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Published: 3 February, 2012

The news that City of London Academy is failing disastrously, with fewer than a third of its pupils getting grades A-C in five GCSEs, is sad but not surprising.

The school was built on a toxic mix of narrow political dogmatism, political spite and politically inspired lies.

I’m sure its teachers have tried hard to make it work.

But politicians of all parties ensured that that the odds were stacked against them.

It was Islington’s misfortune that, when New Labour took power in 1997, the borough was home to Tony Blair and Andrew Adonis.

The amount of direct government interference in Islington’s educational affairs, often coming right from the top in Downing Street, was extraordinary.

The academy’s predecessor, Islington Green School, had caused Blair embarrassment when he decided instead to send his own sons to the other side of London, to London Oratory School.

As soon as Blair became Prime Minister, the school was inspected by Ofsted.

The inspectors passed the school. But Ofsted chief (and Blair ally) Chris Woodhead, without visiting the school, overruled them, and instructed them to report that the school had failed its inspection.

This made the Blairs’ decision for their own children look less like mere snobbery, and provided an excuse for Blair and Adonis to try out their preferred solution for all schools, which was to privatise them and call them academies.

These, unlike  Islington Green School, would not be in any way answerable to the local community.

The Ofsted judgment looked for a while as though it might be self-fulfilling, as such judgments often are.

But the school recovered to become once again the highest achieving mixed school in Islington in the value added tables.

Islington missed out on the first round of Building Schools for the Future money, mainly because it had no plans for an academy.

Its ruling Liberal Democrat councillors realised that unless they agreed to go down the academy route, they would be forced to watch Islington’s schools decay from lack of money.

The school had no chance to build on its successful recovery.

It was told that its £260,000 deficit, which was to be paid off over several years, must now be paid off in two years, before the school closed and the academy opened.

About 14 teachers were made redundant so that the money could be paid.

Class sizes rose sharply.

A good school in a poor area was being vandalised before the academy was even agreed.

The government seems to have decided on a scorched earth policy.

Parents and teachers all wanted the school to stay open. Politicians and the big companies that sponsor academies wanted it shut, and replaced by an academy.

It was a triumph of the political class over the people they are supposed to represent.

They blew into Islington, implemented the pet scheme of both the Conservative Party and New Labour.

And they left behind them a failing school, without pride of ancestry or hope of posterity.

• Francis Beckett is a writer and journalist and author of The Great Academies Fraud. His play The London Spring will be peformed at the Etcetera Theatre in March.