Margaret Asquith, writing in the Bolton Scene, makes a very good case for scrapping the academies scheme.

If the academies are going to be so little different from the schools they replace (apart from the promised new buildings, and if the Government can afford these it can afford them), same children, same teachers on the same pay scales, same local authority involvement, curriculum design that conforms to the same legislation as does that in other schools, there is no need for the council to force through this unwanted change.

Unless, of course, there is some hidden agenda.

Unless there is something that we are not being told.

And it is this “something” that we have to fear.

This apparently innocuous change, which is being sold to us at great expense to our council tax funds, but which, we are told, will leave everything the same except that there will be miraculous improvements in educational attainment, has to arouse our suspicion.

What is it that we are not being told?

Dave and Rachel Mann, Burnside Road, Bolton