THE controversial introduction of city academies is starting to reverse decades of educational failure, a report today indicates.

Jacqui Smith, the Minister for School Standards, told The Times that the report showed the Government was right to press on with its plan to open 200 academies by 2010 at a cost of £5 billion. She said that children in the most deprived urban areas could not afford to wait “whilst a high-level ideological debate” took place.

The report, by the accountants PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC), will boost Tony Blair’s mission to reform the education system. He has urged ministers to go on the offensive after an analysis of the first 11 academies showed high levels of parental satisfaction with their children’s education, and improvements in discipline and attendance. Most of the new schools are heavily oversubscribed.

The Times has been told that the report also highlights the impact of private sponsors in raising aspirations at academies, many of which replaced failing comprehensives with a history of poor results. Mr Blair is a passionate advocate of the academies and his former chief policy advisor Lord Adonis, now an education minister, attracted unpopularity on the Left for his advocacy of them. The report will be seen as a vindication for his stance.

The report’s assessment of academic standards is more mixed, however, noting that while GCSE results since 2002 had improved in six academies, they had not in the other five. The Department for Education and Skills (DfES), which publishes the study today, is also issuing a response highlighting the academies’ record in national curriculum tests of English, mathematics and science for 14-year-olds.

This showed that pass rates at the 11 academies were an average nine percentage points better than those of their predecessor schools in English and maths. Nationally, there was an improvement of six percentage points in English and seven in maths over the same period.

The Government’s programme has come under intense scrutiny in recent months, with a critical report from the Commons Education and Skills Select Committee and threats from teaching unions to fight proposals for new academies. The Unity City Academy in Middlesbrough was failed by Ofsted inspectors last month.

The Labour-dominated committee had urged the Government in March to halt the programme until it could demonstrate that academies represented the best use of public money. It said in a report: “We fail to understand why the DfES is putting such substantial resources into academies when it has not produced the evidence on which to base the expansion of this programme.”

Teaching unions also oppose the involvement of private companies as sponsors of academies, which are state-funded schools. Sponsors are handed control of the governing body in return for investing up to £2 million towards the building costs of academies, which cost around £25 million each.

Ms Smith said: “What this report shows is that academies are beginning to have an impact on standards and that the sort of prerequisites that are necessary for greater standards are in place.

“They have parental support, high aspirations, a focus on behaviour and are orderly schools, which were problems in the predecessor schools.

“Large numbers of parents, pupils and staff believe that academies have high aspirations for their children and are helping to deliver them in contrast to the schools they replaced.”

Ms Smith acknowledged that “more work needs to be done”, adding: “I don’t think it will happen overnight but there have been some pretty big transformations in these schools. This reinforces our arguments that we were right to focus on the areas of greatest disadvantage where standards were not good enough.”

George Cameron, the Shadow Education Secretary, said that he welcomed the initiative. “City academies follow on from the city technology colleges that the Tories set up,” he said. “What matters is not just that they receive extra resources but also that they have proper autonomy and devolution of power. They cannot be just old comprehensives with a new lick of paint.”

PwC found that 87 per cent of parents were satisfied with the education their children were receiving, and 80 per cent of those with pupils about to start at an academy had made it their first choice.

There was no evidence that academies were having an adverse impact on neighbouring schools by creaming off bright pupils, as some teaching unions contended.

Ability levels of children at age 11 were lower in academies than in other local schools, yet they were raising standards more quickly.

PwC’s report is the second of five annual reports commissioned by the DfES to monitor the effectiveness of academies.

DOING BETTER

• They are not bound by the national curriculum
  
  
• Private sponsors give around £2 million towards establishing an academy and in return have a large say over the curriculum and staff. The DfES meets the running costs
  
  
• The average cost of an academy is £25 million
  
  
• The Government aims to create 200 academies by 2010, at a cost of £5 billion

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