EMMA BERRY of Springtide, Stoke Fleming, writes:
I attended both the Consultation Workshop and the so called Anti-Academies Talk to get a balanced view of changing Dartmouth Learning Campus into an academy to try and get some understanding.
I believed that we could have some say whether this change was likely to go ahead. What a joke! The so-called consultation and information workshop in the Dart Centre offered only an overview into academies.
No questions were listened to or even asked, at which point no-one had any real understanding into what this change was likely to mean to our children and their education.
The following week I attended the consultation at the Flavel chaired by the Teachers' Union with an Anti-Academies guest speaker. This meeting was far more informative but was poorly attended, with only a handful of parents, teachers and, I think, one governor, and no local council members attended - they obviously have already made up their minds.
During this meeting we were told we would have no say in any decisions and that there is no educational justification for Dartmouth becoming an Academy.
They say that the government wants each county to have a least one academy and Devon has decided that its academy should be Dartmouth. This is being proposed for reasons of politics not education.
My major concern is that once the government has washed their hands of our Learning Campus and sold us down the river, there is no going back, we will belong to the private sector.
This proposal is rushed and flawed. There has been no consultation process.
Fifty-nine per cent of these academies are failing. We don't want to be another statistic, so keep your experiments and let them run, lets see what happens long term.
Our campus is not broken so it doesn't need a quick fix. We have been led to believe if we don't accept this academy we face closure.
To me this sounds like blackmail. So, let us put this decision to a democratic ballot and we should let the parents and teachers have their say.