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The academies bill is casual law-making by arbitrary diktat that will fail the poorest and fuel the rise of faith schools

The academies bill

Everyone should be concerned at pressing questions left unanswered with no committee for detailed scrutiny. Michael Gove ducks and dives, blustering aggressively and attacking the BBC as a way to avoid answers. But alarming holes in the bill show this is an idea, an ideology, not a fully formed plan.

The 1,038 schools expressing an interest in becoming academies can only discover financial details by signing up and typing into the website details of their budget and pupils. Very small print says they will have to fund all local authority services for themselves, to include insurance, transport, food, legal and other services. So it is hard to tell if they would really gain. Tellingly, some local authorities inputting all their schools discovered the total amount to be paid out exceeded their total budget. The sums don't add up â€" which shows how badly the schools left behind will lose out.

Yet again there is a distinct sense of policy being made on the hoof. Gove told the Today programme that every new academy must take a struggling school under its wing. But it turns out that nothing in the bill says so. In the FAQ section of the Department for Education's website, The answer is no, it 's not necessary before the status of the Academy. Becoming the Academy is the expectation, but without a framework to make it happen: many rich areas, it never will.

Expect exclusions to increase, as schools will be able to keep their funding for the year for pupils they exclude, instead of handing it over to whoever takes in that child. Ministers say this will "remove the disincentive to exclude" â€" but how perverse to add a very strong financial incentive to throw out those who risk lowering an academy's standards. Gone will be Ed Balls's present behaviour partnerships, where academies agree with local schools to take in each others' excluded children. Nor does the bill mention appeals panels for the excluded. These were brought in by the previous Conservative government to prevent mushrooming court cases: are the courts to fill up again with judicial reviews of headteachers' decisions?

Faith schools are likely to boom, in this most secular of nations. An ICM poll for The British Humanist Association â€" of which I am president â€" finds 72% of people concerned at academies being set up by religious organisations. So far 273 faith schools are bidding to become academies, free to teach creationism or any nonsense they like. In the Lords, Baroness Murphydescribed one example: "Take, for example Ebrahim Academy in Whitechapel , an academy school for boys … The school day begins with tahfeez, which is reciting the Qur'an and getting the pronunciation right, which takes up half the day. Then the national curriculum takes up the second half of the day. It is a state-funded, tax-funded madrasa for the Islamic faith."

So what did the education minister reply? "One of the core aims of the policy is precisely that the secretary of state should not dictate to academies what they should teach … I fully accept that if you trust people things do go wrong, but that is the direction that we want to try to go in." Remember, there will be no Ofsted inspections of academies, unless their exam results plummet. We will never know what goes on.

One clause prevents a new faith academy ever turning secular. Naomi Phillips, head of public affairs at the BHA, warns some community schools may turn religious as they become academies, in the grip of local religious leaders among their governors. All this is at the whim of the secretary of state, who has encouraged private religious schools to apply, even if they are not "outstanding". CofE, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, Buddist and Sathya Sai Baba schools have all applied. See how many of the new free schools will be set up by religious groups who have more money and professional organisation than parents.

And other studies confirm - they are socially isolated children with higher academic performance and less on free school meals.

Yesterday Ed Balls led the attack in the Commons, amid a protest outside by some of the 700 schools with rebuilding funds confiscated to pay for the new free schools. This bill will accelerate the social segregation of children â€" a well-documented phenomenon that worsened under Labour. Under the coalition, money may flow increasingly towards better schools as deprived children congregate in deprived schools. The Institute for Fiscal Studies shows how plans for a pupil premium for poorer children perversely risk redistributing to better off areasfrom places such as Tower Hamlets, which now receives nearly twice as much per capita as leafy districts. Labour has made to improve schools, and GCSE results was slightly less class related. Everything in this bill proposes a course in another direction.

The unscrutinised passage of this bill, with so many questions unanswered and such absolute power given to Gove, is an alarming augury of this government's style of policymaking. Contrary to everything Cameron said about giving power back to parliament and decentralising decision-making to local people, this is casual law-making by arbitrary diktat.