IT is most surprising to see some Wiltshire Secondary Schools going for academy status without examining carefully the support infrastructure they will swap for Wiltshire Local Authority.

In last month's Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee report on academies, the Department for Education admitted "that employing sufficient people with the right skills was an increasingly tough challenge, particularly in the context of the Department as a whole having to make a 33 per cent reduction in its administrative budget."

Late last year the National Audit Office found "Forty-seven per cent of academies responding to our survey felt that the Department's budgeting and forecasting were either not very useful or not at all useful."

Going it alone and opting for academy status could well end up being exactly that - with all the fun of accessing a distant call centre when there is a problem!

Never has the saying "A leap in the dark" seemed more appropriate! Academies are a desperate attempt to resurrect the failed grant maintained schools policy. When all LEA schools were forced by law to consider the grant maintained option, 99.5 per cent decided they were not interested.

Moving to grant maintained status required a parental ballot. Remembering numerous parental rejections, the government now gives the decision to a small, largely self-appointed clique of governors. There is no requirement to take parental views into account.

This is despite Academy status taking schools away from local community control and placing them in the hands of a largely unelected small group, unaccountable to its local community.

D M COLCOMB Roundway Park Devizes