Grounds for cautious optimism: Labour laying down some principles and policy detail which might make academy controversies less likely under a future government

Plans for education under a Labour government hold out the potential of taking the wind out of the sails of on-the-ground controversies which have featured heavily on this website.

Ideas set out in a speech yesterday by Bridget Phillipson, the shadow education secretary, seem to set up the possibility of a radically different approach to disputes between central management of schools and communities including parents, pupils and teachers.

Wider media coverage yesterday of the speech, which has homed in on individual aspects such as Labour’s proposed approach for tackling low attendance, or Ms Phillipson having praised the energy of the former education secretary Michael Gove, appears to have missed the fundamental shift in approach, from that of this government, that it signalled.

Several aspects of Ms Phillipson’s speech, at the Centre for Social Justice thinktank in central London, set up a contrast with controversies featuring on Education Uncovered.

Schools working in partnership with communities

 

At several points during the speech, Ms Phillipson mentioned the need for schools to work in partnership with parents, and to be seen as part of their communities.

This was in the context that the focus of the talk was improving school attendance, with the clear implication that in some cases school relationships with families had broken down. However, the points being made also seemed to be at a more fundamental level.

She said: “Schools shouldn’t be detached, unmoored, from the communities and places they serve. They should be at the heart of them.”

Again, there was context to this. The above sentence occurred in a section of the speech in which Ms Phillipson spoke about the need not to separate the high expectations placed on schools from the challenges facing the societies in which they operated: notably poverty. That, in itself, seemed a signal that Labour is positioning itself for a move away from Mr Gove’s approach of trying to detach schools policy from the wider social context in which education operates.

But, again, the points she made went wider than this. She said, in what may sound like a shallow soundbite but which was backed up elsewhere in the speech: “Labour will see parents, as always, as partners in the push for better.”

Ms Phillipson criticised the way that “schools [currently] interact with their pupils, their families,” adding that “the trust and partnership on which the education of everyone in this room [an audience of education policy experts]” was “slowly corroding”.

A “partnership for change,” was needed, Ms Phillipson said, adding that this was “about parents and staff as well as leaders”. This was “above all…the belief that education is not merely about individuals and their success, not simply about schools, but a partnership in each generation, a vision to shape the society of tomorrow.”

It is hard to see how that community-focused philosophy does not contrast with the formulation that has driven the creation of the academy trusts on which Education Uncovered focuses so often.

For local communities are institutionally written out of the academy trust set-up, with trusts being formed through a contract between central government and the largely unelected board of directors which gets to run the schools. This is not a conceptual point: it is fundamental to how the system operates on the ground, with communities not given basic rights, for example, to attend decision-making meetings or even have decisions made by those with power, such as Department for Education regional directors, communicated and reported directly to them when such decisions are made.

The logic of this is that Labour, if standing true to that community-focused philosophy, should be looking at the academies set-up in detail, from the basics of its contracting structure to aspects such as public access to information and formal answerability of decision-makers to local communities.

There are no signs, of course, of the party doing that as yet, with this speech not mentioning the academies structure at all.

However, even without such major structural reform – or, on an optimistic reading, for critics, in advance of it – the implications of this speech are many, for on-the-ground controversies.

If, for example, Labour were to enter office and be serious about schools having to work in partnership with their local communities, would it really allow situations such as, for example, that at St Ivo Academy in Cambridgeshire, where hundreds of parents were sufficiently fed up with the impact of the trust running it on their children – including their children’s mental health - to compile a very detailed survey report and write to the DfE with concerns?

In the end, having taking nearly six months to reply, the DfE’s regional director wrote back to say that, effectively, there was nothing he could do, as academy trusts essentially set their own rules as to how they operate.

Similarly, hundreds of parents wrote a complaint about goings-on within the Canary Wharf College chain of free schools, in East London, only for the DfE to confine its response to whether the trust had followed the formalities of its complaints structure, rather than looking at the substance. Both such cases have seen teachers taking industrial action while such parental criticisms have been ongoing, underlining that concerns extended to different parts of these respective communities.

And in York, a meeting before Christmas again heard concerns voiced over 90 minutes about the operations of South Bank Multi Academy Trust there, underlining the fact that that trust and members of its community have been at odds.

The death of Denis Barry, which I wrote about this week, will have reminded readers that, again, the DfE had sought to impose a forced academy solution on a school where he was chair of governors, against the clearly-expressed will of the local community. That is the complete antithesis of the vision set out by Ms Phillipson.

Again, a new government taking seriously the need for schools to operate as parts of their communities, rather than for the latter to have decisions imposed on them, would not allow such situations to arise.

In particular, I wonder how long the DfE’s line that generally it does not investigate the substance of parental complaints about decision-making within academy trusts could survive under a new government promising to ensure that schools operate in partnership with their communities. Could it really keep saying, in the face of carefully-evidenced concerns expressed by large parent groups, and on occasion staff, that there was nothing it could do?

Schools where children thrive

What Ms Phillipson said about the curriculum, and about pupils’ engagement with school, again seemed to carry implications for controversies which have featured on this website.

She said that, under this government, schools were sometimes offering “a curriculum that narrows, not broadens, our children’s experiences and opportunities, where the pursuit of high standards has become too often synonymous with joylessness, when nothing of the sort be true”.

“Schools and trusts have responsibilities too,” she warned, adding that these would include: “To ensure school is inclusive and welcoming, academic and compassionate,” and “To make schools welcoming places where children thrive”.

She added: “High and rising standards are about imbuing a love of learning, not a fear of it.”

Yet it is precisely the complaint of parents’ campaigns, often backed by teachers and support staff, that I follow that schools can be made to feel like unwelcoming environments for pupils, through disciplinarian behaviour systems and curricula which can be, as they see it, too narrowly-focused.

Such schools simply are not “inclusive and welcoming,” sadly, is the complaint. And it is the heart of concerns by many parents who contact me that the schools they are concerned about are not creating environments where children “thrive*,” in the round.

Again, a future Labour government taking such criticism seriously – as this speech suggested it would – would surely be investigating and pushing back against such cases.

Detailed proposals

At a more immediately practical level, I think details within this speech, setting out how some aspects of a new system under Labour would operate, might make it harder for these kinds of controversies to endure – provided those in charge were committed to the kind of admirable ideals set out by this speech.

Specifically, Ms Phillipson set out Labour plans to introduce annual inspections for certain aspects of education, alongside a reform of Ofsted more generally.

There would be, she said, annual inspections of “absenteeism, safeguarding, off-rolling, health and safety”.

Details, of course, are vital in respect of this and all aspects of policy. But community campaigns which have raised concerns in relation to the last three of the areas to be inspected as set out above – I am thinking, again, about the ones in relation to St Ivo and Canary Wharf College – would have another avenue to explore in terms of people to approach to raise their concerns, if this were to go ahead.

Conclusion

Sitting behind all of this is a sense that there could be some redressing of the balance between top-down academy trusts - set up to have all the power, alongside the DfE, in decision-making in schools - and local communities.

That is implicit, too, by the way, in moves, reported on by Education Uncovered yesterday in relation to this speech, implying the imposition of more curriculum requirements on academies under Labour. This would be premised on the notion of children having the right to a curriculum of a certain character, possibly including breadth, with the freedom of the trust to take its own decisions given less weight.

Quite how much of this might come to fruition under a future Labour government, which, of course, is in any case not a certainty, is up for debate. But this speech was far more thought-provoking than might have appeared from much of the media coverage, with potentially big implications for school communities.

*The fact that, in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development “PISA) rankings published last month, the UK had the second-lowest life satisfaction ratings among 15-year-olds of any country across the OECD, though not mentioned in this speech, should also give pause for thought.

You can read Ms Phillipson’s speech in its entirety at the bottom of this Schools Week piece from yesterday: