The new school comparison tool on the Department for Education’s website is a pretty useful tool; it gives parents a chance to easily compare schools in a variety of ways. You can compare results, spend-per-pupil, Ofsted reports and so forth.
One thing it most obviously illustrates is that there is no spending data for academies — and presumably won’t be for free schools too. I think the “spend-per-pupil information” section is very useful because you can see how much schools are spending on their teaching staff, supply staff, catering and so on and compare with other schools who’ve released this data. I am all for parents asking schools about this issue; if it’s obvious that a school is spending comparatively little on teaching staff compared with administration then perhaps questions need to be asked. But clearly this can’t be done in the case of academies.
talesbehindtheclassroomdoor 
Now *that* is very interesting (and significant).
Thanks for raising this, Francis. It begs the important (and obvious) question: why are academies (and, presumably, free schools, too) not being subjected to the same scrutiny as local authority schools?
Exactly. It is a real issue.
Indeed, it is. I think we’re agreed that this is a vastly more important question than whether or not there might be any correlation between children’s bag-packing and academic achievement.
But then what’s disappointing, then, is that, on this *real* issue, you haven’t (yet) offered any opinion, e.g. ‘the government doesn’t dare subject academies to equal scrutiny because … ‘, ‘academies vastly outperform LA schools making scrutiny redundant’.
Whereas, with the trivial ‘subject’ of bag-packing, you +are+ prepared to stick your neck out and assert that there is a correlation and that it would be a worthwhile topic of research.
I think it depends from what perspective you’re coming from. I’m sure the bag issue is not that relevant to anyone who is not a pupil with a very heavy bag, but for such pupils it is an important one. One of the purposes of good ethnographic research is to give a voice to the marginalised; an educational ethnographer could do worse than look into this issue in my opinion. The issue of transparency is something a group of us at the Local Schools Network have been campaigning for, for a while…http://www.localschoolsnetwork.org.uk/campaigns/transparency-academies-freeschools/