Academies and the rise of the 'education services market'

'Finland's experience shows that it is possible to achieve excellence (in education) by focusing not on competition, but on cooperation, and not on choice, but on equity’, writes Anu Partanen in the Atlantic magazine, comparing its success with the failed marketised model in the USA. Unfortunately, it’s the latter which is the blueprint for the Con Dem’s burgeoning academies programme in England: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-americans-keep-ignoring-about-finlands-school-success/250564/

The vested interests driving the Coalition government’s Academies reforms and the disastrous consequences for state education and the local authorities which provide services to schools were laid bare by Seumas Milne in the Guardian yesterday: ‘A £2bn education services market stands to grow more than tenfold as a result of schools privatisation. But the multiple failings of English schools won't be overcome by creating an unaccountable, corporate-branded patchwork siphoning off public funds’
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/feb/14/crony-capitalism-corporate-schools