The Cambridge Primary Review Trust

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We need to talk about structures

It has been a seductive slogan, for several reasons. But ‘standards, not structures,’ the oft-invoked rallying cry of those who want to cast themselves as fair-minded pragmatists in the now-very-inflamed academies debate, has been an error, I think. For, as has been becoming clearer in recent days, last week’s white paper spelling out the policy of forcing schools towards academy status has at last pushed serious questions about the detail of the academies policy to the fore, and we do need to talk about structures.

The phrase ‘standards, not structures’ – first made popular during Tony Blair’s first term in office – is an attempt to take what is seen as ideology out of the debate as to how state-funded schools should be run. Instead of viewing one type of organisational arrangement – local authority versus academy – as superior and then defending it to the end, the argument goes that we should be agnostic on that. Instead, we should worry only about the quality of education provided to pupils; acknowledge the obvious truth that good practice, or not, exists on either side of this ideological debate; and then move on. In terms of what kind of organisational structure we have in English education, basically we should join the majority of the public and not care: what happens in the classroom is all that matters.

As I say, this argument, set out in those terms, is very powerful. My perception is that ‘standards, not structures’ is used principally, and to a certain extent very effectively, as a weapon against ministers who have been seen to favour academies as an end in themselves. It is very difficult to argue that this is not their position, when a white paper has been published which says all schools are to be turned into academies, but when there is no clear research evidence in favour of the policy. (My last blog discussed this, and it will be set out in detail in my forthcoming research review for the Cambridge Primary Review Trust, especially in relation to primary schools.)

‘Standards, not structures’, was deployed again in Sunday’s Observer newspaper by David Blunkett, who introduced the original academies policy back in 2000. Here, in a well-argued analysis of many of the central problems of this extraordinary white paper, Blunkett said it was part of an ‘ideological agenda that put the structure of our school system before classroom standards’.

He’s right, of course. A government which really cared above all about the quality of what went on in schools, took seriously all the evidence it had and genuinely put children rather than politics first, as the white paper claims to do, would not be proceeding in this manner. Before pushing thousands of schools through a costly and energy-diverting change such as this, it would want to know for sure that improvement would follow. If you want a further insight into the fragility of the evidence base, by the way, just consider Nicky Morgan’s first response when asked about it on last Thursday’s BBC Question Time. The main piece of evidence she could muster on academy quality was a set of statistics embracing changing Ofsted grades for all schools, academies or not.

So the implementation of this policy is, of course, ideological. But that does not mean that arguments about it should stop at a consideration of supposedly ideology-neutral statistics. In fact, we do need to consider arguments away from pure ‘standards’ questions, too.

A personal view is that the obsession over, say, whether school test and exam results are better on the academy or non-academy side, or whether either is improving Ofsted results faster, though important, has obscured real debate about the detail of the really quite fundamental structural changes schools go through in moving to academy status.

And I find myself increasingly thinking about structures – is this the best way of setting up our schools system, irrespective of often small movements in data? – when fielding calls from whistleblowers as I do when writing news stories about the academies system. I would highlight a few structural issues now.

Structure of control

The academies policy, of course, originated under Labour as the suggested answer to usually long-standing problems in inner-city secondary schools. Where institutions had struggled for many years, if not decades, the thinking was that something bold and new had to be tried. The answer was to give great influence to an outside sponsor who, initially usually in response to a promise to donate £2 million, would be given effective control over the school, with only the Secretary of State, overseeing matters from Whitehall, as a democratic backstop.

This was controversial, as it took schools away from local democratic influence and gave great power to sometimes controversial individuals who might have been seen by the ministers backing the scheme to be dynamic. However, if there were worries about an over-concentration of power, they might have been viewed by ministers as a price worth paying in the hope of finally bringing about improvement.

Fast forward to 2016, though, and this, effectively, is the model being proposed for every state-funded school in England by 2022. Academy trusts can be set up with a very small number of ‘members’ – sometimes, only three – at the apex of their governance structures. They can appoint and dismiss the other governors.

It is true that academy trusts can be set up in a much more democratic manner. Yet some of the larger current multi-academy trusts clearly are run as described above, with a small number of individuals having great power. This is made possible because the essential overarching philosophy of the way they are set up has not changed from the original scheme under Labour.

This is not just an abstract debate, either, in my experience. In recent years, as a journalist contacted by people raising concerns, I’ve heard about: a prominent couple running an academy chain, who have particular views as to what should be in the curriculum, imposing that curriculum on schools despite opposition from professionally-trained teachers; an American firm which is influential in running a school ensuring that ‘its’ curriculum is taught in that school; and high remuneration packages finding their way to two individuals who are both among only three or four controlling ‘members’ of the academy chain paying their salaries. This looks to me to suggest an over-concentration of power with regard to taxpayer-funded bodies, serving many pupils.

A key structural question might, then, be: is the original architecture of academy governance, set up for the very particular circumstances of a small number of secondary schools which had struggled, now right for all English  primary and secondary schools?

Autonomy for individual schools

This is probably a key one for school governing bodies considering how to react. The white paper effectively spells the end of the settlement between local authorities and individual institutions, ironically  set up by the Conservatives in 1988, whereby autonomy was given to headteachers and governing bodies, but with the local authority influencing in the background.

Now, the favoured multi-academy trusts can run a whole chain of schools in a top-down manner if they choose. Schools contemplating joining one would be well advised to try to pin down MATs on precisely what freedoms they might be allowed if they join them.

Complaints when things go wrong

It’s a fast-solidifying view of mine that worrying about ‘standards, not structures’, is fine so long as all is well in an institution. It is when things start to go wrong that there are problems. For, over the past four years I’ve been contacted by many people concerned about various goings-on within academies. These include staff bullying, inappropriate spending, the ‘gaming’ of Ofsted inspections, pupils going missing from the system and institutionalised exam cheating.

A refrain of many of these whistleblowers has been concern as to who academies are accountable to. In theory, central government, through the Education Funding Agency and Department for Education, investigates. But we have often found that these remote Whitehall agencies, who, after all, now have thousands of institutions to oversee, are not interested. Nor, by the way, generally is the new intermediate tier of academy oversight, the Regional Schools Commissioner.  To be sure, local authorities, a natural first port of call for a whistleblower in the past, are far from perfect. Yet the ability of an individual to complain, for example, to their local councillor about a particular issue with a local authority school, will be lost in a move to an all-academy system. The general concept of an appeal to a truly local body outside of the instititution itself has fallen by the wayside. The white paper promises that local authorities will focus on protecting, for example, the needs of ‘vulnerable’ children. But without real power, how are they to do this?

These are just a few structural issues. I could mention more, such as questions about the merits of teacher pay and conditions deregulation – is it really best for the taxpayer to have a kind of ‘race to the top’ going on in terms of academy chief executive pay, with salaries in the range of £200-£400,000 now not unheard-of? – the now-well-discussed removal of parents from academy governance structures or the fact that much education law can now be formulated privately, away from the Parliamentary gaze, in the form of academy funding agreements with the Secretary of State.

The bigger issue is that all of these structural changes, which may centre on the de-democratisation and deregulation of state schooling, are important. They should not be seen as subservient to questions about often small changes in test and exam results, for example, or Ofsted outcomes. The country needs to ask itself whether these structural reforms are really in the best interest of pupils. In making this whole issue much more contentious, by proclaiming that all schools are to be forced into the status, ministers  may actually have done this debate a favour. At least now these questions might get more attention.

Warwick Mansell is a freelance journalist and author of ‘Education by Numbers: the tyranny of testing’ (Methuen, 2007). His CPRT research report on recent systemic reforms in the primary sector will be published next term. This blog, a sequel to the one posted on 4 March, was prompted by the publication on 17 March of the White Paper ‘Educational Excellence Everywhere’.

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The end of primary education as we know it?

The government seems seriously to be considering requiring all schools – and yes, that includes all primary schools – to become academies. A white paper setting out such a change may come later this month while, as Robin Alexander pointed out last month, the government has been arguing that ‘all schools should become academies or free schools’ for more than a year.

This would be the biggest change to institutional oversight in the primary sector since the 1988 Education Reform Act, at least. It would enable the Conservative party at long last to achieve what it set out to do less successfully 25 years ago through grant maintained schools: the bypassing of local authorities.

But is it going to herald change for the better, or is it a risky break with what has been a reasonably successful post-war primary education framework in favour of something much less democratic, potentially much more commercialised, arguably much more at risk of capture by vested interests, and certainly much less stable?

A research report I have written for the Cambridge Primary Review Trust, to be published this spring, considers the academies policy in detail. Here is what I found:

Evidence that academy status has improved primary schools since the first primary academies came into existence in 2010 is patchy-going-on-non-existent.

This is perhaps the most obvious finding. The headline is that there is little firm evidence that academy status in itself has improved primary schools. This doubt about evidence perhaps unsurprisingly includes that provided by the Department for Education, which last year was taken to task by the UK Statistics Authority for presenting official test data on sponsored academies without context and was asked by the cross-party Commons Education Select Committee to stop ‘exaggerating’ academy success.

The committee itself said that, as of January 2015:

We have sought but not found convincing evidence of the impact of academy status on attainment in primary schools.

Meanwhile, eight of the nine larger academy chains which have been inspected by Ofsted have come in for criticism.

It is true that the academies policy has been credited by the Commons Education Select Committee with injecting extra dynamism into state education. But the evidence for this seems very indirect.

There is little evidence that academies have used the autonomy which the government says is the centrepiece of the policy on the things that the government usually talks about in relation to it.

Although ministers have tended to argue that academies have greater freedoms over the curriculum, teachers’ pay and conditions and the length of the school day and term, independent studies have tended to find that such theoretical liberties are often not taken up.

For example, although academies can depart from national curriculum arrangements, the existence of an assessment regime which focuses on the national curriculum and against which schools’ futures are decided severely limits their scope for manoeuvre.  Indeed, professionals surveying the current highly prescriptive stipulations of primary English assessments might greet suggestions of professional teaching freedom anywhere within the state-funded sector with a hollow laugh.

The academies policy, with the freedom it gives to multi-academy trusts to control what goes on within a chain of schools, provides no guarantee of meaningful autonomy of any kind for individual schools run by an overarching trust.

At the level of the individual school operating as one of several within a multi-academy trust (MAT), the very concept of school-centred autonomy may not exist as currently understood. Decision-making can be controlled by the MAT board, with the governors of each school having little or no power. If this as a trend continues and many or all schools enter into multi-academy trusts run in such a centralised way – and several leaders of large MATS have confirmed this is what happens in their organisations in the past year– it will be highly significant. Effectively it will bring to an end nearly 30 years of local management of schools, which, ironically, the Conservatives introduced in 1988.

To put it another way, we will have replaced a system whereby heads and governing bodies were given some freedom to manage their own affairs, but subject to oversight and influence by a locally democratic body, with one where a central body which is not subject to local democracy can run a group of schools in a top-down manner.

The academies policy does give meaningful autonomy to academy trusts, at the level of the trust, rather than to single schools within a MAT, in relation to some aspects of what they do. But the question then becomes whether such freedoms are appropriate. Such freedoms come in several categories.

Admissions. For example, the movement of many institutions from ‘community school’ status, run under the auspices of local authorities, to semi-independent academies makes each such academy trust its own admissions authority, rather than having admissions controlled by its local authority.

Yet why would a non-selective school need to control its own admissions? It seems difficult to identify any benefits, from the perspective of a system which sought to treat all local children fairly. However, the potential downsides have been powerfully voiced by, for example, the independent Pearson/RSA Academies Commission. It found that

Academies’ autonomy over admissions has attracted controversy and fuelled concerns that the growth of academies may entrench rather than mitigate social inequalities.

Governance. The academies scheme genuinely gives trusts great freedom in terms of how they set themselves up. At the top of academies’ governance structure sit ‘members’. Members have the ability to appoint and dismiss the other powerful figures within the trust’s governance structure, the trustees. Yet there can be as few as three members controlling multi-academy trusts, which in turn can run large numbers of schools. In some cases, these members seem to know each other well, sometimes as husband and wife. In others, a major figure involved in the day-to-day running of the MAT – say, the chief executive – is also a member sitting at the top of its governance structure.

This seems at odds with established good corporate governance practice and appears to create the clear risk that only a small number of people can be in effective control of large sums of public money and of important public institutions.

Finance. The large sums of taxpayers’ money now finding their way to some senior academy executives – and thus away from the classroom – combined with the payment of public funds to companies in which those governing academy trusts sometimes have an interest, raise additional concerns. Specifically, they highlight the clearly debatable freedoms which have been given to academy trusts over financial affairs.

As DfE’s Academies Financial Handbook puts it, the academies system hands trusts ‘wide discretion’ over the spending of public money, with auditors and the government then checking afterwards that this has been done correctly. In the non-academy sector, the local authority retains ultimate responsibility for spending. Readers will no doubt have views on which procedure is better, but financial goings-on in the academies sector at the very least give rise to concerns.

The system for deciding who runs academies is lacking in transparency and democracy

Decisions such as which organisation gets to take over a school under the new Regional Schools Commissioner (RSC) system are not taken in public; no detailed decision-making documents are available to taxpayers, parents, pupils or staff; there is no detail even on the rules by which such decisions are made, if they exist. Virtually no education stakeholders have any role in the decision-making process. The system is effectively controlled from Whitehall, as RSCs report ultimately to ministers. Though taking decisions with big implications for local communities, they are not subject to any local accountability.

The academies system has also introduced a controversial new feature on education’s landscape: the school takeover. This is when an outside academy trust can be brought in to take over the running of an institution, sometimes whether or not the school community – the parents, staff and pupils – want it.

Conclusion

Moving all schools to primary academy status would seem to herald a major increase in bureaucracy – and a field day for lawyers and auditors – as for thousands of institutions the legal structures on which schools are based are changed. This stands to take resources and the energy of school leaderships away from the core business of what goes on in classrooms.

It also stands to move England towards a system where the claimed greater autonomy of academies over, for example, the curriculum – on which the teaching profession has real expertise –  often seems more rhetorical than real. But it would hand great power to academy trusts over areas such as admissions, where gameplaying in search of a ‘better’ intake seems a clear risk, and finance, where the misuse of public funds is an obvious worry.

It would move the management oversight of schools from governing bodies and local authorities  rooted in their local communities to potentially very small groups of individuals, sometimes friends of each other, supervised essentially from Whitehall. It would allow the writing-out of most parents and taxpayers from meaningful influence and information in relation to major decisions on the future of state-funded schools, including a potential takeover by an outside organisation.

Faced with all of these considerations, one more is worth bearing in mind. As shown by the extensive evidence presented in the final report of the Cambridge Primary Review, considering as it did the system before primary academies:

Primary schools appear to be under intense pressure but are in good heart. They are highly valued by children and parents and in general are doing a good job … [They] may be the one point of stability and positive values in a world where everything else is changing and uncertain. (p 488)

That being so, and taking into account the less attractive aspects of what is being proposed, one question begs itself in relation to this possible change.

It consists of five words: why would you do it?

Warwick Mansell is a freelance journalist and author of ‘Education by Numbers: the tyranny of testing’ (Methuen, 2007). His CPRT research report on recent systemic reforms in the primary sector will be published in the spring.

Contact

Cambridge Primary Review Trust - Email: administrator@cprtrust.org.uk