“We should not cave in to vested interests,” says Labour. Sadly, it has just done so in education.

Governing party has chosen to side with those running academies, against concerns raised against them at ground level, including over sky-high pay.

“We’ve shown that we can win when we put bold, progressive policies at the centre of our agenda, and not back down to vested interests,” Sadiq Khan, Labour’s (centre-left) mayor of London wrote yesterday. 

Political parties should not be “bowing down to vested interests,” but “taking them on,” Labour’s deputy leader, Lucy Powell, had also warned last week, in a tweet criticising Reform over its plans to deregulate business. 

Yet also last week, as Labour put great effort into attempting to win the Gorton and Denton byelection, it had just published a white paper which saw the government caving in to what has sadly become the most entrenched set of vested interests in England’s education system.

The schools white paper, which rightly drew much of the attention of the media towards its central proposals for special educational needs reform, also included a section which saw this government  abandoning the position it had held since the general election on a signature policy of its predecessors: academies.

Wheras the Conservatives had sought to move as many schools as possible away from the auspices of their local authorities to become centrally-funded, quasi-private academies, Labour post-2024 had been agnostic on school structures, arguing that what went on in schools was more important than how they were organised.

It had even sought to introduce some more regulation of the academies sector, requiring all such schools to follow the national curriculum and, with some caveats, to abide by teachers’ national pay and conditions arrangements.

With just over half of state-funded schools in England now academies, and the rest still local authority maintained, there was an effective stalemate between the two sectors, with no apparent government enthusiasm for changing this status quo.

All that has changed, however, with the white paper, with Labour now arguing that all schools should become part of what it euphemistically now describes as “school trusts”. Despite what appears to be an attempt to move away from the use of the word “academy,” this is in reality a refreshed all-schools-must-be-academies drive, as tried twice without success over the past 10 years by the Conservatives, with the Department for Education having confirmed last week that all schools in newly-created trusts will legally be academies.

What has triggered this? It appears that the DfE, despite its hitherto more neutral stance under Bridget Phillipson, has now accepted completely the arguments of the academy employers’ group, the Confederation of School Trusts (CST).

The CST, under its effective and widely-quoted chief executive Leora Cruddas, was last week crowing – via a newsletter to members and also in a TES article - that the language it uses to describe trusts had now been adopted by the DfE. 

This is true. Just as the CST has argued that what it describes as “school trusts” could be the “anchor” of their communities, and “civic” organisations, so these terms were used in the white paper. Even the DfE’s new use of the term “school trust” echoes the CST’s formulation, with this document also accepting the CST argument that: “Our best school trusts illustrate the transformational potential of schools working together for children.”

Readers might ask what the problem is, here. Well, the reality is that academy trusts, as experienced by pupils, parents and frontline staff – and evidence comes my way almost daily – often do not operate in the way that the CST, and ministers, present as ideal. And the employers’ group, and now the DfE, is spinning the way trusts have been set up, sadly, as the opposite of its reality.

For while Ms Cruddas has argued that “school trusts” should be seen as “civic institutions,” my dictionary defines “civic” as “related to a city or town, especially its administration; municipal”. Yet academy trusts were set up to bypass local government: they are founded on a contract between central government and boards of unelected trustees, who do not have to be local, and have no formal answerability to local communities.

Wheras local authority schools have to have local governing bodies, charged with strategic decision-making for their schools, in the academy set-up central trust boards – based at central trust headquarters which can be hundreds of miles from the schools they operate – are in control.

Of course, it is perfectly possible for academy trusts to be “anchors” of their communities, just as happens in non-academy schools. But if you were a government seeking to ensure that this happened, the quasi-privatisated trust board structure, with schools not linked to local elected representatives and not required to have any meaningful local governance, would not be the way to do so.

These arguments are not just theoretical. The reality is that the way schools have been moved away from their communities via these governance arrangements, and through the lack of regulation of the pay of those leading academy trusts, has set up clear differences of interest between the employers that Ms Cruddas represents and those on the end of their decision-making.

I see it almost daily, in complaints coming my way from parents and staff members about academy trusts taking decisions which can be highly controversial, but with little answerability locally.

The most obvious example as a conflict of interest between the needs of those leading organisations and service users and employees is multi-academy trust leadership pay. Pay packages of £300,000 or more for trust chief executives are becoming far from unknown, with some such organisations having seen their leaders’ salaries rising by close to £100,000 over just the past two years. It is routine to report on pay increases for these leaders being much higher than those seen by classroom staff. Leaders of the larger academy chains – routinely – and even some smaller trusts also have pay packages which outstrip the directors of education of England’s largest local authorities, even though the latter oversee schools educating far more pupils than do leaders of individual academy trusts. This, then, is an extra cost at the top of our system which has been introduced as a result of the academies policy.

 

Meanwhile, some academy trusts have moved to cut teaching assistants’ pay, or make teachers and TAs redundant, while budget pressures on the services schools are able to provide their pupils are almost ubiquitous.

Wheras school-level staff have national pay and conditions arrangements, which the government is now ensuring apply even in the academies sector, it has not done so for the academy trust leadership, for which the CST has been a very effective voice. So there are not even any guidelines for how such pay packages should operate, let alone hard-and-fast rules.

With the justified controversy over academy trust leader pay continuing to give the policy a bad name among many people, it seems as if this government has decided that, rather than address this meaningfully, it would rather seek to airbrush the word “academy” away completely, in its use of the non-specific phrase “school trusts,” instead of “academy trusts”.

The white paper does nod towards concerns about pay, stating that it will tighten its rules “requiring executive pay increases to be proportionate and justified”. But this sounds little different from the occasional half-hearted moves towards regulation we saw under the Conservatives, who wrote to trusts urging them to justify inflation-busting increases, to little effect.

So, the reality is that the situation described above continues. Also last week, in the aftermath of Labour’s by-election calamity, the Guardian quoted the party’s MP Chris Curtis, of its “growth group,” saying that the result was a “wake-up call” and that there was a broken system that “rewards the people gaming it and punishes the people grafting”. 

The sad thing is that, despite many people working within the academies system, including no doubt many of its leaders, being public service-minded role models, the state of many of these seemingly ever-expanding pay packets does feed a sense of a deregulated system being gamed, while the rest – the “grafters” – struggle on.

Given this, it is surprising that a Labour government, when faced with the choice of being on the side of those who depend on schools either for their education or those workers in the classroom who rely on them for their incomes, would side with employers, many of whose greed really should be giving those overseeing this system much greater pause for thought.