Academies: education’s Brexit policy

This was a piece originally written for a non-specialist audience. So bear with me as I describe an academies policy with which many of you are, of course, familiar.

It is a huge set of structural changes, embraced by Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings and taking many years to enact on a nationwide scale.

It is having profound impacts on the ground, with implications which will far outlast these political actors. It continues to provoke intense for-and-against debate. But you will barely see it mentioned by most of the parties at this election.

Although much of the above applies to Brexit, in fact the phenomenon under discussion here is the academies policy, through which the control of half of the state-funded schools in England has quietly been changed, in most cases over the past 14 years.

The policy was launched under Tony Blair’s government in 2000, as a small-scale initiative aimed mainly at turning round inner-city secondary schools which had struggled for many years. Governance structures were overhauled so that individuals – often wealthy “sponsors” – were given complete charge and handed freedom over curricula and teachers’ pay and conditions. These schools left the auspices of their local authorities, seemingly permanently, to be run via privately-agreed contracts between the Secretary of State and not-for-profit trusts running each academy.

The arrival of Gove and Cummings in 2010 saw the policy expanded exponentially. From a niche initiative via which 203 academies were created under Labour, it became the government’s favoured approach for all state-funded schools. In April this year, the Department for Education announced that more than half of those schools – some 10,800 – were now academies.

In recent years, the DfE has favoured not just academies, but a set-up called the multi-academy trust (MAT), whereby schools are grouped together to be run by a single board, with legal power centralised under a set of in-almost-all-cases unelected trustees, and practical power sitting with a corporate head office. There are now 1,170 MATs.

For all this structural change, the policy’s impact in terms of the main indicators looked at by politicians – exam results and Ofsted inspection outcomes – has been limited. Most observers would now agree that there are not huge differences between the results of schools in the academies sector and those which remain with their local authorities.

For politicians, including those in and around Labour, this appears to justify not discussing the policy. Remarkably, the word “academy” does not feature in Labour’s manifesto, except to say that multi-academy trust central operations will be brought under the inspection system, the implication being that the Conservatives’ post-2010 reforms are now accepted.

The Liberal Democrats, who opposed academies pre-2010 but then enacted the reforms as part of the 2010-15 coalition, do not mention the policy at all in their manifesto. And even the Conservatives, seemingly bruised after having to back down two years ago on a pledge to academise the remaining schools by 2030, barely reference the policy themselves. Of the major parties, only the Greens address the policy’s weaknesses in a manifesto, via their pledge to scrap it entirely.

What are those weaknesses? Well, despite the broad stalemate between the two sectors in terms of results, academy implications on the ground are multi-faceted. Concerns about the effects of the MAT policy in particular have included money moving away from classrooms to fund what can be sky-high salaries for trusts’ executive teams, with England now having many small chains of schools,  with resultant extra layers of management; the ability of corporate-style trust head offices to impose teaching approaches in classrooms which can downgrade the autonomy of professionals; and the larger trusts having higher rates of teacher turnover, which may be having a contributory effect to England’s current dire position on staff retention.

The academies policy is secretive, as well, with government decisions on which trust gets control of schools taken privately, with parents having few rights even to basic information about decision-making.  

Then there is whether it is right for individuals to be handed control of state-funded schools at all, with England’s second-largest trust, the Harris Federation, in the hereditary gift of a single family, and with concerns having been raised in other cases.

With trusts competing against each other for success and prestige, and local authorities less powerful, there are also concerns that this set-up is enabling children whose education poses more challenges for the trust, such as those with special educational needs, to be eased out.

Against this, a case can be made that academies can have a positive effect on schools which have struggled, and that the reform has brought more dynamism into school management. Many academy leaders, too, are working hard to improve schools, within a structure that they may support even though it is one created by civil servants and politicians.

But the downsides of that set-up continue. Running my website Education Uncovered, which delves into problems with the policy, I also see a lot of anecdotal evidence, backed up by a poll last year, that multi-academy trusts are often not popular places to work for teachers, despite some of them being well-regarded.

The MAT policy has also quietly replaced one around which a level of consensus had built since the late 1980s: local management of schools. This saw the headteacher and governing body given decision-making power, with local and central government operating in the background. Under MATs, this is no longer the case, with the central trust in charge and school heads getting less say.

Is that an attractive offer for parents? Do families want centralised corporate-style franchises controlling schools, or headteachers with the autonomy to work with their local communities to run things as they see fit?

As with Brexit, Labour may simply see the MAT policy as too hard to reverse. This may be another case of Gove and Cummings having thrown everything up in the air to see what happens and the country, at least via its political leadership, not being able to figure out how to respond.

But issues with this policy are not going away. Indeed, Labour is likely to face a decision on whether to continue with the Conservatives’ policy of legally mandating academy status for local authority schools which fail Ofsted inspections, even if their communities reject this, immediately after the election.

Does it agree with that set-up? As with many aspects of what will happen after July 4^th, we are largely in the dark, with prospective ministers simply unwilling to set out plans in detail, perhaps for fear of frightening voters. But the multi-faceted impacts of this policy surely need at least detailed consideration. As with Brexit, the cross-party pact of silence is disappointing.