Scraping The Bottom Of The (Biscuit) Barrel...

The Guardian's obsession with academies marches on, forever dragging up reasons for them to be considered not just unwelcome, but somehow dangerous to comprehensives schools, like they were nuclear reactors with poor containment:

Many academies have covertly selected pupils for years in ways that the despised state schools that preceded them were not able to do, and then trumpeted improved results as though they were due to the academy idea unleashing dear old Greatness. They have to abide by an admissions code, but everyone in the trade knows ways round it. Others have been using their greater power to exclude pupils as a way of clearing out difficult children.

And yet parents don't seem to see this as a bad thing. How odd! They can't seem to see the 'danger' they are un!

By using their power to select covertly, academies promote the creation of two classes of school: the "good" schools, the academies, and the sink schools, run by the local authority. Give academies another couple of decades, and we will have revived the long-discredited secondary moderns.

AIEEEEEEEEE!!!!!

However, in their desire to find sticks with which to beat academies, I think they might have jumped the shark here:

More than a million children at academies and free schools could be eating unhealthy lunches because those institutions are exempt from tough food standards, council leaders have warned.

Note the usual weasel words - 'could be'.

Academies and free schools which opt out of national regulations are failing in their moral duty to ensure pupils receive healthy dinners, according to the Local Government Association (LGA).

Schools have 'moral duties' now? Gosh! Really?

David Simmonds, chairman of LGA's children and young people board, said: "School autonomy is supposed to drive up standards but in the case of school meals, we now have a two-tier system where one type of school can effectively exempt pupils from healthy choices and instead sell fatty and sugary foods. This threatens to seriously impact on the health and educational attainment of our children.

"We now need government to do its part by introducing an acceptable food standard that will allow councils to hold all schools to account for the nutritional quality of food they serve their pupils."

Well, since they loathe the very idea of choice in the school you send your child to itself, it's no surprise they'd be desperate to disallow any chance that your child might have some choice within that school that's not open to those under their own control, is it?