‘Little robots’: behind the scenes at an academy school
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New research from the Faculty of Education lifts the lid on an influential academy school, and finds an authoritarian system that reproduces race and class inequalities.
Structure liberates: the ethos behind one of England’s flagship academy schools.
Designed as an engine of social mobility, this school drills ‘urban children’ for the grades and behaviour considered a passport to the world of middle-class salaries and sensibilities.
The headline-grabbing exam results of this school have led politicians to champion its approach as a silver bullet for entrenched poverty, and ‘structure liberates’ has become the blueprint for recent urban education reform.
The school’s recipe has now been replicated many times through academy trusts that have spread like ‘modern-day missionaries’ across the nation, says Dr Christy Kulz, a Leverhulme Research Fellow at Cambridge’s Faculty of Education. Shortly after it opened, Kulz was granted permission to conduct fieldwork in the school, where she ha...
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