Academy plan for Sheffield's King Edward's is a bad joke to former pupil and comic Graham Fellows

Graham, who attended King Edward VII School in Broomhill, Sheffield, from 1970 to ‘77, said he ‘hates academies’.

Asked what his nerdish, keyboard-playing, alter-ego John Shuttleworth would make of them, he said: “He would probably like them. John‘s comedy is based on him championing things that are naff or in bad taste – like academies.”

KES, the last local authority-run secondary school in Sheffield, is being ordered to become an academy after Ofsted inspectors claimed safeguarding was ‘inadequate’. That judgement meant leadership and management were automatically rated ‘inadequate’, leading to an overall ‘inadequate’ for the school and a forced academisation directive from the Department for Education.

Last month more than 500 parents and children held a demonstration on the steps of Sheffield City Hall, and handed a petition of 3,000 names to the DfE.

Graham, aged 63, who was brought up on Beech Hill Road in Broomhill, signed the petition with the words: “I used to attend the school and know how great it is – as it is!”

The actor and musician said KES – old school of other famous alumni including journalists Emily Maitlis and Julia Bradbury, Joe Elliott from Def Leppard, and Paul Heaton of the Housemartins – had ‘a great mix of kids from all demographics’ and helped him discover his love of theatre.

“I did a lot of drama and performed in lots of plays,” he recalled. “I was in Hobson’s Choice with Matthew Bannister, the BBC radio controller. I did lots of public speaking and debating, and I was on the rugby team until I realised it was all a bit rough for me and you could get your collarbone broken.

“All the teachers were great: Margaret Ward and Nick Jones my English teachers, Norman Barnes who taught music. The head, Russ Sharrock, was a very clever, compassionate man, who always found time to talk to you. I really liked the Latin teacher, David Stead, too, despite the fact he taught Latin.”

Graham said he had personal experience of academisation after his son George’s school, in Lincolnshire, was turned into an academy whilst he was there.

Cordeaux School in Louth became Cordeaux Academy and, later, transferred from one multi-academy trust to another. It is now part of a MAT of 5,000 pupils across Lincolnshire.

“My son noticed a change straightaway,” said Graham, who splits his time between Louth, Leicester, and a former chapel on the isle of Orkney. “George is 21 now but he had mild ADHD, he often didn’t want to go to school, he was branded a trouble-maker, he got excluded.“That’s what happens. He didn’t fit into the smooth running of the machine that school had become.”

Graham added: “The academy system is based on private enterprise and profit before education, and it is wrong. I don’t like money being put before education. I don’t like academies. For a start it’s an American word and it feels American.

“How can a school get better by becoming an academy? Most of the time the people running academies aren’t even teachers but businesspeople. I absolutely endorse the campaign to prevent it happening to KES.”

A proposal to pair KES with the Brigantia trust – which runs five schools in north Sheffield, two of which ‘require improvement’ – has now been paused until the summer while the DfE conducts a ‘comparative analysis of additional multi-academy trusts’.

A DfE spokeswoman said: “As with any school that receives an overall judgement of inadequate, King Edward VII will become an academy and be transferred to a strong trust.”