Today the press is full of the news trumpeted by the pro-Academy lobby that "one in ten schools now academies". You can see the full details here at the Academy Network site: http://tinyurl.com/36j9o9p . Apart from the dubious English of the headline, the maths doesn't work either. The text confesses that it's only one in ten secondary schools, but the headline deliberately misleads.
If you add in all schools in England (25,000) it isn't 10%. it's actually 0.16% (407 divided by 25,000) Oops! Not quite such a roaring success.
I asked the Academy Network to change their headline, and so far they have corrected their twitter on it, but not the website, blaming the headline taken from the BBC (http://tinyurl.com/3yfrve4). Other lazy journalists, including the Guardian (http://tinyurl.com/3xo9x4n) have just used "one in ten". To be fair to Michael Gove and the Department of Education, their press statement is much more considered and makes it plain that it is only secondary schools they are talking about.
So this story actually turns into an extremely good news story for the vast majority of schools, 99.8% of which are happy to remain within their local arrangements, whether local authority or church/faith grouping.
