Every English school to become an academy

[Zaune]

The Guardian

Legislation to turn every school in England into an academy independent of local authority control will be unveiled in the budget.

Draft leglislation, to be published possibly as early as Thursday, will begin the process of implementing a pledge made by David Cameron in his conference speech last autumn.

The prime minister said his “vision for our schooling system” was to place education into the hands of headteachers and teachers rather than “bureaucrats”.

The move follows criticism of the government for going into stasis during the referendum campaign. Cameron and the chancellor, George Osborne, are keen to show that they are in charge of a “reforming” government.

Sources told the Guardian that the plans would be a key part of Osborne’s budget on Wednesday in order to start the process before officials are forced to shut down work because of the purdah before the May elections and EU referendum.

As the chancellor prepares to announce his budget against the backdrop of a deteriorating economic outlook, the government is keen to show that it is pressing ahead with changes, despite the looming referendum.

The chancellor has faced claims of backing away from major measures after he dropped proposals for a radical overhaul of tax relief for pension contributions.

Nicky Morgan, the education secretary, who has been touted as a potential rival to Osborne for the Conservative leadership when the prime minister steps down, is expected to give more details of the plan for the education shakeup when she opens the House of Commons debate on the budget on Thursday. She will appear on the BBC’s Question Time on Thursday evening. The Treasury refused to comment.

The plans are likely to be fiercely rejected by Labour, which argues that taking thousands of schools out of council control means that accountability and oversight falls on to Whitehall alone.

Lucy Powell, the shadow schools minister, said there was “no evidence to suggest that academisation in and of itself leads to school improvement”.

She pointed out that the chief inspector of schools, Sir Michael Wilshaw, had written to the secretary of state for education highlighting serious weaknesses in academy chains.

“How the government can plough ahead with the wholesale academisation of all schools in light of his evidence beggars belief. We want to see robust accountability and oversight of all schools regardless of type,” she said.

Powell accused the government of offering nothing new, saying ministers should focus instead on teacher shortages, school places and inequalities.

In his memo to the education secretary, Wilshaw had said: “Many of the trusts manifested the same weaknesses as the worst-performing local authorities and offered the same excuses. Indeed, one chief executive blamed parents for pupils’ poor attendance affecting pupils’ performance.

“There has been much criticism in the past of local authorities failing to take swift action with struggling schools. Given the impetus of the academies programme to bring about rapid improvement, it is of great concern that we are not seeing this in these seven MATs [multi-academy trusts] and that, in some cases, we have even seen decline.”

But the legislation is very likely to pass because the issue is widely supported by Conservatives, and the SNP would probably abstain on any votes affecting English education.

The white paper will come just days before the government’s education and adoption bill is made law.

That bill was introduced to “sweep away bureaucratic and legal loopholes” and speed up the process of dealing with failing schools by taking them out of local authority control and putting them in the hands of academy sponsors.

When the bill was introduced, the government estimated that up to 1,000 “failing” schools would be turned into academies as a result.

Of the more than 24,000 schools in England, about 5,000 are now academies – and with 85% of primaries still in local authority control this gives some insight into the scale of the task ahead.

The role of the local authority in the education of the nation’s children, which has been gradually eroded with the introduction of academies, will be virtually brought to an end by such legislation.

Schools and councils have been bracing themselves since the prime minister first outlined his education vision and they will be keen to know now the detail in terms of timing and process.

Former education secretary Michael Gove, who launched the Tories’ education plans, originally considered making all schools academies but pulled back because of the challenges it would pose.

Concerns have already been raised about whether there would be enough good sponsors to take on schools. With many more schools facing academisation, that task will be even greater at a time when some academy trusts are facing criticism for under-achievement.

MPs sitting on the education select committee announced this week they would be launching an inquiry into multiple academy trusts after a series of Ofsted inspections raised concerns.

Teachers’ unions, who have been critical of the academisation process, said parents and teachers would be outraged. Kevin Courtney, the deputy general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said: “Finally the government has come clean on its education priorities and admitted that its real agenda all along has been that every school must become an academy.

“The fig leaf of ‘parental choice’, ‘school autonomy’ and ‘raising standards’ has finally been dropped and the government’s real agenda has been laid bare – all schools removed from collaborative structures within a local authority family of schools, all schools instead run by remote academy trusts, unaccountable to parents, staff or local communities.”

Councils reacted angrily to the news. Councillor Roy Perry, chairman of the Local Government Association’s children and young people board, said: “Ofsted has rated 82% of council-maintained schools as good or outstanding, so it defies reason that councils are being portrayed as barriers to improvement. Ofsted has not only identified that improvement in secondary schools – most of which are academies – has stalled, but it has praised strong improvement in primary schools, most of which are maintained.”

He said only 15% of the largest academy chains perform above the national average in terms of pupil progress, compared with 44% of council-run schools.

“It’s vital that we concentrate on the quality of education and a school’s ability to deliver the best results for children, rather than on the legal status of a school, to make sure that we’re providing the education and support needed in each area,” he said. “The LGA opposes forced academisation and giving significant powers relating to education to unelected civil servants with parents and residents unable to hold them to account at the ballot box.”

[fordlltwm]

Headteacher and teacher stagnancy is more of an issue in my opinion. Teachers who have taught at one school for 40+ years are hidebound and just seem to drone through their planed lessons without any care to class discipline or bullying, so these changes still won't serve to help the amount of students who leave schools with severe trauma that holds them back for years to come.

I don't think there will be a great deal of change as far as the students are concerened but we shall see.

[NoXion]

More unqualified teachers. Yay?

[Eternal_Freedom]

More unqualified teachers. Yay?

How do you reach that conclusion? As best I can tell, anyone teaching needs to be properly qualified (unless it's general cover teacher work, and even then you need something close to teaching qualifications).

[madd0ct0r]

not at an academy (or a private school for that matter).

Limited to failing schools, I can see this being good where the issue is incompetency in the local education authority, or possibly in protected teaching staff. However, that isn't the only or even the main reason schools fail, so I can see it simply not working most of the time. Of course, the aim of this is to privatise as many schools as possible, so from the Tory point of view actually fixing the schools is not the aim. Ideally, all new academies expel their worst pupils, who all have to be taken on by the remaining comprehensives in the area, driving them down until they are failing too and can be privatised.

Schools as resources can be squeezed in plenty of ways. Playing fields being sold off or leased out being the obvious one. I am glad this does not apply to wales.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Bah, if they wanted more qualified teachers they might consider expanding PGCE courses to keep up with demand (and yes, I am feeling somewhat bitter about not being accepted despite being impeccably qualified for the course, because "your personal statement wasn't strong enough.")

[madd0ct0r]

they don't want more qualified teachers. They want to privatise schools and undercut the teachers union. They want to make their friends rich.

[Tribble]

Headteacher and teacher stagnancy is more of an issue in my opinion. Teachers who have taught at one school for 40+ years are hidebound and just seem to drone through their planed lessons without any care to class discipline or bullying, so these changes still won't serve to help the amount of students who leave schools with severe trauma that holds them back for years to come.

I don't think there will be a great deal of change as far as the students are concerened but we shall see.

Not necessarily. When I was in school I had a fair number of teachers who had been around long enough that they had taught my parents back in the day, and I found that they were usually the best teachers. Class discipline was never an issue in their classes, not because they were tyrants, but because the class simply respected them too much to really get out of line. And they were very dedicated to teaching their students and remaining up to date in the fields. Many of them could have retired a long time ago with full pension / benefits, and you could tell that they stayed because they truly enjoyed what they are doing. Though perhaps my school was an exception rather than the rule.

[Simon_Jester]

No, it's not at all uncommon.

Old teachers are either burned out or very, very good at what they do. It's kind of a binary.

[Dartzap]

I could have sworn I'd read somewhere recently that the PGCE courses were generally running half empty, with the apprenticeship equivalent also not at capacity. I think it mentioned in the article a LEA up north had so few teachers graduates, it had headhunters in Jamaica recruiting dozens. Woe upon any teenager who misbehaves in those classes!

[Simon_Jester]

Yeah. Training more teachers takes effort but isn't really that hard; the biggest problem education usually faces is teacher retention in the face of a difficult school environment. Keeping your workforce is hard if you overwork that force, or if the nature of their job requires them to deal with extremely obnoxious people every day.

Such as the 5-10% of teenagers who are most dysfunctional, most of whom are amazingly obnoxious, in ways that only a person with literally zero life experience of surviving on their own without getting fired and thrown in jail can be.

Dealing with such individuals represents a large "anti-perk" of teaching, and many people either can't do it, or quit the profession rather than put up with it and all the other things teachers may have to deal with.

Having observed this pattern in the US I would honestly doubt it's much different in Britain.

[Eternal_Freedom]

I could have sworn I'd read somewhere recently that the PGCE courses were generally running half empty, with the apprenticeship equivalent also not at capacity. I think it mentioned in the article a LEA up north had so few teachers graduates, it had headhunters in Jamaica recruiting dozens. Woe upon any teenager who misbehaves in those classes!

Apparently that's true everywhere but here. Go fuck yourself Cardiff Metropolitan University.

[Crazedwraith]

Could you not have say... applied to one of those other places doing the course?

Anyway, this is not going end well. Am I reading this correctly that it's basically a light version of privatisation/removing oversight from school?

[Eternal_Freedom]

Could you not have say... applied to one of those other places doing the course?

Please give me some credit. Sadly due to personal circumstances and other commitments relocating to somewhere else is not a viable option, so I'm kinda stuck.

[Crazedwraith]

Well that sucks. I'm sorry to hear it.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Thanks. I shall just have to press on and devise Plan L next.

[madd0ct0r]

Could you not have say... applied to one of those other places doing the course?

Anyway, this is not going end well. Am I reading this correctly that it's basically a light version of privatisation/removing oversight from school?

I was interested enough to chase this up with my parents who are teachers in England. They are not too worried. Over 50% of publiclly funded secondary schools are already academies so the scale of the change there is not huge. It is at primary school level, but primary schools tend to be smaller, not have playing fields and be harder monetise.

My father (specialist in difficult cases boys) anecdotally notes.
1) if you don't like the available school and want to set up your own, it's now much more possible, too the point two of his friends have done it.
2) as far as he is aware there's no link between performance and funding, so you could take over a good school and make it worse through cost cutting profit making. Until 1) kicks in
3) following the scandal in Birmingham, nutjob religious schools are finding it harder to get away with
4) the best strength of academies (in his view) is they are able to get rid of bad head teachers / management staff much more easily.
5)that said, he named a school that no teacher in the area will take a job at since the head there has a reputation as very, very quick to fire over performance, irrespective of any mitigating circumstances. That school advertises for about twenty (yes) new positions a year. The overall quality of education is thus suffering there due to the target driven approach.
6) I asked about the motivation of the policy (if not making Tory cronies richer). He reckons it's to cut local education authorities out, as he considers them incredibly resource inefficient.
7) he does not expect amazing results or an education revolution. He does not expect the end of the world either.

[Zaune]

1) if you don't like the available school and want to set up your own, it's now much more possible, too the point two of his friends have done it.

That's a big part of what worries me. If you don't like the available school so you send your kids somewhere else, what do you think happens to that school? We saw this when we started letting parents choose which comprehensive in a district to send their kids to; the ones whose parents cared enough and had the time and resources to research the options and absorb the extra transport costs got into the good schools, which got more funding because they had more students, while the bad schools got all the kids whose parents didn't know how to work the system or couldn't afford to pay the bus fare out of pocket or just didn't care, and less money because they were under-subscribed.

If you don't like the available school, make it better. Join the PTA or the board of governors, volunteer at an after-school club, write strongly-worded letters to the LEA and your MP; whatever it takes. Don't just shrug and send your kids somewhere else and file crap local schools under Somebody Else's Problem, because kids who go to crap schools and get crap GCSEs or no GCSEs are everyone's problem, for the tax money it costs to keep them on the dole or in prison is nothing else.

[Starglider]

English local authorities are the most glacially awful, worthless and useless examples of pointless beurecracy you can imagine. The Rotherham mass rape scandal was a tragic illustration of that. Removing education from the list of things they can waste money on, impede, ignore and screw up can only be a good thing.

[madd0ct0r]

It does not follow that the alternative will be automatically better though.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Perhaps not, but the bar is now set so low that the odds of it being worse are slim.

[Starglider]

It does not follow that the alternative will be automatically better though.

The alternative is central government oversight. In the UK the transition from local to central government employment is an aspirational career path for civil servants, so perhaps that is why they tend to be slightly less apathetic.

[Zaune]

The alternative is central government oversight. In the UK the transition from local to central government employment is an aspirational career path for civil servants, so perhaps that is why they tend to be slightly less apathetic.

Yeah, 'bout that...

[madd0ct0r]

Fairly amusing article on the situation by the independent.

At last our schools will be “set free” by George Osborne. They’ll be “free from local bureaucracy”, no longer run by councils but governed instead by academies, such as the one set up by carpet millionaire Lord Harris. It seems incredible that up until now, no one has taken the obvious step of handing over our entire education system to carpet millionaires.

To start with, carpet millionaires are so much more accountable than local councils. At least we get to vote for carpet millionaires in the annual carpet millionaire elections, in which Lord Harris stands against John Lewis and Ted who goes door-to-door selling rolled up mats he swiped from a warehouse in Luton.

Up until now, the law has stated that parents should be “consulted” about a school becoming an academy. Now that consultation has been done away with, ridding us of another layer of bureaucracy, because there’s nothing more annoying when someone wants to make a massive change to your child’s life than some bureaucrat who wastes time asking for your opinion. You don’t see child traffickers faffing around like that; that’s why they get things done.

Once a school becomes an academy, it’s free to run as it pleases, setting rates of pay, employing non-qualified teachers or – as some academies have proposed – inviting businesses such as Apple to set up a store inside the school. This makes a school truly free, because instead of being stifled by a local council, your child’s life will be controlled by a kindly, multinational, predatory global corporation.

And there’s never a hint of bureaucracy with Apple, who sometimes wait as long as four days before bringing out a new model with new sockets that render everything you bought last week obsolete and useless. That’s because they care.

Another way the academy system can fight bureaucracy is by paying consultants. For example, the Griffin Schools Trust paid £800,000 to an education consulting company, because it’s important to take advice on how to eliminate expensive bureaucracy. And to make absolutely certain the Griffin Schools Trust was receiving the best possible advice, £700,000 of the money was paid to a company owned by the same people that ran the Griffin Schools Trust. The money was apparently initially to repay work done by those people to set up the school and later in lieu of their salaries, but all the same, it’s best to take advice off someone you trust – and who do you trust better than yourself? You don’t get innovative measures like that taken in schools run by a stodgy old local authority.

Academies, it is claimed, produce higher exam results, but schools that have been compelled to become academies have a worse record than schools that have remained as part of the local authority*. More than 1,000 teachers working at the Harris chain of schools left within three years, resulting in some students being left for entire lessons without teachers, even in their GCSE years. This shows how far the Government is committed to its brave, hippie vision of setting kids free from bureaucracy.

Soon Osborne will announce the next stage, yelling: “Don’t let maths teachers control your thoughts by telling you what numbers to write down, man, set yourself free of their bureaucracy with our teacherless academies, where you can think of whatever number turns you on.”

Then the Government can get on with reducing bureaucracy everywhere. They can shut down cardiac units in hospitals, setting victims of heart attacks free of the health authority, so instead of being forced to be stretchered around by a paramedic they’ll receive a £30 voucher to spend however they like, on a non-qualified doctor or a priest, or if they prefer on a giant bucket of chicken nuggets if they manage to pull through by themselves. At last they’ll have the choice.

The last dribbles of social housing can be sold to developers, setting tenants free from local bureaucracy, giving them the choice of which park to sleep in, rather than be constrained by the red tape of owning a key.
The Chancellor has become such a free spirit that, when asked why he’s missed all the economic targets he set himself, he answered: “The important thing is we set out to achieve those targets.” That’s a beautiful, non-elitist, inclusive attitude – it doesn’t matter if any of us achieve our targets, as long as we set out to achieve them.

Maybe this loving vibe will be adopted at the Olympics and, instead of only the “winner” getting a gold medal, everyone who set out to do well gets one, including Mr Tidbury from Worthing who set himself a target of winning the 200m butterfly but never learned to swim, as he popped in the bookies on the way to the pool instead.

When Osborne was asked again about the missing his targets, he said: “I’m the first Chancellor to be independently assessed.” You can’t tie Osborne down with the bureaucracy of an answer that vaguely pertains to the question. He’s set himself free and answers whatever question he likes. When he was asked again, I thought he’d say “Alpha Centauri” or “Sir Stanley Matthews.”

Instead he settled for: “I’m the first Chancellor to look at what we spend on welfare.” What a revelation, that supposedly when Denis Healey was Chancellor he used to say, “I haven’t got time to bother with what we spend on welfare, I’m the Chancellor.”

But this is a Chancellor who’s opened his mind, so every aspect of our lives – even schools – is no longer run with the old bureaucratic sense of co-operation (such as the NHS, which nobody likes), but with the free market business model, such as the banks. In recent years they have proved to be so much more reliable, efficient and free.

*In the interests of fairness, I'm going to point out that in the previous system schools that were compelled to become acadmeies were ones that were failing, so having worse records than others isn't that surprising. The rest of the examples in that kicking still stand afaik.