In this year’s Budget, George Osborne announced that all schools in England must become academies by 2020. Some teaching unions believe there is little evidence that academies perform better than those schools under local authority control. Should academy status be compulsory?
Toby Young is an associate editor of the “Spectator” and co-founder of four academies.
The best argument for converting local authority schools to academies is that it shifts power over what’s taught in the school and how away from politicians and bureaucrats and towards headteachers and school governors. Many critics of academies point to a lack of evidence that they outperform local authority schools, but the schools that have converted to academies so far weren't selected at random so it’s impossible to make meaningful comparisons. However, international evidence compiled by the OECD suggests that granting more autonomy to taxpayer-funded schools raises standard, provided you have the right regulatory regime in place.
What is incontestable is that far more children are taught in good or outstanding schools in England today than in 2010 and far fewer in failing schools. Whether that rise in standards is due, in part, to academisation is more controversial, but the Commons Education Select Committee concluded it probably was in its report on academies and free schools last year.As a conservative, I’m ambivalent about universal academisation. I’m in favour of reducing state control over public education, but conflicted about whether the government should force schools that don’t want more autonomy to embrace it nonetheless. The best argument for it is that the direction of travel since academies were first introduced by the last Labour government is towards universal academisation—nearly 65 per cent of taxpayer-funded secondary schools in England are now academies—and if that’s where we’re going, why not speed up the process? We’re currently at an intermediate stage in which state schools broadly fall into two categories and that system is less efficient and more expensive to run than a unitary system would be.
I accept that many of these arguments depend upon accepting the position we’re in after six years of education reform and if you’re someone who’s opposed those reforms from the beginning you’re unlikely to be convinced. But we are where we are, standards are improving and Labour still hasn’t come up with an alternative education policy.
Lisa Freedman is the MD of the educational consultancy, At The School Gates
If someone told me that, over the next six years, they intended to bulldoze their house and rebuild it, I’d probably ask: “Will the house be better than the one you have?”; “Do you have good builders?”; and, of course, “How much will it cost?” In March, George Osborne announced that he intended to dig up the entire foundations of our schooling system. So far, I’m not convinced that he or anyone else involved has solid answers to my questions. The first will trouble parents most. Will this produce a better outcome for all our children? If so, many would be happy to swallow the medicine. The government claims they have the golden key to “raising standards”: the door to better learning will open if we can only remove the shackles of local-authority control. But, as you acknowledge, the evidence for this is still very much lacking.
Last year, the Sutton Trust, an organisation devoted to aiding England’s least advantaged pupils, published a paper on the effectiveness of multi-academy trusts (MATs). It found that, while some well-funded chains are highly effective, "the majority, when analysed against a range of government indicators on attainment, still underperform the mainstream average for their disadvantaged pupils." The Government Select Committee you quote concurred: "Academisation is not always successful nor is it the only proven alternative for a struggling school."
You state that the strongest argument for academisation is its potential to empower headteachers and school governors rather than politicians and bureaucrats. Mass academisation, however, will have precisely the opposite effect, centralising power in the hands of the Secretary of State for Education, and, on a more immediate level, in the tight bureaucratic grip of MATs who are often more interventionist and less transparent than any local authority.
I don’t think the policy of universal acadamisation will “dig up the entire foundations of our schooling system”. Academies aren’t new. They were formally established by the Learning and Skills Act in 2000, but in reality they’re re-badged versions of the grant-maintained schools introduced by the 1988 Education Reform Act. When Labour left office in 2010 there were 203 academies and at the time of writing there are 3,304, roughly 65 per cent of England’s state secondaries. So the foundations have already been dug up. Both sides in this debate can cite domestic evidence in support of their position. For instance, 64.3 per cent of pupils at secondary convertor academies last year got five or more good GCSEs, including English and maths, compared to 55 per cent in local authority run schools. In London schoolchildren perform better than they do in any other English region and I think this is partly because it has the highest percentage of academies in the country. But as I’ve already said, those schools that have converted to academy status weren’t selected at random so it’s impossible to make meaningful comparisons. It’s the international evidence linking autonomy to rising standards that you need to look at. A key finding in the analysis of the 2012 PISA results, a survey of student performance in 65 countries, is that there’s a clear link between autonomy and attainment: "PISA 2012 also finds that the highest-performing school systems are those that allocate educational resources more equitably among advantaged and disadvantaged schools and that grant more autonomy over curricula and assessments to individual schools.” I
ncidentally, a fairer distribution of resources between advantaged and disadvantaged schools was another measure introduced by Osborne's Budget. I don’t really buy the “transparency” argument. Some MATs are more secretive than others, but then so are some local authorities. Anecdotes about individual MATs behaving badly don’t prove that academies in general are less transparent than local authority-run schools. From a financial point of view, academies are more transparent because they’re audited every year and are required to publish their accounts, as well as their auditors' reports, on their websites. It’s true that some large MATs are quite centralised organisations and that local authority schools that join them may find they’ve traded one set of masters for another. To mitigate this, I’m in favour of allowing schools to move between multi-academy trusts in certain circumstances, which is a suggestion included in the education white paper Nicky Morgan unveiled after the Budget. Your strongest point is that mass academisation will concentrate power in the hands of the Secretary of State for Education, but it needs unpacking. The funding agreements academies and academy chains sign with the Secretary of State place a number of latent powers in his or her hands, whereby they can take those schools over if they misuse resources or consistently underperform, but you need that safeguard if you’re going to introduce more autonomy. My worry is that those powers could be abused by a Labour Secretary of State determined to force all schools to place themselves under local control, which Lucy Powell said she intended to do last year. Now that really would “dig up the entire foundations of our schooling system."
We clearly have different perspectives on "foundations." I was thinking more Balfour Act of 1902—which, I’m sure you haven’t forgotten —was a Conservative measure which established Local Education Authorities to work
with teachers, parents and government to decide how children should be taught, tested and disciplined. The 1988 Act, of course, rebalanced the formula, reducing teacher and Local Authority input in favour of central government and parents. And, the current round has, of course, neatly edged parents out of the equation as well—leaving just one person with absolute power. You know who. As to "domestic evidence" about outcome, it might make it clearer if we unpack the phrase "not selected at random." What I’m sure you really meant to say was that, the schools "invited" by Michael Gove to become "converter" academies were already "outstanding" schools, with the majority of pupils obtaining five or more good GCSEs. And, as I’m sure you’re equally aware, the capital’s exceptional academic record stems from the 2003 Labour Initiative, The London Challenge, which specifically prescribed a "close co-operation with Local Authorities." In the fuzzy haze of "aren’t all academies marvellous." you might also want to take a closer look at last week’s White Paper, which claims "
that four of five pupils now achieve the expected standard or higher in reading, writing and Maths and the end of primary… up from just one in five in 2012." An improvement, which has clearly taken place without the assistance of academisation, since only about 15 per cent of primaries have currently "transitioned." Going global, a peak at the five-year study (2013) conducted by Stanford University’s Centre for Research in Education on 1372 schools run by 167 "charter managed organisations" (the equivalent of MATs) will show that "
in the aggregate, CMOs perform about the same as traditional public (state)
schools." So, I think we can be confident that liberation from the Local Authority is not a cure-all. And, while the treatment is definitely unproven, the expense is not. As you know, Labour has calculated that to convert all of England’s state schools to academies would cost £1.3bn (based on previous conversion rates of £66,000 per school). The government’s responsed was that all the money is already set aside. But, were I still a parent with a child of school age, I would be cross that this money was not being used to repair the school roof or hire a vaguely competent maths teacher or, indeed, keep class numbers manageable—all of which won’t be happening, as school spending falls "in real terms" for the first time since the 1990s.
Like you, I’m concerned about the Education Secretary having too much power, but the system established by Balfour is flawed. If local authorities receive a large percentage of their annual budgets from central government, rather than raise that money locally, lines of accountability are blurred. Who’s responsible for the closure of a local school, for instance? The local authority or the government? If local authorities have to raise all the money they spend locally—which is the system we're moving towards—they can then be held directly accountable. If you accept that logic, they should either have to fund schools through local taxation or not be involved in local education provision at all. Balfour’s solution was a fudge. Defenders of bureaucratic interference in schools always point to the London Challenge—the one success story among a raft of failed Labour school improvement initiatives. A clear-eyed, evidence-based assessment of shows just how much of the "London Effect" is due to immigration. Success has many fathers, but the real credit belongs to the fathers and mothers of London’s high-achieving schoolchildren, many of whom have risked their lives and travelled thousands of miles to secure their children’s future. I’m glad you recognise that the reforms introduced since 2010 have had a positive impact on improving the performance of primary school children, but I’m bound to point out that results in primary sponsored academies that have been open for two years have improved at twice the rate of maintained schools in the same period. Opponents of academies often point to the 2013 Stanford study you cite, but the research methods used have been much criticised. More recent evidence is more positive. Even Standford’s own Center for Research on Education Outcomes acknowledges that urban charter schools are now outperforming their municipal equivalents. Finally, we come to the £1.3bn figure. I’m afraid I don’t have much confidence in Labour’s costing of academisation, not least because the first figure the party came up with was £900bn. It then went up to £1.1bn and now it’s £1.3bn. No doubt it will rise again as Lucy Powell frantically scribbles away on the back of a fag packet. I’m confident that the £500m set aside in both the 2015 Autumn Statement and the 2016 Budget will be sufficient. I’m not entirely happy with the policy of universal academisation because, as a conservative, I’m a believer in limited government. But if we end up with a more autonomous system, in which headteachers and governing boards have more control over their schools, I’m prepared to live with the socialist methods for getting there. The system you’re seeking to defend didn’t work—in 2009, a Sheffield University study found that roughly a fifth of children leave school in England unable to read or do basic maths. Substantial improvements have already been made since 2010, as you acknowledge, and I think the evidence that increased autonomy will lead to more improvements is robust. Labour hasn't come up with a persuasive alternative and simply reversing the current reforms would be a disaster. Better if we all sign up to the current plan, move to a single, uniform system and then get out of teachers’ way.
The principle of de-centralisation of education, ie, giving all parents a local point of control, is recognised in every major European country, as well as in Canada, Australia, and the US. Equally, if not more, important, however, in this instance is the projected educational outcome. Ultimately, there has to be a proven point to policy. Policy should not, for example, be based on the hopeful speculation that green Wellingtons might be better than red at keeping out the rain. If it isn’t absolutely conclusive that the end is achievable, then cautious, measured change is the wisest way forward—particularly when spending in hard times. In this instance, the explicit purpose of the policy, as headlined in the recent White Paper is: Educational Excellence Everywhere. As is abundantly evident from
all the available data, existing academies do not uniformly (or even in the majority of cases) provide "Educational Excellence" even in their currently relatively limited jurisdiction. Nor, is it at all clear where a sufficient number of "newly qualified" MATs of adequate quality are going to be found in the next six years to implement these projected plans. And, even if everything goes swimmingly and the cost of conversion to a new operating system is "only" half a billion pounds, it’s still a spend that can hardly be justified in the context of inadequate provision for an expanding school-age population, decrepit building stock and radical changes in assessment which have left the teaching profession (as even the Secretary of State acknowledges) stretched to departure levels. None of this matters, of course to Nicky Morgan, who recently confided, “I’ve never met… a parent, who has said, “I’m not voting for your party in a local election because of the state of our schools.” She and you, however, may find this is a situation about to be transformed.
Lisa Freedman is an education writer and runs At The School Gates, an educational consultancy. www.attheschoolgates.co.uk
Toby Young is the author of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People (Abacus)
