Reaction to the government’s announcement in its education white paper that all schools in England must become academies is remarkably muted. Last time this was tried, in 2016, ministers were forced into a U-turn, due in part to opposition from Conservative councils. Six years later, and six months after becoming education secretary, Nadhim Zahawi has sweetened the bill to win them over. Local authorities will now be allowed to set up their own trusts, spinning off their education departments into third-sector bodies. They have also been promised powers to intervene if and when academies are not delivering what is needed by communities. A long-awaited report on provision for children with special educational needs and disabilities is also due.
For years, multi-academy trusts (Mats) escaped inspection altogether, with Ofsted’s remit limited to individual schools. The Department for Education now finally admits that this hasn’t worked. Two reviews are on the way: one of academy regulation, and another of their senior leaders’ excessive pay.
Currently, 44% of the nearly 22,000 schools in England are academies, including 78% of secondaries and 37% of primaries. The hope that the white paper holds out is that a greater degree of order can be created out of the current patchwork. There is a logic to the division of labour it envisions, whereby councils plan provision and coordinate admissions, and trusts concentrate on delivery. But when it comes to real-life situations, such as the case of an excluded child that a council wants to place in a particular school, it is far from clear that said council will be granted the power to override a trust’s objections. Similarly, the test of a commitment to enable individual schools to jump from one Mat to another will be in the small print.
The emphasis in the white paper on the quality of teaching is welcome, as is targeted funding for disadvantaged areas and a mental health lead in each school. So too is the government’s commitment to the research-focused Education Endowment Foundation, and the creation of a compulsory register of children not attending school. But there is no getting away from the fact that the overriding aim of the white paper is to turn all schools into academies.
No one who wants the best for the next generation could object to the government’s ambition to “spread the brilliance of the best trusts”. But the fact is that Mats have increased inequality in the system, with their schools overrepresented at the bottom as well as the top of league tables. The education secretary and his officials can see this evidence as well as anyone else. Hence their pledge to bring the laggards up to scratch. There is no good reason to think that they will succeed. Removing schools from the control of elected bodies is not a route to excellence. The experience of recent years shows that the fragmentation of the system has led to worse outcomes for some of the most vulnerable children, including through “off-rolling”, when pupils leave a school without a formal exclusion.
Having refused to fund the pandemic package that his own expert appointee recommended, Boris Johnson wants Mr Zahawi to polish up the government’s poor record. If resistance to this latest push towards academies is muted, the worry is that this is because schools and councils are worn out by fighting a policy agenda driven more by ideology than evidence.
