New report raises important criticisms of academies structure –but fails to address its defining weakness

Imagine the excitement chez Education Uncovered, on learning of a new report about the structure of schools. Not only that, but this one seemed to be taking head-on some of its multi-faceted problems, about which this website is reporting almost daily. Great stuff.

The report in question was published today. Entitled “20 years of muddling through: Why it is time to set a new course for the state school system in England,” this was a document produced by a small think tank called EDSK, which is headed by the former teacher and government special adviser Tom Richmond.

It includes several proposals which on their own terms would be very welcome, such as local authorities taking charge of pupil admissions for all state schools in their areas; school-level financial transparency, more openness on decisions about the control of schools; and a national pay structure for all school leaders. It rightly criticises the excessive centralisation of schools policy through the academies structure over the past 20 years. It is an impressively-researched piece of work.

However, as I read on, this document ultimately proved a disappointment, perhaps underlining how what for me is the defining controversy and problem of the academies policy, since its inception, has been so little understood. And yet it is fundamental.

The detail

The report starts with the argument that the government has sought for too long to “muddle through” with a “parallel” system of local authority-maintained schools and academies – either side currently makes up roughly half of the schools in England. The report would replace this with what it a suggests would be a single legal structure of “school boards” which would run every state-funded school in England.

Other proposals, which featured in coverage in the TES and Schools Week today, included a new “independent regulator,” reporting to Parliament rather than the Department for Education, to take on the current functions of the DfE’s Regional Directors and Education and Skills Funding Agency.

Many good bits

There are certainly some strong passages in this report, including on problematic aspects of our current system that opened up new thinking for me, and a lot of really useful factual material as the authors grapple with specific weaknesses.

The report considers the academic and Ofsted results of academies against local authority maintained schools and concludes, as many observers now tend to do, that there is little to choose between the two sides. It therefore rightly criticises the political pursuit of “constant structural changes” to schools.

It states: “Given that there does not appear to be a causal relationship between types of schools and their performance, it is perhaps surprising that over the last 20 years successive governments have expended considerable time, energy and public money on forging ahead with constant structural changes.”

It rightly points out the lack of balance in the government’s current politically-driven approach to school “underperformance”: if a maintained school “underperforms” (in reality, this currently means it fails an Ofsted inspection or has two successive “requires improvement” verdicts), it is academised, but if it fails as an academy, there is no chance to return to the local authority, even if it sits within a “high-performing” LA.

“This does not seem aligned to the overall goal of improving pupil outcomes,” states the report, rightly.

It highlights how remote the DfE’s current structure of “Regional Directors” and advisory boards are from local communities and public scrutiny, with the latter not even featuring any local authority representatives, let alone direct community representation, and with parents having struggled even to access information about key decisions taken within this structure, such as those over who gets to run their child’s school.

Remarkably, and some of this was new information to me, the report also presents a stark disparity in the field of proposals to close schools. Whereas in the maintained sector, there has to be a consultation, followed by a statutory proposal setting out information such as the proposed closure date, the potential impact on the community and the reason for the closure, there are no such regulations in the academies sector. As the report puts it, “the equivalent academy requirements are merely set out in DfE ‘guidance’. A multi-academy trust can simply submit a request to the DfE to close the school, with the Education Secretary having the final say and the local authority, and local communities, having no formal roles in this process.

“That parents, communities and LAs have been excluded from this process is indicative of the centralisation of powers at the DfE to both open and close schools, which is difficult to justify on the grounds of delivering the best possible outcomes for pupils,” warns the report.

I agree, although it would have been better if the sentence above had stopped at “which is difficult to justify,” because the case for local democratic involvement could and should be made on its own terms in this report. But more on that later.

The report’s section on high pay for academy chief executives rightly points out that some are paid too much, and therefore proposes a national structure, mainly calculating leader pay against the number of pupils they oversee. Again this is good news, though the suggested cap of £263,000 in this report seems too high to me: it is higher than for the leadership of many local authorities, though they are generally still larger organisation than are MATs.

The report is one of a succession to highlight the incoherence of local authorities having legal responsibility to provide school places in their areas, but not having control over the process, because of academies having decision-making powers. And the ability of academies to control admissions, allied to the competitive pressures on all schools, has created what sounds like a disastrous perverse incentive, which is rightly identified in this report.

Some schools are resisting the admission of children with EHCPs [Education Health and Care Plans], local authorities had reported, one telling the Office of the Schools Adjudicator that “many schools are not open to receiving children with EHCPs”.

The report correctly concludes: “A school system that fails to protect the interests of the most vulnerable learners is clearly not sustainable from an educational or political perspective.”

The report continues in this vein of presenting some pretty substantial failings of the current set-up, and proposing a host of solutions.

On transparency, it is proposed that the report’s recommended new regulator – the “Office for Capacity and Oversight in Education”, or “OFCOE” should hold public hearings and consultations on all major decisions it makes, such as which organisation gets to run a school.

Also, every state-funded school should be required to publish an annual breakdown of income, expenditure and staffing, the report rightly identifying that school-level finance is opaque within multi-academy trusts. Additionally, “GAG pooling,” the increasingly prevalent move by MATs to put all funding they receive into one big pot, would be banned.

And, in the spirit of ensuring that all of the proposed “school boards” are “connected to local communities,” all would be required to operate “local governing bodies,” with the report again rightly pointing out that many multi-academy trusts, controlled by a central board of trustees, do not operate “local governing bodies” at all.

The problems – and central flaw

Overall, then, the report correctly suggests that the current set-up of school structures suffers from what it categorises as three types of weakness: it lacks coherence; its competitive structures undermine collaboration between schools, which are important; and the system as a whole suffers from a fundamental lack of transparency. I would agree with all of those, as failings.

So what are the report’s problems?

Well, there are one or two factual errors, to start with. There were, for example, 203 academies when Labour left power in 2010, not the 176 reported here. Academies Enterprise Trust is not the largest MAT (it is United Learning, which is listed elsewhere in the report as the largest). And Lord Agnew, stated in the report as the “former CEO of the Inspiration Trust,” is actually its founding “sponsor,” and a current chair of governors, controlling “member” and trustee/director, rather than its executive leader.

I may also be in a minority in querying the suggestion that, with state-funded education in England currently in a kind of stalemate between the academies sector, with roughly half of schools, and the maintained sector, with the other half, the answer is to create a common structure for both. I would argue that, while the report posits that its approach implies a simpler set-up, in fact with its move to offer a new structure of three different types of “school boards”, and with potentially thousands of boards set to operate, we would still be in the realms of acute fragmentation and complexity.

The report also states that “a return to a full LA-operated state school system is no longer feasible,” without explaining why: does it mean politically, practically, or economically, I wonder. I think it’s important to ask: the current academy structure was created at scale, after all, more or less from scratch by Michael Gove from 2010, so the notion of rapid structural change is clearly not impossible, at least in theory. So it would have been good to have been taken through the reasoning, at least, on this.

But the defining problem of this report is that it fails to consider arguably the most significant aspect of the academies policy: that it is, at base, anti-democratic*. That is, the policy has moved schools away from democratic decision-making, with profound effects on how local communities experience schools policy. This becomes most obvious when matters get controversial, as of course they often do in cases reported by this website.

I think in turn this problem is a product of the user voice being conspicuously absent from the list of those interviewed for this report.

Fundamental to this is, I think, the report not having viewed from a more sceptical perspective the history of the academies policy, discussing what should be seen as its most questionable aspect from its outset.

Under Labour, in 2000, what were originally called City Academies saw incoming “sponsors” – often wealthy business people – given the chance to essentially take over state-funded schools, in return, initially, for a contribution of £2 million. In return, they would be given complete control over that school’s decision-making, via control of its board of directors.

The requirement for a financial contribution was quickly dropped. But the notion of unelected individuals having the ability to gain control of state-funded schools was retained, as the academies policy continued. And, of course, the scale of the policy, with its underlying legal structure basically unchanged, expanded at startling pace. From a structure applying just to a few scores of schools mainly with years if not decades of having struggled, under Labour, it was soon applied to thousands of institutions, under the Conservatives, with the government in recent years being of the belief that all state-funded schools should follow the academy set-up.

That is, Michael Gove put “rocket boosters” under the scheme, having spotted his opportunity provided by Labour’s policy to bypass local authorities’ influence over schools, without the policy being subjected to meaningful questioning. For was this structure really the correct way to run things, across England?

Was it right that such control should be given to unelected trustees in this way? The report does not address this question.

The report’s key proposal

But it becomes fundamental when looking at the report’s central recommendation.

In place of the current set-up, of roughly half of England’s schools being local authority maintained, and half being academies – with some currently in single-academy trusts, and others operating in chains or MATs – the report proposes an alternative.

All schools would now be operated by one of three types of “school boards”. There would be a “single school board,” similar to an existing maintained school or standalone academy; a “local school board,” which would be set up by a local authority and something akin to the LA [academy] trust,” as envisaged by 2022’s failed DfE white paper on the future of the schools system; and an “independent school board,” which would be similar to a multi-academy trust.

The paper specifically avoids calling these organisations academy trusts. Interestingly – and perhaps correctly – it states that “the language of ‘academies’ and ‘academisation’ has become politically toxic and also means little or nothing to parents.”

But what is proposed in the place of “academies” arguably is little more than a rebranding exercise. In fact, although the paper at-first-glance encouragingly calls for a “reset” on the system of academies and LA schools, in reality the above recommendation looks like an all-academy system in all but name.

For we would have a system of boards of trustees now running all schools, with local authorities no longer overseeing any of them.

For this observer, a system of “school boards” might still have merits, were those boards to be subject to local democratic influence. But that appears not to be the case, here.

In fact, the phrase “school boards” had been one of the reasons I thought this paper looked encouraging, on reading its headlines. For the phrase has democratic connotations – school boards in the United States, for example, are local democratic institutions: as this website puts it, in relation to California, for example: “school board members are locally elected publicly officials entrusted with governing a community’s public schools”.

But there is no mention here of the boards proposed in this report having that local democratic basis. As far as I can see, there is no proposal in this paper for elections to such boards.

Essentially, then, the academies model of unelected trustees in ultimate charge of the strategic direction of state-funded schools would become the requirement for all schools.

The report also proposes the restoration of “local governing bodies” for all schools. These would presumably have elected parental representation. But it is not clear from the report what power they would have; in the current academies system, it is the board of trustees which has decision-making control, rather than any local committee, and it appears to me that this would not change under the school boards system proposed in this report.

The failure to consider matters from a democratic perspective comes through in other significant ways in the report.

For example, on school closures, and decisions over who gets to run schools, the proposals rightly seek to return decision-making making to needing to have reference to local communities, who must be consulted, and with at least some element of open decision-making, through “public hearings”.

Again, this is good as far as it goes. But the decision-makers in this case will not be connected to the local democratic system, as has happened within the traditional set-up of local authority schools, but national officials working for the regulator.

Contrast this with, for example, the set-up within the maintained sector currently when a school is lined up for closure. The decision is put forward for recommendation by council officials, but the decision will be taken by locally elected councillors. These are formally answerable to local people, in the way that decision-makers, within the academies set-up and even within the new set-up being proposed in this report, are not.

So these proposals would have the effect of moving decision-making, for more than 10,000 schools which are currently within the maintained sector, away from locally-elected politicians and into the hands of unelected national officials.

The realities of de-democratising school structures

The above might seem just an abstract debate. Although local democratic influence over school decision-making might be seen as something nice to have, what difference in reality does all of this make?

I would argue that the moving of schools to outside the arena of local democratic decision-making has had profound effects, that are felt by communities all the time when things go wrong, and which Education Uncovered attempts to chronicle in detail.

This has been most striking over the past year in controversies over top-down decision-making within academy trusts through policies such as pupil disciplinary systems, or teaching techniques.

The Sheffield-based Astrea Academy Trust, endlessly covered by this website, last year alienated a large number of parents at St Ivo Academy in Cambridgeshire over policies including super-strict approaches to pupil discipline, that many felt were having detrimental effects on their children’s mental health.

The parents ended up going to the DfE, only for its Regional Director to tell them, approaching six months later, that effectively there was nothing he could do, as academy trusts set their own policies. There is now also considerable disquiet, according to multiple sources, with the two secondaries Astrea runs in the nearby town of St Neots, but again, parents and staff are kept on the outside, with their opinions seemingly counting for little.**

The situation at another academy trust arguably demonstrates problems even more starkly. Before Christmas the South Bank MAT, which runs six schools in York, tried to stop local councillors even holding a meeting for parents to discuss any unhappiness with its schools, on the argument that it was accountable to the DfE and its own (unelected) trustees alone, and not its local community.

Yet these trusts are presiding over the running of schools in ways which have proven deeply unpopular with at least a proportion of the parents of the pupils in their care, with profound implications for those children’s educational experiences. It is hard to see such situations being allowed to continue as they have, without such parents being listened to in more meaningful ways, under a local democratic system in which community views were formally taken into account.

It could be argued, also, that the academies policy’s remoteness from local community opinion is not doing even itself any favours, in the long run. By setting up a situation in which parents’ inability to have their voices heard, when trusts choose not to listen, is made so obvious, parents do get more disgruntled, including by going to the media, and a sense of confrontation rather than partnership can ensue.

In my view, the argument for more democratic structures may be being dismissed, or not taken seriously, because in the end policymakers, and those with responsibility for school decision-making, reject the idea of parents being involved with the running of schools. But this misses the point: most parents do not want that, but when they are unhappy they do want meaningful mechanisms ensuring that the community perspective is taken into account, not least over decisions which might affect the most important aspect in the life of parents: their children’s wellbeing.

As it is, the lack of discussion of the rights and wrongs of more democratically-based decision-making in schools in this report is striking, given that, as argued above, arguably the central controversy about academies from the start has been this notion of taking schools outside of the democratic arena. Yet the word “democracy” or “democratic” only features once in the entire paper, and that in a reference to Labour’s 2019 manifesto under Jeremy Corbyn describing the academies system as “undemocratic”

Lack of user voice

I would guess that the absence of discussion of democracy in this paper is at least in a part a product of user perspectives not featuring in the list of those interviewed or consulted about this report. Of 33 people listed as interviewees, none was from a parent or student group, or an organisation such as “SquarePeg,” which speaks up for children and their families who have struggled with the schools system as it is, with academy trusts heavily represented.

To be clear, it is useful to get the perspective of service providers on the failings of the current system. But the user perspective is also desperately needed, and seemingly absent, here.

Unions were also conspicuously absent from the list of interviewees, suggesting another important stakeholder perspective was missing, again in terms at least of those spoken to for this report.

Better alternatives

 

To be fair, this is, clearly, a complex system, whose reform will not be simple. It is perilous trying to set out alternatives. I have never done so myself in a systematic or detailed way (I have been too busy documenting on-the-ground problems with the current regime...)  And, as mentioned, I am impressed with some of this report’s analysis and solutions.

But meaningful change, and a reduction in the system dysfunction about which Education Uncovered reports constantly, will not come unless and until someone decides to address directly the lack of democracy at the heart of politicians’ hasty moves over the last 20 years to change school decision-making structures.

To give a flavour of different approaches, a couple of more interesting ideas have popped up in recent years.

First, there has been the suggestion that all parents/carers at a school, or all members of a local community, could be given the right to become “members” of a trust running school(s). In this way, they would all have certain reserve powers, including the right to amend a trust’s constitution, or to appoint and sack trustees.

For sure, I can think of possible objections, still, to such a set-up. But I believe it would stop a high proportion of scandals documented by this website, simply because trustees would be much more mindful not to engage in activities likely to generate high levels of controversy within a community. That is, there would be meaningful engagement with local opinion because there was meaningful local democratic influence, ultimately, over decision-making.

Second, sections of this 2022 report for Labour by Gordon Brown, on devolution, suggest a more democratic way forward.

This stated: “Local and devolved decision makers are already substantially more trusted than central government to make decisions in the best interests of their area. There is also clear evidence that people want more of a say on the issues that affect their lives, meaning we need double devolution – pushing power as close as possible to people and communities.”

There is no doubt that many people now expect not just top-down services, where they are told just to accept what they are given, but to have their voices listened to. This may be particularly true in education, where parents expect to have their views on the care of their children taken meaningfully into account.

Although the Brown report focused on other areas of potential devolution than education, it is not hard to see how a move towards more democratically-structured decision-making for education would be in line with its proposals.

This and other reports have underlined in my mind the need for this website to start proposing alternative set-ups to the current set-up for school decision-making, with some democratic deficiencies even within the local authority maintained system also needing discussion. I do hope to be writing along these lines in the coming weeks.

*Many would point to the academies policy moving schools away from local democratic structures. I would argue that schools have been taken out of the democratic arena more or less entirely. This is because, while it is true that the academies system retains its link to elected politicians, and thus in theory democratic answerability, via those leading the Department for Education, in reality there is little to no democratic answerability for individual decisions, since a national politician can shrug off a decision which may be very unpopular at a local level, since a local electorate has little purchase on him or her unless it happens to be his or constituency, whereas local councils face meaningful comeback from voters in the face of unpopular local decisions. It is also perhaps indicative of how the policy may be anti-democratic by design that in recent years the minister directly responsible for it has always been a member of the House of Lords, so with no democratic answerability at all.

**It could be argued, also, that the presence of top-down, super-strict or authoritarian systems of pupil discipline, as increasingly covered on this website, reflects the lack of democratic input into the academies system. They are possible, despite, I suspect, unhappiness among at least a significant proportion of pupils with such regimes, because they are generally not being consulted about them. They are also enabled because any parent unhappiness with the impact of such policies on their children will find only limited expression in appeals to democratically-elected local representatives, given the lack of power local authorities have over academies.