Labour’s stated mission is to break down barriers to opportunity. But some of its policies risk undermining the very system (the academy sector) that has best driven the improvement of so many weak schools over the last 20 years, including those in the most disadvantaged areas of the country.
To declare an interest, I am a passionate advocate of the academy sector – not for ideological reasons but because of what I have seen they can achieve, both as chair of a trust in London and the South East and as an admirer of so many trusts who have transformed long-term under-performing schools, and in turn the life chances of tens of thousands of children and young people.
Three legislative changes in the new Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill will impact all schools, but particularly the academy sector, and as a result risk threatening the continued improvement of our country’s schools.
These three changes would mean that:
- All new teachers will need to hold Qualified Teacher Status or be working towards it.
The latest Department for Education (DfE) statistics show that overall non-QTS teachers account for just 3.6% of England’s 469,000 teachers. There are good reasons for why it can be very helpful to have an unqualified teacher in a classroom, and it provides important flexibility to staffing structures. For example, if a teacher leaves suddenly, an academy might temporarily use a higher level teaching assistant (HLTA) from within their staff to cover the class until the teacher is appointed. That non-QTS HLTA will already know the children and the curriculum, and so will provide consistency. Under a QTS requirement a supply teacher might instead be brought in – they won’t know the school, let alone the children or the curriculum, and will cost more.
Academies also currently appoint people such as artists, musicians and sports professionals, who are experts in their fields but don’t hold QTS, so the children get the best possible learning opportunity.
The QTS freedom has, at the least, not inhibited academies’ ability to improve schools. But perhaps most importantly, in a recruitment and retention crisis, and when we still await detail on how the Government will recruit its long-promised 6,500 new teachers, it would seem wise to keep as many recruitment options open as possible. And we don’t yet know whether the 17,000 current non-QTS teachers will be able to continue teaching if they change to a new employer. Academies should be trusted to be able to employ those they believe will raise standards.
- All teachers will have the same core pay and conditions offer.
At the moment, academies don’t have to follow the same pay and conditions requirements as maintained schools, though most do. Trusts currently have the flexibility to do things differently in order to address the persistent national workforce crisis – you can’t improve schools without the staff to make it happen. A great example is United Learning, which pays its teachers 5.6 per cent above scale. Innovations like this need nurturing, not restricting.
- “Failing” schools will not have to become academies.
Currently, if a maintained school is rated ‘Inadequate’ by Ofsted, the Secretary of State must convert it into an academy and it joins a trust with the capacity and track record that indicates it can improve it rapidly. The Government’s plan changes this duty to a discretionary power, which means many struggling schools may not join the organisations which are best placed to turn them around, or may convert to academy status slowly.
But urgent intervention, from expert academy trusts, is what is required, which is why weak schools are currently “forced” to join a trust.
A consistent pattern
The Bill comes shortly after the DfE announced an end to two grants: one covered the legal and administrative costs for maintained schools to become academies and the other enabled trusts to invest in things like additional staff to build the necessary capacity to support the schools most in need. The removal of these funding pots exacerbates financial hurdles, limiting the sector’s ability to improve weak schools.
Meanwhile, academies will also soon need to follow the national curriculum. The vast majority already do but the freedom the current rule provides means that an academy has the flexibility to do something which they know will better meets the needs of the children in their particular school. The implication shouldn’t be that doing things differently is not good.
Then there are the Regional Improvement for Standards and Excellence (RISE) teams, which will be run by the DfE. Plans for how the teams will work are still vague, but they will comprise a mixture of civil servants and educators seconded part-time from schools, councils and trusts. Teams will commission support for schools in accordance to categories of need based on the upcoming Ofsted ‘report cards’ – but who decides which category a school is in is unclear.
A key issue is that it’s not yet known who is ultimately responsible and accountable for whether interventions are successful and the funding utilised is well-spent – the organisation commissioned to support or the responsible (governing) body of the school.
Also unknown is to what degree this support will duplicate or even negate efforts already in progress in any of these schools which are already working with a trust. The trust will be on the ground and therefore know and understand the issues and have targeted improvement plans underway which need time to embed.
Trusts are already designed as the engine room for school improvement. They hold the capacity as organisations which improve schools through deep and purposeful collaboration – this is exactly what they exist to do. Why duplicate what trusts do, but slower, more bureaucratic, and less connected to the real world of the schools?
Why does it matter?
Labour’s intention seems to be to put local authorities (LAs) on an equal footing with academy trusts for improving schools. But it was the Labour Government in 2003 which realised that LAs were not best at doing this. For example, back then a school improvement partner might visit a struggling school once a term, discuss what needed to be improved and how it might be done, and then visit the next term to see what progress was being made. Struggling schools continued to struggle, and as a result Labour introduced the academy programme. The capacity of LAs now to improve schools is even weaker than 20 years ago, simply because they have not been fully in that game for two decades, and because of decimated funding.
Strong academy trusts with track records of transforming schools aren’t occasional visitors to those schools – they are deeply embedded in the daily life of the school and understand fully the challenges and how to fix them.
A central support team of experts in teaching and learning, finance, HR, estates, health and safety, IT and more closely supports schools every day. They understand the context, challenges, strengths and people in each school.
Crucially, the trust is the legal employer of all staff. This means the trust can harness the expertise throughout the trust collectively to help improve the different areas of challenge in each of the schools. And it can do this efficiently in terms of money, time and resource.
Schools aren’t left to their own devices or isolated.
In this way, trusts like Dixons, Outwood Grange and countless others have transformed standards in hundreds of schools with what seemed to be entrenched underperformance, including those in disadvantaged areas.
Trust central teams can focus on the big picture issues whilst the schools can focus on the teaching and learning. Trusts — more than individual schools or local authorities — have the structure and capacity to think strategically, act decisively and manage resources efficiently to improve schools.
Breaking Barriers? Or Breaking Opportunity?
More than half of children in England attend academies.
The Government refers to Tony Blair’s former phrasing of “standards not structures”. But this mantra, as Sam Freedman expertly described in a recent Tes article, is “doomed to fail” – Blair himself described his change of heart, saying: “the whole point is that structures beget standards. How a service is configured affects outcomes.”
The key questions to ask are first, why does the trust structure drive improvements and innovations? Then, how does that improve education? And finally, how can we expand this opportunity? The answers to those are what should be driving policy.
