The Evelyn Grace Academy in Brixton, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects; the building won the prestigious Stirling Prize in October
We have only Susan Crosland’s word that her husband Tony, the late Labour secretary of state for education, ever said that he wanted to “destroy every fucking grammar school in England.” It is less likely still that a man as decorous as the current education secretary, Michael Gove, would utter such an imprecation. But it is to be hoped that he has the same scale of ambition, albeit trained at a better target. The mission of his government, which will otherwise be defined by a halting attempt to pay down the deficit, should be to destroy every fucking failing comprehensive in the country.
Every cabinet minister has a finite amount of reforming energy and a limited stock of political capital, and there are early signs that Gove’s considerable abilities are not being deployed to solve the biggest problem. Since he became education secretary, Gove has deployed two signature policies. The first is to usher 24 establishments into being, under the banner of the “free schools” policy, by which interested parties are licensed to run a school if local demand exists. The second is a rapid expansion of Labour’s academies programme and it is on this second count that Gove is starting from the wrong point.
The idea of the city academy, as it was originally called, was a response to a chronic and shameful failure in British education. In 1995, the first ever Key Stage 2 standardised tests (known as “Sats”) showed that two thirds of 11 year olds left primary school unable to read, write and add up properly. In half of all comprehensive schools, fewer than one in three 16 year olds were failing to achieve five GCSE passes including English and mathematics—the standard that Michael Gove would later term the “English baccalaureate.” A quarter of all comprehensives were getting fewer than a fifth of their children over that threshold. Michael Barber, who led the National Literacy Strategy, tells the story that, when he was on a commission sent in by the department of education to close down the notorious Hackney Downs School in London, they discovered its best results at GCSE were in Turkish. Hackney Downs didn’t teach Turkish.
This failure had been incubated for a generation by conservatives of both left and right. The left’s conservatives located all the ills of British education in underfunding and the divisive elitism of private schools. The left’s affinity with its own creation, the comprehensive, led it into the defining conservative position—believing that wisdom must be encoded in an institution, even when all the evidence is to the contrary. The conservatives of the right either ignored comprehensive education altogether or, at best, plotted an escape route for a tiny number of refugees from the proletariat, while indecisively lamenting the absence of proper technical education for the masses.
Not that Tony Blair’s Labour government grasped the problem at once. Its early forays into secondary education (primary was a different matter) were a series of false starts. The 1,200 grant-maintained schools were returned, against their will, to local authority control. Time was wasted mulling the ambition of abolishing local education authorities. There was a brief fashion for more sixth-form colleges. Failing comprehensives were re-launched under the banner of the “fresh start” policy.
Some of these initiatives were useful but none were transformative. The pivotal moment came when Andrew, now Lord, Adonis, the prime minister’s education adviser, suddenly saw, on the road to Telford, the magical compound. On a trip to the Thomas Telford City Technology College in Shropshire, Adonis was bowled over by its ethos of expectation, by the ambitions the teachers held for its pupils, by its vibrant extra-curricular life and by the ingenious information technology curriculum.
Reflecting on that time and the battles over academies since, Adonis told me, “People always want to complicate the issue. But it’s basically very simple.” Incremental change is never enough. And there is an obvious standard to judge reform against: “with every change, I asked myself, would I want this for my children? If the answer was no, I started again.”
The idea was that academies would replace schools that were either in special measures—a designation meaning they have been judged inadequate—or else heading that way. Academies have twice the national average of children in receipt of free school meals (a standard measure of deprivation) to this day. It is important to remember, as we bring the story up to date, that academies were, before they were anything else, an attempt at the systematic replacement of failing comprehensive schools.
The new model drew inspiration, variously, from Kenneth Baker’s City Technology Colleges, the charter schools movement that began in Minnesota in the United States in 1991, and now boasts over 5,000 schools across the country, and the experiment with school autonomy that began at the same time in Sweden. There were, and are, four essential, linked, components to the idea of the academy school. These approximate to the findings of a 2010 McKinsey study, “How the world’s most improved school systems keep getting better.” On this model, the attributes that a successful school needs are a clear ethos, good leadership, effective governance and excellent teachers.
The first stipulation—the demand for a distinctive ethos—is, in a sense, a summation of the case. The animating purpose of the academy, which made it an affront to the traditional comprehensive, was differentiation. This came in part through encouraging schools to develop at least one subject specialism, but it came about mostly by setting high expectations for all students, in which even uninterested parents were made complicit. Then the school’s leaders were given the latitude to lead.
Though academies are required to follow the national curriculum in the core subjects of English, maths, science and IT, they have the power to vary what else they do. One of the great pioneers is Michael Wilshaw, now head of Ofsted, who established Mossbourne Academy on the site of Hackney Downs in 2004. He took pupils out of the mainstream curriculum to give them intensive tuition in literacy and numeracy. Some academies have torn up the school day, or even the structure. Former headteacher Richard Gilliland, chief executive of the Priory Federation of Academies in Lincoln, manages four academies, including one that has eliminated the divide between primary and secondary. Children walk in at five and can stay until 18.
Perhaps the most important new power granted to principals was recruitment. It is unsurprising to find out that the single most important component of a good school is the quality of its teachers. Countries that sit at the top of the international league tables—Finland, South Korea, Singapore—are those in which teaching is a prestigious occupation that attracts the highest quality graduates. Their recruitment processes are rigorous and the subsequent qualification is highly prized, and not just within education. By the late 1990s, secondary school education in England was in the throes of an acute shortage of teachers, especially in mathematics and most sciences.
Academy status grants greater flexibility over staffing than is common in local authority schools. Academies are under no obligation to recognise trade unions, or follow national pay bargaining. The critical change was attracting higher calibre graduates into teaching, which was why the Teach First programme was so important to the academy model. (Teach First signs up recent graduates with a promise to help them into other employment after an initial period of teaching in a poor area. By 2011 it had become the third largest graduate recruiter in the country, with 5,000 applicants for 787 places.) Then, the autonomy of the school leader was assisted by a new model of governance. Aside from the church, local authorities had been the monopoly providers of schools for almost a century. The academy programme brought in external governors to provide extra cash and new thinking. As Daniel Moynihan, chief executive of the Harris Federation puts it: “sponsors bring high expectations and a track record of success.”
The use of sponsors has never been less than controversial, but Ofsted recently reported that, while 62 per cent of secondary schools have good or outstanding leadership, that is true in 95 per cent of academies. Extra money was important, but the comparatively trifling sums invested by sponsors were overwhelmed by the massive increase in state education funding. Until austerity intervened, capital spending in education had risen to £6.4bn a year. There was a lot in this model to excite the critics, of which there were many. When then education secretary David Blunkett announced Labour’s first “city academy” plans in March 2000, the head of the Local Government Association’s reaction was characteristic: “A half-baked idea from the US. This is something that is not acceptable. This is the beginning of removing education from local government. We don’t need another untested and alien gimmick.” To John Dunford of the Secondary Heads Association, academies were the “cuckoos in the nest.” The Anti Academy Alliance brings together the TUC, NASUWT, NUT, ATL, UCU, Unison, Unite, GMB, PCS, MU and FBU in compendious union hostility to the policy.
The substantial capital grants to academies—sometimes as much as £30m—looked unfair. Local authorities resented being locked out and made the point that academies had been taken out of the ambit of democratic control. They worried that special needs provision would get worse as schools opted out of co-ordination. There were concerns that academies would take a share of the money that ought to go to neighbouring schools. There was a lot of opposition to private sponsors and the allegedly baleful influence they held over the school curriculum. There were concerns that new staff would not be employed on the same generous remuneration packages as the old. This worry co-existed alongside the contradictory anxiety that some of the senior personnel of the academy chains were being paid far too much. And it quickly became clear that academy status was no panacea. One of the first, Unity City Academy in Middlesbrough, was soon after placed in special measures by Ofsted. Academies do not always work. With so much vested in the leadership, having the wrong people in control can be to the school’s detriment. The virtue of autonomy for academies can also be their vice.
Yet, for all the criticism, the academy model took hold and now has some signal successes to its name. The most recent data from the department for education and skills shows academies are improving faster than the average school. GCSE results in academies are rising at more than twice the national average, including in English and maths. The 2010 GCSE results showed that academies which had replaced existing schools were achieving results that were twice as good as their predecessors had managed in 2001. A recent PricewaterhouseCoopers evaluation found the progress of academy pupils generally “exceeded corresponding improvements at a national level.” A recent study by Steve Machin at the Centre for Economic Performance at the LSE found that academies that had been open for at least two years had generated “significant improvement” in their GCSE results over and above those achieved by comparable non-academies. Parents are noticing too. On average, academies receive two applications for every place available each year, according to a 2010 report from the National Audit Office. This success has proved irresistible to the government, which has rushed through a huge expansion in the programme. In the process, the original conception of the academy as a replacement for the failing comprehensive has gone missing. In academies, the proportion of children eligible for free school meals is over two and a half times greater than in maintained secondary schools. That will soon cease to be true as the government is encouraging every school to convert.
There are now more than 1,400 academies, the vast majority having converted since the Academies Act of July 2010. In October alone, 69 schools converted and a further 74 applied. But the LSE study—referred to above—also pointed out that the conversions are coming from schools that are already more successful than average. According to the report, the “Coalition academies” contain far lower proportions of pupils who are eligible for free school meals, and they are considerably better performing schools in terms of GCSE results. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with extending a policy devised to combat failure to those who have already tasted success. The virtues of autonomy will, no doubt, help those schools that are converting, although there is suspicion that the incentive is not so much the attractions of extra autonomy as of extra money. Some schools have been quite open about this. The Tiffin school in Kingston upon Thames sent a letter to parents, explaining the £225,000 annual net benefit of academy status as the principal benefit of conversion, the Guardian reported recently. In a survey of 1,471 secondary schools conducted by the Association of School and College Leaders in April 2011, 72 per cent of those interviewed cited financial gain for the school as a reason for pursuing academy status. It would be unfair to suggest that the government is doing nothing. Lord Hill of Oareford, the parliamentary under-secretary of state for education, points out that: “since the coalition has been in power we have taken 116 failing schools and turned them into academies; 44 more will become academies by April next year.”
The case is not that the government is idle or blind to the issue of failure. It is that it is spreading its reforming instincts too widely. Granting a little more autonomy and money to schools that are already good will not deal with the residual problem of British secondary education: the poor quality on offer at too many schools. And that will be an abiding shame because a drive to eradicate failing comprehensives could produce change that would be a monument to the government. There are two key policies that could help—the emergence of education brands and breaking the walls between the public and the private sectors.
Whatever else it has achieved, the academy has become a noted brand. Adonis notes that few comprehensive schools advertise that fact in their name. All grammar schools did and all academies do. The brand value of the academy has spawned education chains such as the Harris Federation, ARK, the United Learning Trust, Oasis, the Edutrust Academies Charitable Trust, the Haberdashers’ Company and the Emmanuel Schools Foundation. More than half of the pre-coalition academies were members of a family of schools under a single banner. The Harris group of academies, which even has its own flag, now employs 800 staff to educate 8,000 pupils, with an annual budget of £50m.
The advantages of federation are manifold. The rare commodity of good leadership stretches further. Schools can offer a wider choice of courses, within and without the ordinary curriculum. Staff expertise can be shared and there are many more opportunities for promotion and professional development across the federation. The academies themselves gain economies of scale in purchasing, IT and managing the business.
Some of these chains, such as the Mercers’ Company, are already dissolving the wall between the public and private sectors. Dulwich College sponsors an academy on the Isle of Sheppey and Wellington College sponsors a military academy in Wiltshire. The King Edward VI Foundation now includes an academy in its portfolio of two private schools and five state grammars. The Girls Day School Trust has converted two of its private schools in Liverpool and Birkenhead into academies. The Mercers Company, the Haberdashers’ Company, and the City of London Corporation have all sponsored academies. This is a rediscovery of the private sector’s initial mission. Eton was established by Henry VI for the benefit of poor scholars—Elizabeth I set up Westminster School and William of Wykeham founded Winchester for the same reason.
The arithmetic is compelling. There are 3,333 state secondary schools. Taking just those in the bottom half of the league tables that have not already become academies leaves roughly 1,500 schools. There are over 2,600 private schools and 300 universities in this country. It is not a fantasy to suppose that the expertise contained in those institutions could transform the long tail of comprehensives that are still not good enough.
The other way in which the private sector could help is to increase its supply of places. Private schools have responded to extra demand by increasing the price rather than creating more supply. If a good education could be made available, at £3,000 per annum, private schooling would come within reach for thousands more families who tell pollsters they would be attracted to it were it not for the prohibitive price-tag. So far, the private sector response has been unimaginative and the examples of cheap private schooling are isolated exceptions.
The existence of failure is still the contested space of education. The first wave of free schools is welcome but Gove would be unwise to invest all his capital in the numbers game of how many new schools spring up. Most of the early candidates for free school status are actually schools escaping the threat of closure, faith schools and schools converting from independent status, all of which were permitted within the existing rules.
The performance of the academies has been patchy, inevitably so, as they replaced the poorest schools in the country. But patchy is an improvement, not a criticism. Academies have shown that it is at least possible to extend educational opportunity into urban areas on which teaching had more or less given up. Forty per cent of the pupils at the Mossbourne academy in Hackney are on free school meals and 30 per cent have special needs. Eighty-two per cent of the cohort gained five A*-C grades in their GCSEs, including English and maths. Conservatives of left and right would never have believed it possible.
The task now is to keep pressing on, to make progress ubiquitous. But the outline of a revolution is visible. It will take incredible application and relentless drive from the centre. There will be a lot of opposition and many travails along the way. But it can be done. A renewed academies programme, with its original inspiration, holds out the promise that, as John Stuart Mill said as long ago as 1860, “if the government would make up its mind to require for every child a good education, it might save itself the trouble of providing one.”
We have only Susan Crosland’s word that her husband Tony, the late Labour secretary of state for education, ever said that he wanted to “destroy every fucking grammar school in England.” It is less likely still that a man as decorous as the current education secretary, Michael Gove, would utter such an imprecation. But it is to be hoped that he has the same scale of ambition, albeit trained at a better target. The mission of his government, which will otherwise be defined by a halting attempt to pay down the deficit, should be to destroy every fucking failing comprehensive in the country.
Every cabinet minister has a finite amount of reforming energy and a limited stock of political capital, and there are early signs that Gove’s considerable abilities are not being deployed to solve the biggest problem. Since he became education secretary, Gove has deployed two signature policies. The first is to usher 24 establishments into being, under the banner of the “free schools” policy, by which interested parties are licensed to run a school if local demand exists. The second is a rapid expansion of Labour’s academies programme and it is on this second count that Gove is starting from the wrong point.
The idea of the city academy, as it was originally called, was a response to a chronic and shameful failure in British education. In 1995, the first ever Key Stage 2 standardised tests (known as “Sats”) showed that two thirds of 11 year olds left primary school unable to read, write and add up properly. In half of all comprehensive schools, fewer than one in three 16 year olds were failing to achieve five GCSE passes including English and mathematics—the standard that Michael Gove would later term the “English baccalaureate.” A quarter of all comprehensives were getting fewer than a fifth of their children over that threshold. Michael Barber, who led the National Literacy Strategy, tells the story that, when he was on a commission sent in by the department of education to close down the notorious Hackney Downs School in London, they discovered its best results at GCSE were in Turkish. Hackney Downs didn’t teach Turkish.
This failure had been incubated for a generation by conservatives of both left and right. The left’s conservatives located all the ills of British education in underfunding and the divisive elitism of private schools. The left’s affinity with its own creation, the comprehensive, led it into the defining conservative position—believing that wisdom must be encoded in an institution, even when all the evidence is to the contrary. The conservatives of the right either ignored comprehensive education altogether or, at best, plotted an escape route for a tiny number of refugees from the proletariat, while indecisively lamenting the absence of proper technical education for the masses.
Not that Tony Blair’s Labour government grasped the problem at once. Its early forays into secondary education (primary was a different matter) were a series of false starts. The 1,200 grant-maintained schools were returned, against their will, to local authority control. Time was wasted mulling the ambition of abolishing local education authorities. There was a brief fashion for more sixth-form colleges. Failing comprehensives were re-launched under the banner of the “fresh start” policy.
Some of these initiatives were useful but none were transformative. The pivotal moment came when Andrew, now Lord, Adonis, the prime minister’s education adviser, suddenly saw, on the road to Telford, the magical compound. On a trip to the Thomas Telford City Technology College in Shropshire, Adonis was bowled over by its ethos of expectation, by the ambitions the teachers held for its pupils, by its vibrant extra-curricular life and by the ingenious information technology curriculum.
Reflecting on that time and the battles over academies since, Adonis told me, “People always want to complicate the issue. But it’s basically very simple.” Incremental change is never enough. And there is an obvious standard to judge reform against: “with every change, I asked myself, would I want this for my children? If the answer was no, I started again.”
The idea was that academies would replace schools that were either in special measures—a designation meaning they have been judged inadequate—or else heading that way. Academies have twice the national average of children in receipt of free school meals (a standard measure of deprivation) to this day. It is important to remember, as we bring the story up to date, that academies were, before they were anything else, an attempt at the systematic replacement of failing comprehensive schools.
The new model drew inspiration, variously, from Kenneth Baker’s City Technology Colleges, the charter schools movement that began in Minnesota in the United States in 1991, and now boasts over 5,000 schools across the country, and the experiment with school autonomy that began at the same time in Sweden. There were, and are, four essential, linked, components to the idea of the academy school. These approximate to the findings of a 2010 McKinsey study, “How the world’s most improved school systems keep getting better.” On this model, the attributes that a successful school needs are a clear ethos, good leadership, effective governance and excellent teachers.
The first stipulation—the demand for a distinctive ethos—is, in a sense, a summation of the case. The animating purpose of the academy, which made it an affront to the traditional comprehensive, was differentiation. This came in part through encouraging schools to develop at least one subject specialism, but it came about mostly by setting high expectations for all students, in which even uninterested parents were made complicit. Then the school’s leaders were given the latitude to lead.
Though academies are required to follow the national curriculum in the core subjects of English, maths, science and IT, they have the power to vary what else they do. One of the great pioneers is Michael Wilshaw, now head of Ofsted, who established Mossbourne Academy on the site of Hackney Downs in 2004. He took pupils out of the mainstream curriculum to give them intensive tuition in literacy and numeracy. Some academies have torn up the school day, or even the structure. Former headteacher Richard Gilliland, chief executive of the Priory Federation of Academies in Lincoln, manages four academies, including one that has eliminated the divide between primary and secondary. Children walk in at five and can stay until 18.
Perhaps the most important new power granted to principals was recruitment. It is unsurprising to find out that the single most important component of a good school is the quality of its teachers. Countries that sit at the top of the international league tables—Finland, South Korea, Singapore—are those in which teaching is a prestigious occupation that attracts the highest quality graduates. Their recruitment processes are rigorous and the subsequent qualification is highly prized, and not just within education. By the late 1990s, secondary school education in England was in the throes of an acute shortage of teachers, especially in mathematics and most sciences.
Academy status grants greater flexibility over staffing than is common in local authority schools. Academies are under no obligation to recognise trade unions, or follow national pay bargaining. The critical change was attracting higher calibre graduates into teaching, which was why the Teach First programme was so important to the academy model. (Teach First signs up recent graduates with a promise to help them into other employment after an initial period of teaching in a poor area. By 2011 it had become the third largest graduate recruiter in the country, with 5,000 applicants for 787 places.) Then, the autonomy of the school leader was assisted by a new model of governance. Aside from the church, local authorities had been the monopoly providers of schools for almost a century. The academy programme brought in external governors to provide extra cash and new thinking. As Daniel Moynihan, chief executive of the Harris Federation puts it: “sponsors bring high expectations and a track record of success.”
The use of sponsors has never been less than controversial, but Ofsted recently reported that, while 62 per cent of secondary schools have good or outstanding leadership, that is true in 95 per cent of academies. Extra money was important, but the comparatively trifling sums invested by sponsors were overwhelmed by the massive increase in state education funding. Until austerity intervened, capital spending in education had risen to £6.4bn a year. There was a lot in this model to excite the critics, of which there were many. When then education secretary David Blunkett announced Labour’s first “city academy” plans in March 2000, the head of the Local Government Association’s reaction was characteristic: “A half-baked idea from the US. This is something that is not acceptable. This is the beginning of removing education from local government. We don’t need another untested and alien gimmick.” To John Dunford of the Secondary Heads Association, academies were the “cuckoos in the nest.” The Anti Academy Alliance brings together the TUC, NASUWT, NUT, ATL, UCU, Unison, Unite, GMB, PCS, MU and FBU in compendious union hostility to the policy.
The substantial capital grants to academies—sometimes as much as £30m—looked unfair. Local authorities resented being locked out and made the point that academies had been taken out of the ambit of democratic control. They worried that special needs provision would get worse as schools opted out of co-ordination. There were concerns that academies would take a share of the money that ought to go to neighbouring schools. There was a lot of opposition to private sponsors and the allegedly baleful influence they held over the school curriculum. There were concerns that new staff would not be employed on the same generous remuneration packages as the old. This worry co-existed alongside the contradictory anxiety that some of the senior personnel of the academy chains were being paid far too much. And it quickly became clear that academy status was no panacea. One of the first, Unity City Academy in Middlesbrough, was soon after placed in special measures by Ofsted. Academies do not always work. With so much vested in the leadership, having the wrong people in control can be to the school’s detriment. The virtue of autonomy for academies can also be their vice.
Yet, for all the criticism, the academy model took hold and now has some signal successes to its name. The most recent data from the department for education and skills shows academies are improving faster than the average school. GCSE results in academies are rising at more than twice the national average, including in English and maths. The 2010 GCSE results showed that academies which had replaced existing schools were achieving results that were twice as good as their predecessors had managed in 2001. A recent PricewaterhouseCoopers evaluation found the progress of academy pupils generally “exceeded corresponding improvements at a national level.” A recent study by Steve Machin at the Centre for Economic Performance at the LSE found that academies that had been open for at least two years had generated “significant improvement” in their GCSE results over and above those achieved by comparable non-academies. Parents are noticing too. On average, academies receive two applications for every place available each year, according to a 2010 report from the National Audit Office. This success has proved irresistible to the government, which has rushed through a huge expansion in the programme. In the process, the original conception of the academy as a replacement for the failing comprehensive has gone missing. In academies, the proportion of children eligible for free school meals is over two and a half times greater than in maintained secondary schools. That will soon cease to be true as the government is encouraging every school to convert.
There are now more than 1,400 academies, the vast majority having converted since the Academies Act of July 2010. In October alone, 69 schools converted and a further 74 applied. But the LSE study—referred to above—also pointed out that the conversions are coming from schools that are already more successful than average. According to the report, the “Coalition academies” contain far lower proportions of pupils who are eligible for free school meals, and they are considerably better performing schools in terms of GCSE results. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with extending a policy devised to combat failure to those who have already tasted success. The virtues of autonomy will, no doubt, help those schools that are converting, although there is suspicion that the incentive is not so much the attractions of extra autonomy as of extra money. Some schools have been quite open about this. The Tiffin school in Kingston upon Thames sent a letter to parents, explaining the £225,000 annual net benefit of academy status as the principal benefit of conversion, the Guardian reported recently. In a survey of 1,471 secondary schools conducted by the Association of School and College Leaders in April 2011, 72 per cent of those interviewed cited financial gain for the school as a reason for pursuing academy status. It would be unfair to suggest that the government is doing nothing. Lord Hill of Oareford, the parliamentary under-secretary of state for education, points out that: “since the coalition has been in power we have taken 116 failing schools and turned them into academies; 44 more will become academies by April next year.”
The case is not that the government is idle or blind to the issue of failure. It is that it is spreading its reforming instincts too widely. Granting a little more autonomy and money to schools that are already good will not deal with the residual problem of British secondary education: the poor quality on offer at too many schools. And that will be an abiding shame because a drive to eradicate failing comprehensives could produce change that would be a monument to the government. There are two key policies that could help—the emergence of education brands and breaking the walls between the public and the private sectors.
Whatever else it has achieved, the academy has become a noted brand. Adonis notes that few comprehensive schools advertise that fact in their name. All grammar schools did and all academies do. The brand value of the academy has spawned education chains such as the Harris Federation, ARK, the United Learning Trust, Oasis, the Edutrust Academies Charitable Trust, the Haberdashers’ Company and the Emmanuel Schools Foundation. More than half of the pre-coalition academies were members of a family of schools under a single banner. The Harris group of academies, which even has its own flag, now employs 800 staff to educate 8,000 pupils, with an annual budget of £50m.
The advantages of federation are manifold. The rare commodity of good leadership stretches further. Schools can offer a wider choice of courses, within and without the ordinary curriculum. Staff expertise can be shared and there are many more opportunities for promotion and professional development across the federation. The academies themselves gain economies of scale in purchasing, IT and managing the business.
Some of these chains, such as the Mercers’ Company, are already dissolving the wall between the public and private sectors. Dulwich College sponsors an academy on the Isle of Sheppey and Wellington College sponsors a military academy in Wiltshire. The King Edward VI Foundation now includes an academy in its portfolio of two private schools and five state grammars. The Girls Day School Trust has converted two of its private schools in Liverpool and Birkenhead into academies. The Mercers Company, the Haberdashers’ Company, and the City of London Corporation have all sponsored academies. This is a rediscovery of the private sector’s initial mission. Eton was established by Henry VI for the benefit of poor scholars—Elizabeth I set up Westminster School and William of Wykeham founded Winchester for the same reason.
The arithmetic is compelling. There are 3,333 state secondary schools. Taking just those in the bottom half of the league tables that have not already become academies leaves roughly 1,500 schools. There are over 2,600 private schools and 300 universities in this country. It is not a fantasy to suppose that the expertise contained in those institutions could transform the long tail of comprehensives that are still not good enough.
The other way in which the private sector could help is to increase its supply of places. Private schools have responded to extra demand by increasing the price rather than creating more supply. If a good education could be made available, at £3,000 per annum, private schooling would come within reach for thousands more families who tell pollsters they would be attracted to it were it not for the prohibitive price-tag. So far, the private sector response has been unimaginative and the examples of cheap private schooling are isolated exceptions.
The existence of failure is still the contested space of education. The first wave of free schools is welcome but Gove would be unwise to invest all his capital in the numbers game of how many new schools spring up. Most of the early candidates for free school status are actually schools escaping the threat of closure, faith schools and schools converting from independent status, all of which were permitted within the existing rules.
The performance of the academies has been patchy, inevitably so, as they replaced the poorest schools in the country. But patchy is an improvement, not a criticism. Academies have shown that it is at least possible to extend educational opportunity into urban areas on which teaching had more or less given up. Forty per cent of the pupils at the Mossbourne academy in Hackney are on free school meals and 30 per cent have special needs. Eighty-two per cent of the cohort gained five A*-C grades in their GCSEs, including English and maths. Conservatives of left and right would never have believed it possible.
The task now is to keep pressing on, to make progress ubiquitous. But the outline of a revolution is visible. It will take incredible application and relentless drive from the centre. There will be a lot of opposition and many travails along the way. But it can be done. A renewed academies programme, with its original inspiration, holds out the promise that, as John Stuart Mill said as long ago as 1860, “if the government would make up its mind to require for every child a good education, it might save itself the trouble of providing one.”
