Blair Sells Kids' Brains To Car Dealer

Blair Sells Kids' Brains To Car Dealer

Although Britons might be just waking up to the idea that their army is firing faith based bullets at Iraqis, many have been concerned for some time that their children's education is being handed over to Blair's evangelical friends. This threat to British kids' brains can, indeed, be found in the Labour Manifesto. Page 37 contains the innocuous seeming...

"We strongly support the new Academies movement. Seventeen of these independent non-selective schools are now open within the state system; their results are improving sharply, and 50 more are in the pipeline. Within the existing allocation of resources our aim is that at least 200 Academies will be established by 2010 in communities where low aspirations and low performance are entrenched."

Now for those unfamiliar with Academies (or "City Academies" as they were originally called), they are an innovation of New Labour's education reforms and they work something like this. If you are an individual, charity or miscellaneous organisation with couple of million quid in your pocket, you can invest in a "failing" state school somewhere in urban Britain. In return for your, relatively, modest contribution the state will supply tens of millions of pounds to knock down the old school buildings and replace them with a state-of-the-art shiny new "Academy". You then get to choose which teachers to employ and which kids to teach. Crucially, unlike your state school neighbours, you won't be burdened with having to stick to the national curriculum and can use alternatives like the American import: Accelerated Christian Education (ACE).

Enter Peter Vardy, Christian fundamentalist former car dealer, educational entrepreneur and friend of Tony Blair. His Emmanuel Trust already runs several schools in the North of England and is just itching to get its hands on more "failing" schools and turn them into places where every teacher is a "full-time Christan worker". The people behind the Emmanuel Trust believe, for instance, that "homosexuality is against God's design" and that religious "truths" should be given equal weight alongside scientific fact.

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