Is our school going to close? DfE: we’ve told the academy trust what the decision is and they’ll tell you in due course

My jaw frequently drops to the floor in covering the academies scheme. But for summing up the problems with decision-making-in-private which is at the root of the policy’s endless weaknesses, this latest development surely takes the biscuit.

Families of children attending two former Steiner academies in the West Country have been waiting desperately for news as to whether the secondary sections of these schools are going to have a continued existence.

The decision, which I report on here, is clearly of life-changing importance to these communities, not least for the children who attend the secondary sections of these schools, who seemingly have faced the prospect of moving to classrooms elsewhere if the closure decision, which seems on the cards, goes through.

A meeting at which that decision was taken appears to have happened last week, at the latest meeting of the government’s “Headteacher Board” for the South West.

Such meetings always take in private, meaning there is no opportunity for those affected to view decision-making in real time, as happens, for example, in local authority planning proceedings.

Parents still do not know the result from last Wednesday. So I thought it would be reasonable for the Department for Education to be able to provide them with the factual information as to what had happened.

Staggeringly, though, the answer is no, parents are not to be told what happened by the decision-maker, the DfE. A DfE spokesperson only stated that: “In line with normal procedure, minutes of Head Teacher Board meetings are published online approximately six weeks after the event.

“The Regional Schools Commissioner’s decision has been shared with Avanti to communicate to the school communities ahead of publication.”

In fact, as Education Uncovered has reported, these minutes can take up to six months to emerge.

But even to state this seems slightly besides the point. For the question remains: why on earth is the community affected not being shown the courtesy of having the decision communicated to it directly by the decision-makers as soon as it is made?

This is not journalistic moaning, at not being given exclusive information by the DfE, by the way. The department should surely have pre-empted any need for an individual reporter to ask questions on the basics of what had been decided by making the proceedings of the meeting available to all, as they happened, or, failing this, in this case with such local significance, to issue a press release.

Even the Regional Schools Commissioner’s office, in an email last May, admitted that there was a need to end the uncertainty facing the school. Now, the assumption behind the government sticking to their always-in-private official process seems to be that it is fine for that uncertainty for parents to continue.  

I wonder how the civil servants presiding over this situation would feel if it were their own children’s futures. Would it be good enough to say: “the minutes will be out in a few weeks, and the organisation which applied to take this decision – but didn’t actually take it – will tell you in due course”. What an outrageous way to behave; a local council doing so would surely be pilloried for it in the local media.

Why is decision-making taking place like this*?

My guess is that this is the product of the way the academies system has been set up: is it inward-facing, with all decisions taken by the government and the trusts, and the public left as outsiders, looking in.

There is no formal answerability of the decision-makers, within the DfE, to those affected by their decision-making – school communities – because this has simply not been the way the policy has been designed.

Somehow, those running it need to get the message that they are presiding over a public service, which operates to serve the public, not a private system in which grateful families must passively await the outcomes of those decision-makers.

But, in the strangely closed-loop world in which this weirdly anachronistic policy operates, the message just does not seem to be getting through.

*There does seem to be a contrast, here, with how local authorities operate, for all their imperfections. As Anne West and David Wolfe put it in their 2018 paper for the London School of Economics: “Decisions for maintained schools are taken by local authorities under the oversight of elected local councillors who operate in meetings subject to ‘public participation’ obligations.

“However, decisions for academies are taken by the eight RSCs [Regional Schools Commissioners, advised by HTBs]: individuals appointed by central government, who exercise considerable power without any local democratic oversight or requirement for open process [my italics].”

That paper added: “Changes to maintained schools such as opening them, closing them, expanding them, changing the range of pupils for whom they make provision, involve a public process (public notices, and opportunity to object, and so on). This is not so with academies: the MAT [multi-academy trust] or RSC (depending on the issue) can simply make a decision as to how to proceed.”

I think, in fact, that decisions on such - as the DfE calls them - “significant changes” always have to be taken by the DfE (via the RSC), rather than by the MAT. But the thrust of the point stands.

This aspect of academisation seems to underline the point that England no longer has a public education system.