Mossbourne case shows how academy supervision is failing on public transparency

DfE appears to have dodged local and public answerability as to how it has responded to high-profile safeguarding review, simply because it can.

As a development, it should have made jaws drop, at a national level. A detailed safeguarding review, on a school run by a high-profile multi-academy trust, had reported, with a string of findings and recommendations which made headlines in the education press and beyond.

The local council, concerned about the findings of the report and set up to offer scrutiny, wanted to know what the school, the trust running it and the regulator – the Department for Education – had done in response.

But, while leading figures within the trust did attend a session in front of councillors – resolutely defending their school’s practice – the DfE simply refused, both to attend and even to answer any written questions on the case.

This development happened back in July, with schools close to breaking up for the summer. It was picked up only by the local Hackney Citizen newspaper. But, since then, as I reported last week, the department has continued to refuse to say how it has responded in this case, which has had national repercussions for the debate about school approaches to managing pupils’ behaviour.

The case concerns the local safeguarding practice review into practice at Mossbourne Victoria Park Academy (MVPA) in Hackney, East London. In December last year, the review found that MVPA, which operates a “no excuses” behaviour policy, had achieved excellent academic results “at too high a cost for some pupils,” with a “climate of fear” operating, with, it argued, serious implications for some pupils.

The Hackney Citizen had reported in July that the DfE had failed to answer 11 written questions submitted to it by the commission. On the deadline set by the commission for publication, 30^th June, the DfE was stated to have told the commission that it would not respond.

Back in the spring, I had sought myself to find out what the impact of the safeguarding review, by a former director of children’s services in Hackney, Sir Alan Wood, had been. When the report had been published, the DfE had told me that the Mossbourne Federation, which runs MVPA, was “responsible for reviewing the findings [from Sir Alan’s review] and informing the Department of its planned response.”

What was that response, then, I had asked the DfE under Freedom of Information. But it would not tell me, the thrust of its FOI answer being that to do so would inhibit free and frank discussion between the trust and its regulator.

Earlier this month, the Hackney Citizen revealed it had had a very similar answer after making its own request for information. The newspaper had asked the DfE, under FOI, for the department’s response to the council’s written questions. The response had been that, yes, the DfE had drafted up some answers for the council, but no, as well as not sharing them with the council, it would now not be disclosing them publicly.

Also earlier this month, the chair of Hackney’s Children and Young People Scrutiny Commission – the body whose July meeting the DfE had refused to attend – wrote to the department asking for a response to its questions. There has yet to be a report, as far as I can see, of any answer in response.

The letter, signed by the commission’s chair and vice-chair, had said: “As the regulator of academies, the DfE’s absence from [the July] meeting was a significant impediment to public scrutiny as it prevented the Commission’s ability to understand how the DfE is exercising its oversight responsibilities in this high-profile case.

“The absence of the regulator at the meeting also limited what assurance this process could provide to the pupils, parents and the wider community that changes required by the safeguarding practice review will be made at the academy.”

Among the questions of which it sought answers from the DfE were whether academies are “required to fully co-operate and comply with safeguarding investigations” and implement the latter’s recommendations, or not.

Implications

Hackney’s commission is right on this. It seems to me outrageous that a publicly-funded department can simply decide that it does not want to be scrutinised about how it has responded after safeguarding concerns were raised in relation to a publicly-funded public service. It seems as if a body with decision-making influence in this case has concluded it does not need to answer to local representatives, or to the public.

This is not how a democracy is supposed to function. Those overseeing public services are, surely, meant to be answerable in public.

It could be argued that there is a power imbalance, here. Because the supervision of schools has now effectively been nationalised, via the academies scheme which sees schools funded and overseen from Whitehall, we have, in cases such as this, a local body demanding answerability from national government. If the latter simply chooses not to engage, what can be done?

To be fair, there are recourses to an external organisation, in the cases of requests for information under FOI being rejected. Those of us who have had the substance of their FOIs rejected by the DfE can appeal the decision, before, if this fails, then taking their request to the Information Commissioner’s Office and, if that fails, to an independent legal tribunal.

However, such challenges are time-consuming and demanding, when the default should, surely, be that public bodies need to be answerable in public for their decision-making.

The department’s view, that its communications with outside organisations need to be secret, or else those organisations will not be open with it, is a fairly standard response from it to FOIs asking for anything other than statistical data, in my experience. It seems to me to be debatable, on its own terms.

But even if it were to be conceded that internal communications were not to be disclosed, the DfE could still be releasing broader details as to how it has responded, in this case. It could be answering other of those questions from Hackney’s scrutiny commission, such as whether “further guidance about compliance with safeguarding investigations” was to be issued to academy trusts; what its position was on “zero tolerance” behaviour management policies as implemented at MVPA, which had been criticised in Sir Alan’s report; and whether the DfE was doing anything to ensure academy trust boards and school governing bodies scrutinised the impact of behaviour policies on particular groups of pupils.

Again, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the DfE simply decided it would rather not have to answer such questions. And, with no higher body to enforce its public engagement on these issues, there was nothing the public or their representatives could do about this.

Two aspects of this public answerability failure

There seem to me to be two aspects in which this case reveals how the academies policy as currently set up fails to operate in the interest of the public, rather than in the interests of those running the policy.

First is that local/national disjuncture. I have mentioned the national/local power imbalance above. It is possible, in contrast, to consider a situation in which a national body, such as backbench MPs via the Education Select Committee*, became interested in this case. If this committee sought to scrutinise, in a public session, the DfE’s response to a particular case such as this**, it is harder to imagine officials, or indeed a minister, simply refusing to appear. That would, if nothing else, become a bigger story.

But such scrutiny will happen only rarely, because national bodies such as Parliamentary committees can only occasionally get into the detail of academy controversies many of which can nevertheless be intensely interesting to a local audience. The obvious level, therefore, at which such scrutiny should take place is locally. Services provided at the local level should be subject to the answerability of decision-makers at a local level. That disconnect, between answerability of decision-makers locally, and decision-making taking place nationally, is institutionalised via the academies set-up, in which schools are ultimately answerable, via their funding agreements, only to the DfE.

If we consider the situation whereby school supervision takes place locally – in the case of the non-academy sector via local authorities – and is answerable to local communities via their elected representatives, this has an additional benefit, compared to what we have seen in the Mossbourne case. For, if the local response is perceived by service users, or their representatives, as inadequate, there could be the recourse of an appeal to a higher body, in national government. In the case of academies, this seems impossible, with the DfE now apparently the judge and jury as to whether it engages.

The second aspect in which I believe this case shows up the academies policy as not operating in the public interest is because the nationalisation of school supervision which it has involved has brought schools into the realm of the civil service, which has not been set up with reporting in public as an aim.

This was perhaps best put in a blog published in 2023 by a former DfE Permanent Secretary, no less***. Tweeting the piece out with his thoughts that it would mean “no more policy behind closed doors,” Jonathan Slater, who had also served as a local authority deputy chief executive and director of education, wrote: “My life as a policymaker in local government was very different from my life as a policymaker in central government.

“In local government, my advice was typically offered in public…Then I joined the Civil Service and suddenly discover[ed] that it wasn’t part of the job…officials often feel it is not safe to speak to users of policies or services and feel nervous about doing so, not least as they might find it uncomfortable to be defending the government’s position on something…

“So meetings do literally take place behind closed doors and then official advice is kept secret for 20 years. It’s a completely opaque system and it’s a problem because it invites the view that policy is of no concern to the public…and it can’t be of any concern to them because they’re not in the room.

“Consequently, officials don’t really understand the needs of our users and certainly do not prioritise them. This is the cause of a lot of poor advice.”

The civil service advice-in-private model makes for a poor match with the supervision of a major public service. At the very least, if academisation is to persist, some thought, in my view, should go to ensuring this is addressed through some sort of local public answerability requirement for officials and, if necessary, ministers.

As it is, my hunch is that Mossbourne, civil servants – and, in the case of FOIs cited above, a minister – have chosen secrecy because this is how their world operates. But answerability for decision-making, at the level where it has impact, is surely basic to any democratic society. The disjunction between this and the way the academies policy has been set up, as vividly underlined by the Mossbourne case, should be a profound cause for concern, for anyone interested in education and the wider debate about how public services should be set up.   

*Some accountability of academy trusts to Parliament, in practice via the education select committee, is implicitly acknowledged in, for example, the Academy Trust Handbook, which states that trust accounting officers must be able to assure Parliament, as well as the DfE and the public, “of high standards of probity in the management of public funds”.

**Indeed, in the past both the education committee and the public accounts committee have taken just such an interest. 

***Apologies that this is the second time I’ve mentioned this blog, in successive think pieces in recent weeks. But I expand on it in this article, as the thoughts are very much worth highlighting in this context.