SCHOOL IS FAMILY: a metaphor too far for Academies? Martin Edwardes King’s College London martin.edwardes@btopenworld.com http://martinedwardes.webplus.net/ Contents Abstract ....................................................................................................................................... 1 School is family ............................................................................................................................ 1 SCHOOL IS FAMILY ....................................................................................................................... 2 School is Academy ....................................................................................................................... 4 Academy is not family ................................................................................................................. 5 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................... 7 References ................................................................................................................................... 8 Abstract The Academy school programme, initially a Labour government project, has been enthusiastically promoted by the current coalition government – making it a policy which, unusually, has had the support of all three major UK parties. While the Academy programme has largely been successful in educational terms, it has remained within the pre-existing ethos of school management, an ethos that has been developed and refined over more than 100 years, and which should not – and cannot – be arbitrarily replaced. The Academy is still a school, and its primary role remains the successful transition of students from childhood to adulthood. As a system for bringing up children, its role resembles that of the family; and in the current social environment it has increasingly undertaken tasks that traditionally were family-based: sex education, social and cultural education, and even morality training. The SCHOOL IS FAMILY metaphor has been productive and effective, and it describes the management systems that work best at schools: the teachers act in loco parentis to the students, and the head teacher acts in loco parentis to the teachers. Academy schools, however, have a range of new tasks that were formerly undertaken by local authority education departments. The Academies therefore have a new type of employee whose commitment is primarily to their role in the organisation, and not directly to the process of education. These employees often come from industries which operate in a more democratic way; so how do they adapt to the SCHOOL IS FAMILY system, and how does it adapt to them? This paper looks at the changing nature of the secondary education organisation, and considers whether the management paradigm of SCHOOL IS FAMILY is still effective for Academy schools. School is family The idea that a school is like a family is an old concept, an obvious comparison based on the convergence of their roles. In educational terms, though, it is nowadays considered somewhat