IT was depressing to read that Trinity High School has become an Academy (Advertiser, September 7), not only because this is profoundly undemocratic but because it is the first step in creating a two-tier education system within Redditch.

Even though the taxpayer will continue to pay for the school, it can now go it’s own way on admissions policy, sell off school land and property, opt out of a supposedly national curriculum and is exempt for the Freedom of Information Act.

Not one teachers’ organisation or union supports this.

Academies will widen social division by returning to ‘grammar vs secondary modern’ days, when those in the latter were written off and considered factory/dole fodder.

Academy schools on average take 40 per cent fewer poorer students, so Michael Gove’s ‘back to the future’ agenda is already having a negative effect. It is shameful that Worcestershire County Council is complicit in this piece of social engineering, allowing half the county’s secondary schools to simply opt out of community or democratic accountability. Have they done this for their own narrow ideological reasons or are they just incompetent?

Our education service is owned by, paid for, and belongs to all of us, yet the fruit of generations of public investment in education is now being deliberately sold off to profiteers.

I would urge parents, governors and headteachers to resist bribes and inducements to convert to Academy status; we need more democracy and accountability, not less, and to recognise education is both a fundamental human right and essential public service; not a commodity.

Stephen Smith Feckenham