By Councillor Jeff Hanna, Merton Council's chairman of the children and young people scrutiny panel (Labour, Pollards Hill ward)
As a governor of William Morris Primary School, may I congratulate Merton Council's officers on negotiating the federation with Singlegate School, enabling outstanding headteacher Natalie Bull to manage both schools, and resulting in William Morris moving from special measures to its current Ofsted rating of ‘Good’.
This is an exceptional achievement.
My thanks of course to Ms Bull and her staff for all their hard work, but, without the intervention of our education officers, it would never have been possible.
This success story makes the Conservative approach to Merton’s schools, declared at our last council meeting, all the more astonishing.
They want all of our schools to become stand alone academies, removing each and every school from the Merton family.
Schools would become separate, isolated units. Merton Council would have no further influence on standards. Indeed Merton would lose the funding needed to employ the education officers who currently serve us so well.
Academy status is right for some schools, but as part of a well established consortium, as is Harris Merton.
Again and again, headteachers and governors have told me how much they value being part of Merton.
The Conservatives blindly ignore the fact that our schools do not want the isolation of academy status, but have remained loyally within the Merton family of schools, precisely because they recognise its benefits.
Similarly, parents in Merton do not want the Council’s involvement with our schools to be so fatally and irreparably terminated.
May I therefore urge your readers to seek to persuade Merton’s Conservative councillors of the value of the vast majority of our schools being Merton schools, of Merton Council being accountable for standards in those schools, and of Merton Council education officers continuing to support, advise and facilitate real improvement where it is needed, as so eloquently demonstrated by the William Morris success story, and indeed elsewhere in the borough.
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