The academies policy is crying out for further reform

It lacks the decision-making-in-public which I once witnessed in relation to a school re-organisation, with decisions of crucial importance to local people now taken by a single civil servant, sitting in private. This sits oddly with Andy Burnham’s vision of devolution.

 

It is a story, from my time starting out in my reporting career in the late 1990s, that sticks in the mind.

The county council had hatched a plan, which I covered in my capacity as education reporter for the Cambridge Evening News, to close one of the six secondary schools in the city.

Senior officials knew that this was going to be controversial, as school closures almost always are. But at a public council meeting, documents in which they set out their case in detail were nevertheless confidently put forward. Elected councillors, who would decide whether to follow the officials’ recommendation, then scrutinised the plans, often seeming unimpressed, if I recall correctly. A public consultation followed and, with the scheme unpopular and weaknesses in the plan explored in detail both in the newspaper’s pages and eventually, again if I recall correctly, once more in the council chamber, the scheme was scrapped.

Nearly 30 years on, the school, Coleridge Community College, remains open. And, for anyone who remembers that the central argument behind its proposed closure – that the soon-to-boom Cambridge was about to experience a population slump, seemed a stretch – its survival has been highly rational.

My mind goes back to those times as I survey the situation with regard to the government’s now-favoured method of school organisation: academies. For, when moves seriously affecting the future of an organisation are made – almost as serious as a school closure – there is none of the public discussion and consultation that we saw in relation to Coleridge. The current system is shockingly lacking in any sense that the views of service users – the ones who, of course, depend on decision-making about our schools – actually count for anything.

Current cases underline the situation.

The Arthur Terry Learning Partnership (ATLP), a 24-school academy chain based in Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands, imploded spectacularly last academic year, as a rapidly-accumulated deficit and controversy over proposed job cuts culminated in the departure of its senior leadership and then, in May, news that it was to be wound up.

In a letter to parents on May 21^st, ATLP’s troubleshooting interim chief executive, Lee Miller, wrote that the trust “has been working closely with the Department for Education to understand what the future for the Trust should look like…following these discussions, I am writing to inform you that the Secretary of State for Education has now made a decision in principle to support the schools within ATLP to transition to a small number of high-performing, regionally based academy trusts...”

Then, two weeks ago, news arrived via an ATLP press release that “the Department for Education has now indicated its intended arrangements for individual schools.” Each of the 24 schools then had its name listed against one of seven academy trusts, which they were to join at some as-yet-unspecified point.

Yet there was no mention of the schools’ parents, pupils, staff and local communities being involved in any discussion about any of this, even after these “intended arrangements” had been announced.

I asked ATLP whether the schools’ communities had had any part in choosing the trusts which each school is to join. Answer came there none. I also asked an ATLP parent. She said that parents had “just been told” which trust it was to be, and that “we know nothing about it. Very shocking”.

The contrast with what I experienced in Cambridge could not be more complete: that was decision-making in public, with those putting forward proposals having to set out their reasoning and local people’s democratic representatives taking the final decision. This was…not that.

Today’s set up is far worse, from a democratic and public accountability perspective*.

The decision-makers will argue that they know best – Mr Miller wrote in May that: “I want to reassure you that this process has been, and will continue to be, undertaken in the best interests of our schools, colleagues, children and families in mind.” But it is hard to see that all of the perspectives of those parties can be fully understood without talking to them openly about the options. This looks like a patrician, oddly old-fashioned system, which the public are being asked to accept in an age which has gone far beyond unquestioning deference for elite decision-making.

Hundreds of miles away, a group parents unhappy about their experience of the academies system are making a similar point, among several.

The Athena Learning Trust, a group of nine schools in Cornwall and Devon, is to be broken up, as community concerns principally about its behaviour management policies prompted a decision by the trust board in July that its schools would be handed to other trusts.

But, surprise, surprise, the communities themselves seem yet to have been involved in discussions about the nature of the transfers, and the identity of the incoming trusts.

In an interesting and well-argued paper published on Sunday, a group of Athena parents called on the government to allow members of the public to get involved in discussions about academy transfers, at the stage that this would have the ability actually to influence decision-making. 

The paper sets out how far the current set-up differs from decision-making-in-public that I witnessed back in the 1990s. Now, people are allowed to “make representations” to the person who is now the sole decision-maker in such cases: the DfE’s Regional Director for the area. But the detail of the director’s thinking in response is not even published, let alone local people having a chance to put their points in person, or to listen to democratic representatives doing that on their behalf. And the officials provide no paperwork setting out their thinking. This is decision-making-in-private, by a single individual, with no detailed explanation even as to their thinking.

The parents’ paper therefore recommends the introduction of “a statutory duty to consult parents, staff and the relevant local authority” before the DfE “determines a transfer, with a minimum consultation period. This helps ensure a wider set of stakeholders are given the opportunity to weigh in on a decision that affects their children, thereby increasing engagement, local support, transparency and accountability.”

It seems staggering even to need to argue that local service users – parents, pupils and classroom staff – should be involved in discussions as fundamental as which organisation gets control of their schools.

Consider, also, how this sits with the notion of parental choice, the important albeit highly-contested idea on which school organisation has been built since the 1980s. Parents are encouraged to agonise over which institution to send their child to, with their preferences then driving the financial success or failure of schools, as funding follows the child. Then, having made that choice, they are cast as passive recipients of decision-making which can have a huge impact on the character of their child’s education, if control of the school via its academy trust were to change.

The Athena parents’ paper makes another point which speaks to how the academies policy has been set up to foreground the interests of those running schools – academy “proprietors,” as the legislation puts it -as opposed to those who depend on their services.

Impressively, they have spotted how the lack of regulation of the academies sector, relative to what we see in non-academy local authority schools, means that parents have less power if they ever need to make a complaint. Whereas in the local authority maintained sector, the law is that a school’s handling of a complaint must have reached a “reasonable” conclusion, academies, which legally are classed as “independent schools”, only have to have set up a complaints process with certain characteristics, and to have followed it. Whether the outcome is “reasonable” is not covered by the law. And, as the parents point out, the DfE as funder and overseer of the academies system does not get involved in the substance of parental complaints. That, it seems, is for the academy trust itself to address.

This means that, as the paper puts it: “Under the current framework, a complaint is made to, and determined by, the trust that is its subject.” It seems a classic case of institutions marking their own homework, and does feed the frustration that I see feeding through from people contacting me with substantive concerns to investigate.

The arguments put forward in relation to the above by the Athena parents’ paper – that communities should not be kept this remote from academy trust transfer decisions, and that parents should be given meaningful routes to raise concerns beyond the trust itself – seem very well-made.

The government’s academy reforms of the past two years, including requiring academies to follow the national curriculum, moves on teacher pay and conditions and some greater regulation of executive remuneration, do not address these points.

As it is, the academies structure, in which the key legal relationship is between the DfE and the trust itself, seems a classic case of top-down decision-making, with service users on the outside. In this sense, structurally it is not a public-facing system** at all.

This would appear to be at odds with the philosophy of the new Prime Minister, which has emphasised devolution of decision-making. This came through in sections of Andy Burnham’s speech to the Labour conference last week. He said, first: “We need to restore stronger democratic control;” and second: “We will bring back local democratic control through a stronger role for mayors and local leaders.”

He was talking, first, about public housing and, second, about energy. But education is, of course, another hugely important area of public policy. The government needs to have another think about how its favoured structure for schools works.  As a start, the government should re-introduce the right to in-public decision-making, which seemed so much in evidence as I cut my teeth as a reporter in the 90s, but which can seem so lacking now.

 

*Interestingly, a blogpost published three years ago by a former DfE Permanent Secretary, Jonathan Slater, made a very similar point, arguing: “The problem with the world of Whitehall is that our policymaking takes place behind closed doors.” He contrasted that with the situation in local government, where he had also served as a senior official and where “my advice was typically offered in public.” The piece was making the case for “a more user-centred approach to policymaking”.

 **Some school leaders and policymakers may dispute this, emphasising the interactions that institutions have with their communities, informally, on a daily basis, and perhaps the notion that parents’ choice of school does give local people some leverage. But it is telling that direct answerability and influence by service users over the services that have been provided seems to have been so watered down.