The teaching cabal

Those of you who live on this tiny island will be aware that the Secretary of State for Education Nicky Morgan was roundly heckled the other day addressing the Teachers Conference regarding the need to change all Primary Schools currently controlled by Local Government into Academies. Although the funding will still be from government, the actual control of the school on matters such as hiring and firing of teachers, the actual allocation of the budget and crucially the curriculum will be in the hand of the Headmaster.
Our schools are failing the children and society. We are falling well behind other comparable countries in terms of exam results which is a scandal given that the basic infrastructure has had so much money thrown at it in the last 15 years, specifically in building refurbishment.
There seems to be three major issues :-
Large classes (immigration plays a part).
Poor parental guidance (the parents are the embodiment of the continuing failure to educate and give these people aspiration).
The teachers themselves who seem caught in an ideological mindset where, for instance discipline is rejected for the laudatory but often illusory ideal of winning hearts and minds by other methods.
Teachers have always been a rum lot. I suppose assimilating your day with young juvenile minds makes you slightly off balance when it comes to adult judgement but the incessant call for the rights of children, irrespective of whether the kids understand that with rights go responsibilities, has skewed the relationship between pupil and teacher.
You go to school to learn was always the diktat in my day and if the teacher had to emphases this with corporal punishment so be it.
Today this is an anathema. We have to win them (the children) over and convince them that it's all in their best interest. For many it's enough, they understand the need for education and the pathway it provides in adulthood for a better standard of living, but there are a significant minority who come from sinkhole estates and dysfunctional families, who cause such disruption in class and school and were the teacher is severely limited in what they can do, short of calling the police, who themselves have to tread a minefield regarding their own actions.
Self serving Politicians, as always seeking to impress their own views, have hit on the idea that Academies are the answer.
By localising control, the actions will, it is assumed be tailored to suite local conditions and therefore more effective. It has the ring of common sense in that the conditions of each school vary so much that a blanket solution is impossible. The counter argument that breaking the centralising grip on schooling will leave the school system open for a drip drip privatisation of our schools without the clout that the large school fees bring to the "Public School" system.
Divide and rule comes to my skeptical mind since real independence would be on very shaky ground with funding still in the hands of the central paymaster.
Just to boor you all again I refer you to my suggestion to the Education department 5 years ago when I suggested the schools should grasp the nettle and use technology to a greater extent.
One of the greatest innovations in education was the creation of the Open University by Harold Wilsons Government. I was amazed at how a properly designed teaching system could teach even a dullard like me how to visualise the interconnectivity between maths and physics, how each held the others hand, how through superb audio visual graphical representation the pennies began to drop in my mind which had up until then never seen, nor was it possible to show on a blackboard, the cross-over between mathematical theorem's and the forces at play in for -instance engineering. My plea to the educational establishment was to use the facility of the Open University and pump lectures down the fibre network into the classroom each day  specific bullet points for the teacher to act as moderator, emphasising the message through further discussion. All schools have the ability, through their interactive white boards and the Internet connection to begin to focus teaching not through an array of variable teaching ability but on the gold standard of the OU
My letter to the Education Department, and it covered a range of issues, was answered in a polite "we thank you for" and whilst their reply did address some of my ideas, this idea, to centralise lessons was a bridge too far. Centralise the lessons meant bypassing to some extent the autonomy of the teacher so, irrespective of its benefit, it was denied on ideological grounds.