A number of those concerned at the "academisation" of King's Manor Community College engaged Mr Loughton in a discussion about the whole exercise.

Clearly, Mr Loughton and his Tory party colleagues are in favour of the proposal and there was very little meeting of minds as a consequence, but when we categorised the proposal as the privatisation of secondary education, Mr Loughton vehemently disagreed, declaring that this was not about turning the school into a profit-making enterprise.

Now, it is clear that the privatisation programme pursued by both Tory and New Labour governments has resulted in the sell-off of whole swathes of the public sector to organisations devoted primarily to extracting as much profit as possible from these industries, the gas and electricity generators and distributors being the most obvious examples of how pernicious that process has been.

But to say that the fact that the United Learning Trust, the organisation earmarked to take over King's Manor, is a charity, is a non-profit-making body and that, therefore, the whole transfer process is not a privatisation, is to ignore other fundamental aspects of the privatisation process.

The school will be taken out of the control of the local authority and put into the hands of a private organisation that has a similar structure to a private, profit-making body.

This controlling body will be able to take decisions about the curriculum, the structure, the staffing arrangements, the admissions policy, the exclusions policy and, of course, the finances, and, while having to consult with the local authority, does not have to report to the local authority.

There will be a governing body, but that body will not enjoy the same level of democratic control by parents, staff and local authority governors that schools remaining in the state sector are entitled to.

And, as we have seen with the previous candidate, the Woodard Corporation, the sponsor will enjoy a pre-eminent role in determining who remains, or takes up, the role of the head.

This control comes at a price tag of £2million, which secures the sponsor massive public funding currently being withheld while the school remains under local authority control.

So, it might well be that there is no overt profit-making activity by the sponsor, but there are a considerable number of attributes to the takeover which make it virtually indistinguishable from privatisation.

As one of your previous correspondents has remarked, how many privatisations have worked to the benefit of ordinary citizens like ourselves?

S. J. Guy
Southview Road
Southwick

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