship to the idea of globalisation and the value of the market mechanism. New Labour can be seen as the mutated child of the Social Democratic right wing of the labour movement, and has consequently inherited the pragmatism of Social Democracy of accepting capitalism ‘as it is'. The rationale of Blair and Brown is clear: if Britain is to make its way in the world, then it needs to adapt to the requirements of capital. Although the actual words they use is that "Britain needs to modernise". Brown expressed these sentiments in his 2006 Foreword to the re-publication of Anthony Crosland's*, The Future of Socialism. After praising Crosland, he argues that the world has now changed and that: "Crosland was dealing with a sheltered economy in a pre-global age of national economies... Today globalisation is defined by cross-border flows of capital and the global sourcing of goods and services." The conclusion Brown draws is that Britain needs to develop a flexible and well-trained labour force. which New Labour engvisages as being created by an education system premised on independent Academies.

Part and parcel of the change in the delivery and system of education is also an attack on the conditions of employment of teachers and school staff. All Academies are allowed to set their own pay, conditions and working time arrangements, regardless of national union agreements. Again, by making each Academy a separate institution, the government claims each as an individual employer. The result of this will be similar to the destruction of the Silver Book conditions in Further Education employment. Under the Academy system, the School's Burgundy Book conditions of employment will disappear.

Currently, teachers transferred from the schools closed when the Academies are opened are covered under employment legislation and have their previous pay and conditions protected. However, these members of staff are a minority, and the legislation does not cover any new staff or replacement for these staff when they leave, nor does it cover any Academy that was created without a specific school closing. The independent Academies can change the conditions of service of teachers, including pay scales and pension rights whenever they like. Current experience is not looking good, with a larger than average number of staff on short-term 6-month contracts, with corresponding loss of security of employment and sickness benefits. Equally, there is only union recognition in some of the Academies, with strong evidence of an anti-union stance generally by Academies' governing bodies.

The extension of the Academies programme will effectively be an attack by the government on nationally negotiated union agreements, creating a large number of schools operating under conditions which ignore agreed pay and conditions. As the number of Academies grows, the ability of teachers to avoid employment in Academies will diminish, and correspondingly increase the power of the Academies' governing boards. Teachers are therefore facing a potentially bleak future of struggles to maintain their conditions of employment.

The NUT is rightly at the forefront of opposition against the Academies programme, alongside many local groups which have sprung up in opposition to the creation of Academies, to the closure of existing community schools or to the diverting of funds away from existing schools in order to build the plush Academies.

However, the shape of the battle against the Academies programme needs to involve a range of strategies, including involvement in local struggles to stop the creation of Academies, the building of union membership within individual Academies and a wider political struggle to turn the Labour Party back to its roots and wrest control and power away from the neo-conservative infiltrators of New Labour who currently control the leadership of the Labour Party.

Within the broader labour movement we need to refocus on and campaign for an alternative education policy. We need to demand a well-resourced, comprehensive, state-funded education system that includes democratic participation and control by teachers, school staff, parents, students and local education authorities in the running of all schools.

 * Anthony Crosland was one of the main Social Democratic thinkers in the Labour Party between the 1950s and 1970s. Along with other right wing thinkers such as Hugh Dalton and earlier, Evan Durbin, he attempted to turn the Labour Party further away from a socialist policy and programme than it already was at that time.