The academies programme: very different now

It's time to look again at the academies policy, argues Ben Gibbs.

It's nearly 20 years since the conception of the academies programme. In line with their third way philosophy at the time, New Labour's frontline were looking at how to engage the private sector in their programme of public sector reform, simultaneously endorsing the free market and social justice. And now their gaze was turned to schools.

 

 

An earlier initiative - the “Fresh Start” programme, in which a “super-head” was parachuted into a failing school to re-launch and improve it with the help of central and local government funds - had crashed and burned dramatically. So government advisers began to explore taking the idea on a step, by removing failing schools from the control of those pesky local authorities altogether.

 

They soon hit upon the public-private partnership wheeze of persuading a business or church sponsor to throw in a couple of million quid, plus some advice and guidance on how to work independently and become self-sustaining. A small Business Development Unit of seconded civil servants and private sector contractors was formed in David Blunkett’s Department for Education & Skills, and in 2000, it began developing relationships with potential sponsors.

 

By the end of 2001, the first sponsors had been engaged to open “City Academies” in Brent (Lowe Group), Lambeth (CfBT) and Liverpool (Church of England), although the first three City Academies actually opened the following year, in the London boroughs of Bexley and Haringey and in Middlesbrough. They would be free of local authority control, and with management delegated to a self-appointed board of governors. They would have responsibility for setting strategy, employing all academy staff, delivering a curriculum, agreeing levels of pay and conditions, and setting policy.

 

And the rest, as they say, is history.

 

The concept of sponsorship at the outset of academies

 

Except that “sponsorship” bit doesn't seem to have quite worked out how it was supposed to.

 

The principle of business or third-party involvement in schools was, in my view, quite sound at the time. Defined as a blend of Thatcherite market orientation and Labour’s traditional commitment to state-sponsored social justice, the third way jointly prioritised equality and marketisation, as distinct from the Conservatives' classic neoliberalism. In the context of the City Academies programme, the goal was to increase school choice and hence competition (market forces) between schools whilst also addressing the link between deprivation and poor educational attainment (social justice).

 

In his 2008 paper, 'Twenty years of progress?' http://bit.ly/2yIONKF , Geoff Whitty (now Professor of Equity in Education at the University of Newcastle, Australia) reflects that these policy goals were entirely genuine, benign, and largely reciprocal. After all, there should indeed be a place for business engagement in improving a school system which firms themselves rely on for the health of the society in which they operate. Those first sponsors of City Academies were quite happy to shell out up to £2m to help turn around a failing school [though there is a question over whether all early sponsors have footed the bills; see articles here http://bit.ly/2g5RktX and here http://bit.ly/2yAgwjQ WM]

 

They were investments made by big businesses in the quality of their future employees, and were viewed by chief executives and shareholders as their corporate social responsibility. The same can be said for the thousands of direct relationships between smaller companies and schools at a local level, whether for work experience and placements or as sponsors of events and resources.

 

“Sponsorship” now

 

So, what changed?

 

Well, over successive years the original requirement for sponsors to put financial skin in the game to join the academies scheme was gradually relaxed, to the extent that now incoming sponsors can qualify for financial support to get involved, though some still do donate. 

 

Of course, Michael Gove then arrived as Secretary of State for Education in 2010, and while he talked about social justice, at heart he was a pure neoliberal. He pledged to put “rocket boosters” under the academies scheme, and the number of academies ballooned, as successful institutions as well as primary schools were encouraged, cajoled or occasionally forced into academisation.

 

But a less-widely-appreciated aspect is that, along the way, the original vision of having a large business or philanthropic organisation sponsor a school as part of their corporate social responsibility objectives had been lost. Instead, as the academies programme has grown, the direct support previously required from a sponsor to support what goes on in a school has been replaced by an imported (and, sadly, corrupted) form of corporate managerialism, with doctrinal performativity, target-setting and competition applied straight out of the New Public Management handbook.

 

But what about privatisation? Are we on the way to a system in which for-profit chains compete with each other for business?

 

Well, some are worried, but I don’t think so. That said, one trend does worry me a bit: the influence in the system of the financial sector. A summary glance at the boards of many high-profile chains, and of many of the organisations most heavily involved in the reform programme is enlightening in this respect. Add in the finance backgrounds of both the new academies minister and his predecessor, and several other Department for Education directors, and one begins to wonder if things are not a tad unbalanced.

 

The finance sector, of course, is very important to the UK economy. Its influence across all aspects of public policy is still strong, perhaps paradoxically given the still-ongoing effects of the crash of 2008. According to Bill Emmott, the former editor of The Economist, writing in the June 2017 issue of Prospect magazine, the crash also "illuminated a dangerous trend in many liberal democracies. This trend was the subversion of public policy and democracy by the overweening power of the financial sector and of the extraordinarily wealthy individuals connected to it."

 

Have we reached that point yet, in terms of academies? Maybe; maybe not. But one thing seems certain: that the original vision for corporate involvement in state education, which I still support in principle, seems a long way in the past now.