Academies – Cameron’s Con

As part of his “first 100 days” celebrations, David Cameron has set out areas where he wants his Conservative government to be “bolder still”. This blog covers just one area, academies, and seeks to point out the confidence trick, the flaws and the fallacies in what he says.

David Cameron wants all schools “to have the opportunity to become an academy and to benefit from the freedoms this brings”. He says “We will make it a priority to recruit more academy sponsors and support more great headteachers in coming to together in academy chains” and “This means schools with strong standards and discipline. It also means giving great headteachers the freedom to run their own schools with the ability to set their own curriculum and pay their staff properly.”

The confidence trick is simple – academies are in reality no freer from bureaucracy and external influence than maintained schools. In fact, as local authorities have become less engaged with schools, in many cases academies find themselves more tied into the bureaucracy of their chain and the Education Funding Agency than ever they were with the local authority. After academisation, so-called “great headteachers” often find themselves with less autonomy than before.

The fallacies in what David Cameron says are easy to expose:

Take “set their own curriculum”, for example. Any school or academy that does not deliver good examination results in examinations that allow children to progress to study post-16 or post-18, or to work, will rapidly find itself in deep trouble with Ofsted and parents. In fact, there was a de facto national curriculum since long, long before the official national curriculum. The GCEs I took back in 1967 were pretty standard. And schools will be measured (and will assess themselves and be assessed by parents) against whatever measure the government of the day dreams up – the Ebacc being the current gold standard (but remember what happened to the gold standard).

Take “pay their staff properly”, as another example. First, schools and academies have finite budgets and can’t pay staff what they want. Budgets are becoming more and more constrained and the freedom to allocate funding to salaries, for example for the best or the scarcest teachers, is almost non-existent.

Take “great headteachers” as a third example. There are, as in any area of life and work, some really good headteachers, many who do a perfectly adequate job, and a few who do less well. But the system already identifies these headteachers pretty well and turning schools into academies won’t make more “great headteachers”. (Paradoxically, some of the “great headteachers” and leaders in other fields who have operated on charismatic leadership have proved the most fragile. Too many schools have gone downhill when a “great headteacher” moves on.)

The deepest flaws, though are in areas where David Cameron has said nothing. If every school is an academy and can set its own admissions policy, who will stand up for parents to make sure admissions policies and practices are fair? If schools select children, rather than partners selecting schools – a practice which enables schools to avoid teaching the most difficult and expensive-to-manage pupils, and to achieve more easily good results overall – who will stand up for the “difficult” children?

The simplest way for schools to improve standards is to select pupils covertly or overtly (“Let’s arrange our admissions criteria with a catchment area that does not include that particularly difficult estate”). The second simplest way is to exclude the children admitted by mistake, again overtly or covertly (“Mrs Smith, I think your son would be better suited by XXX school, down the road. We can avoid an exclusion being on his record if you move him yourself.”) The third simplest way is to game the curriculum and assessment system, again either covertly or overtly, to meet the needs of the school not the needs of the pupil. (And anyone who thinks that cheating by is not an issue is not looking at the evidence.)

Full academisation will result in major problems for school admissions, school exclusions, special educational needs and school place planning, with some children effectively being disenfranchised from the education system and no-one “in authority” caring or even knowing.

We must ensure that someone – and it won’t be Regional Schools Commissioners – continues to have, and to take seriously, the duties of local authorities to ensure that all children have a decent education. My view is that this role must continue to sit with local authorities, as locally-elected democratic bodies with a moral purpose in support of their entire population. But there needs to be a recognition that this is the case, at every level, and local authorities need to have the levers to ensure that a so-called autonomous academy can’t just ignore criticism.

John Freeman CBE is a former director of children's services and is now a freelance consultant