The one-sentence dismissal of academies reform by Labour-leaning think thank –and why this is so disappointing

My jaw hit the floor on learning of how the Institute for Public Policy Research had considered possibly the most significant education reforms of the past 20 years.

Badged as a “case study,” within a 54-page document produced by the Labour-leaning think tank on “how to rebalance our school system to work for people, economy and society,” staggeringly the academies policy – the way nearly half of schools in England are now of course organised - was given only five paragraphs’ consideration.

The first four summed up the policy’s history and the academic results of what are legally state-funded independent schools, against those achieved by the local authority maintained sector. This document was right to point out that the academies policy has not led to any great advantage for such schools over the maintained alternative they have been billed as replacing. This report’s one-sentence conclusion was that we should therefore not look at changing the academies structure-for the coming “decades”.

So, because of this stalemate in results between the two sectors, said the report, “policy makers should avoid focusing on structures in seeking to improve school outcomes in the coming decades”.

I found this profoundly disappointing. So I wanted to set out here a few reasons why.

Strange logic

First, the logic of this short section, for me, does not bear the briefest of scrutiny. The argument, again, is that because there appears to have been no great difference between academies and non-academies, in terms of results, any substantive differences in the way they are structured do not matter. Results indicators, then, are all, and we should not consider changing the academies structure, because doing so will not lead to any improvement in this data.

But this seems perverse*. I have long thought that the virtual stalemate on results between the two sectors actually should encourage consideration of the important qualitative ways in which they differ.

To put this another way, if the academies sector enjoyed an overwhelming advantage in terms of the quality of education it was producing, as measured by our chosen outcomes indicators, then there would certainly be a stronger argument for setting aside what I think are serious structural weaknesses.

But it does not: the data does not support such a conclusion. The very fact that there is no great difference in the two sectors** in terms of outcomes should, then, in my view, lead us to think much more carefully about the implications of the academies structure itself, rather than run away from such consideration. For me, then, the logic as set out in this paper, for not considering school structures just does not work. (If there are political reasons to consider this off-limits, a paper such as this should set them out.)

Academies policy’s significance not considered

Whatever one stands on the academies policy, it is highly significant. Since 2010, an initiative which under Labour had been a small-scale project in which a couple of hundred secondary schools, mainly with serious challenges serving disadvantaged areas, were often given expensive new buildings alongside changes in control, has morphed into one now encompassing nearly half of the state-funded schools in England. Crucially, the governance and control of such schools is substantially different from the local authority maintained sector. And the organisation, now, of thousands of these schools – in centrally-controlled chains rather than under individual institutions with their own governing bodies – has profound implications for how pupils and communities can experience education provision.

All of this, of course, should come as no surprise to subscribers to Education Uncovered. I set up this website in part because I was having so many people contact me about problems and implications of the academies policy, as experienced at school level. I wanted to use the website to track what was going on; to provide some accountability for decision-making which sources often felt was lacking in this new structure; and to try to analyse what developments in this newly-fragmented system then said about the policy as a whole.

These implications are not considered in this document. Yet they have consequences for what the IPPR says are other aims, in what otherwise looks quite a radical report.

Young people as “active citizens”

The document suggests, for example, that there should be “active citizenship” for young people, in part by giving them voting rights at the age of 16.

“Young people should be partners in building a system that gives them a voice and agency within [my italics] and outside the school setting,” it recommends. This was needed in part because “In school there is significant evidence that young people often feel disempowered and unheard. More than one in ten…children aged 10-15 state that they are unhappy at school and the most frequently given reason for low satisfaction is not ‘feeling listened to’.”

Yet the report gives no consideration to whether structures of school control may be contributing to this.

I make no claim, here, that academy structures guarantee that pupil voice is marginalised. That would be absurd: such developments will depend on the nature of individuals and organisations in charge at the school level. However, there is no doubt in my mind that the policy’s allowance of top-down direction of schools through centralised multi-academy trusts can feed such alienation.

Policies can be developed centrally, more or less whatever teachers think, let alone pupils, as the current case of Astrea Academy Trust’s St Ivo Academy in Cambridgeshire, where by-the-minute lesson plans in which staff are told to get teenagers to follow along with a ruler as books are read to them, make vividly clear.

The sense that decisions are imposed on these pupils without sufficient concern for their mental health is evident from evidence compiled by the parents’ group in the St Ivo case. It also comes through in other recent cases in which academy trusts have imposed controversial behaviour policies on young people. This came through, also, in the development not long ago where a Conservative academy sponsor, in complete control with his wife of a chain of academies, warned that pupils could “face disciplinary consequences” after they protested about controversial policies which they said had failed to reflect their school’s ethnic diversity.

Indeed, while the IPPR’s report talks about the need to “empower young people’s voices and agency rather than disempowering them,” it is hard to think of a more direct example of them being disempowered than when current school control structures see decisions imposed from on high.

The core structural controversy about the academies policy is that it concentrates power in the hands of a few unelected trustees, with all strategic decision-making taking place in private, between the trust and the Department for Education. Communities, including pupils, are left on the outside, seemingly by design. At their worst, these structures can seem to be facilitating authoritarian decision-making which appears the antithesis of the civic engagement seemingly advocated in the IPPR’s document.

This has been illustrated vividly for me in recent days, through letters from DfE regional directors to parent campaign groups for St Ivo Academy and in relation to the South Bank chain of six schools in York. The groups were raising a host of concerns about the details of their children’s education. But, as these officials effectively told parents, there was nothing the DfE could do about it: all decision-making sat with the central trust.  

Beyond that, the academies policy sees decisions about schools’ futures taken entirely in private. Decision-makers are not answerable to the communities who depend on their decisions.

There is also, of course, a case that the policy is taking money away from classrooms, by encouraging high spending on central management teams, as set out in my recent report for the Campaign for State Education.

All of this is about as far away, in terms of the way school structures have been designed under this policy, from the kind of civic engagement that this report otherwise seems to want, as could be imagined. When communities are frozen out of meaningful engagement with decisions, made in private, it seems as if they are no longer public, but private, institutions.

Similarly, the IPPR’s report seems to advocate a move away from the “low-trust, skill and autonomy” set-up of recent decades in the schools sector towards a “high-trust, skill and autonomy” alternative. Again, fine, but where is the consideration that multi-academy trusts, with their facilitation of centrally-designed approaches, might actually be decreasing autonomy, as again the Astrea case seems vividly to illustrate?

No consideration of competition implications of current set-up

The failure to consider the implications of school structures as they are undermines the report in another significant way. This concerns what it says – or does not say – with regard to competition between institutions.

The report criticises the current arrangement, within England’s schools system, for having an emphasis on “competition” and “choice.” This should be replaced, it argues, with “peer to peer learning,” seemingly between schools locally and “coproduction and design”.

But the vehicle for such competition, currently in the English state-funded schools system, increasingly is chains of schools, otherwise known as multi-academy trusts. It would be lovely if such chains would co-operate and, for example, share teaching material and expertise. Some of this no doubt does happen. But it goes against the grain of the way the policy has been set up, which is the encouragement of quasi-private brands competing with each other for pupils and prestige.

I am afraid that simply to wish away such competition without considering the structures through which it operates is ludicrous.

Whole community planning

On a related note, the report mentions as a priority the need to “Harness the whole village to support learning, rather than overburdening schools.”

It says: “We need to stop putting more pressure on schools alone to educate – and solve wider problems such as mental ill-health – and instead harness and connect the resources of public services, parents and the wider community.”

But this is one of the reasons why maintained schools sit within the auspices of wider local authorities, responsible for a range of local services. The academies policy has removed that institutional link, by seeing organisations set up which focus on education alone.  

Ofsted

For me, even the section on Ofsted is undermined by a failure to consider the reality of school structures as they currently are.

The report advocates that a future government should “abolish overarching judgements in inspection reports from Ofsted and develop a new, narrative driven report for parents and guardians.”

This sounds great. But the reality of the current system is that easily-summarisable Ofsted outcomes are needed by competitive organisations of schools in order to demonstrate to the public that they are doing a good job. In other words, it is tricky to think about accountability reform without also thinking about the function that that regime has been put in place in part to perform: holding competitive institutions to account against each other.

School structures, then, are hugely significant to how education operates in England, with deep implications for pupils. It is thus really disappointing that a report such as this, with such forward-thinking aims, should have decided not even to take on board structural consideration – ironically on the basis of a set of results indicators about which, elsewhere, it seems deeply sceptical.

Is it the case that even thinking about school structures was deemed off limits for this team? Seeing it in this way would be strange, given that much of the rest of the report is pretty radical, including the suggestion of votes for 16-year-olds and the end of national Sats tests for year six pupils. As it is, this lacuna, sadly, is bizarre and fundamentally undermines the entire report. The way schools are organised needed to be considered throughout, rather than bolted on as a “case study” whose importance was then quickly dismissed.

Report should have been more open-minded about reform options

It is a shame, as well, since there are a range of recommendations that could be reached after England’s current structural set-up had been looked at in depth. The core problem is that the academies structure does not put service users – pupils, parents and the wider community – front and centre, in terms of rights and accountability. Academies are set up through a private contract between a trust comprising a few individuals, and the Secretary of State, and it seems in the reality of how this operates that it is only these two parties who are seen as important in the running of state-funded schools.

Better approaches could range from scrapping the academies policy altogether to changing it to guarantee, for example, far greater access to information for those affected by decisions; answerability for central government decision-makers to local communities; or greater stakeholder input into the mechanisms of decision-making.

Not even to investigate, then, is seriously to miss an opportunity for a much more interesting discussion. Arguably, it lets down communities which have felt shut out by the way the academies policy works, by not considering their perspective and experiences.

As I finalise this piece, I’ve just sat in on an online session about this report, where I and a few others put points to the lead author about these issues. He responded to argue that, because results are effectively a dead heat between the sectors, the team had decided it would be wrong to embark on another round of costly structural reform.

But this is to leap to rejecting any consideration of the problems and implications of the current system, on the grounds that the most radical option – say returning all academies to local authority oversight – is not a possibility. But wherever one stands on that debate, the reality is that many measures could be taken to address some of the problems set out above; they just need thinking about seriously. So this report really missed many tricks, I think, by closing off such thinking.

I hope, then, that the IPPR might reconsider its report, and address afresh the much more substantial implications of school organisation than are considered here.

As it is, what this report has done is make me think, afresh, about how the current demonstrably problematic structure of school organisation could be made to work more in the public interest. I hope soon to write more on that.

-I have to highlight one other false note in the report. On page 30, it describes the government's recent development of a "core content framework" for initial teacher training as "world leading". This is where the DfE has set out what it sees as a minimum guarantee of curriculum content within teacher education programmes. To describe it as controversial would be an understatement: the move to prescribe from Whitehall the content of courses was a key concern of universities including Oxford, Cambridge, who worried I think about a decline in their ability to shape courses using their own professional juidgement, and about politicisation of content. "World leading," then, I think would be stretching it...

*There’s another level of perversity within that argument, in that elsewhere in the report, the IPPR seems to be taking issue with current results indicators, as too narrow. And yet it has used the current indicators to seemingly reject any detailed thinking on school organisation.

**Admittedly, if the local authority sector was demonstrably seeing its pupils get better results than those in academies, then there would be an even clearer case to look at academy structures and ask if they are the right ones. But the fact that the academies policy has not delivered what its advocates would surely have hoped for – a demonstrably higher set of “outcomes” nationally than the local authority sector – does underline the need to ask questions about it.