I have not commented on the government's plans for turning every school into an academy, announced last week, and feel it remiss of me not to have done so.
I know something about schools. I was a school governor for more than 15 years, was heavily involved in the management of an undergraduate and postgraduate theatre school for some years and am now employed part time by a university, but it is on schools that I wish to focus.
When a governor, usually as chair or vice chair and invariably responsible for finance, I always enormously valued the role of the local education authorities I worked with and usually greatly resented it when I had to undertake tasks that I thought it wholly inappropriate should be passed on by them when they should and could have been done so much more efficiently centrally. My reason for that irritation was that, as I can remember often having to remind meetings, our real job was to ensure people who were by and large shorter than those making the decisions got the education that they needed, despite which we were forced to spend far too much time thinking about other issues.
So too were the people who had chosen to go into teaching - and were frequently gifted at it - when they had to undertake activities, like accounting, admin, basic HR, contract management and myriad other things - for which they had received very little training, had not chosen to do and had no special skill to undertake. It was absurd.
And yet it has been announced that every school should now be out on its own.
Let me assure you that there is no hint of economic logic to this, at all. If it were true that it is really appropriate that the people who know local need best in the communities in which they serve should be in charge of running all aspects of local organisations then the entire economic rationale of our supermarket chains would have collapsed long ago. Local managers of Sainsbury's should, using this logic, long ago have had the right to put their own name over the store, change store layouts from the formula we see repeated throughout a chain, set their own accounting systems, create their own quite distinct HR and pay policies and so much more, but that's precisely not how it works, and for very good reason.
Some skills are limited in supply and best managed centrally: that was the reason why some degree of national curriculum was needed.
Some tasks are best done once. It galls me that thousands of schools will now have to spend hours creating policies on issues where one central edict would solve issues once and for all.
And some matters, like accounting, need to be standardised to ensure that necessary information is supplied.
Whilst centralised support services simply save money and reduce the chance of mistakes. Which is precisely why supermarkets have them.
None of which is to say that local store managers should have no power: their role is to optimise the system in the local context using the skills they are best endowed with. That should also be the case with headteachers, whose job should be to tailor the education they provide to best suit the needs of the children entrusted to their care, which is the skill they should really have.
Liberating teachers to teach enhances education. Imposing on teachers the duty to run the whole of a school's admin without sufficient resource to do it well is simply dumping on them tasks that can be guaranteed to reduce educational focus in the schools for which they are responsible.
So why is this being done? Look at the supermarkets, I suggest. No one thinks stand alone academies can work. The economics of them just do not make sense. So all this is really about is creating the opportunity for academy chains to be created from which in due course profit can be extracted. But as there is no profit extraction now that must eventually be at cost to our children.
The attack on those least able to defend themselves continues.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
Your conclusion is entirely correct Richard. The announcement this week was so misleading. It was not about setting up stand alone academies. It was about the use of MAT (multi-academy trusts).
Basically the government have awarded themselves the power to hand the running of local schools to whoever they like. It is the biggest centralised power grab imaginable.
It is also worrying that parent governors are being sidelined. While I am not convinced that the current method of selecting and appointing governors necessarily produces a team which is best equipped to run the school, there is no doubt that parents must have a role in making decisions related to the school their children attend. I suspect that privatisation is also behind this move – they don’t want troublesome parents getting in the way of profit.
Agree with all that
I think this sums it up very well.
https://disidealist.wordpress.com/2016/03/20/the-mysterious-case-of-the-disappearing-schools-how-state-schools-will-be-privatised-without-anyone-noticing/
Not about individual schools, but about Multi Academy trusts on a huge scale. Say goodbye to your playing fields and hello to the supermarket.
And because of the legal problems once this land and buildings have gone has gone – they’ve gone.
only good teachers and conditions can drive standards up. Who are these academy chains, will pay and conditions be adequate, no need for a qualified teacher. Much like the health service there will be some privatisation on the agenda, sponsors etc. And like police commissioners, mayors, why. Children have to be prepared for a modern society, yes, it just seems as usual this government knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing. Let’s hope the implosion started by IDS will gather pace.
Two points about the staffing of academies:
1 They do not have to use the School teachers’ pay and conditions when appointing staff.
2 They have more flexibility to appoint unqualified teachers.
When a headteacher is under financial pressure, he/she will fill gaps in the teaching staff with the cheapest option, not necessarily the best. He/she can also change the times of the schoolday and I have heard stories of teachers being forced to stay at school until 7 or 8pm. The salaries of some of the academy CEOs need invesyigating.
MATs are charities and cannot make a profit from running schools. However, they can provide services such as HR, payroll, curriculum planning and advisory services for a profit, usually under a different name.
Some big secondaries now have more clerical and support staff than teachers. Separate hierarchies have developed, which causes tensions between teaching and non-teaching staff.
Indeed, take a closer look at the supermarkets. Tesco is not a grocer, I have heard it said, it’s a front for a land grab. The comparison with academising schools, then, may well be entirely appropriate.
This is well expressed Richard and you have exposed the inherent contradictions with the supermarket analogy. The notion of ‘localism’ and ‘choice ‘ is spurious as neoliberalism doesn’t work like that with it’s multinational behemoths.
I left teaching in 2000 a job I loved and felt suited to. Even then the league table mentality and competition with local academies was creating decisiveness and the seeping in of corporate concepts I found utterly detrimental to the aims of education. Behind this privatisation is global capital whose aim is to sweat assets to death.
Out of interest, in which LEA area was your school based?
From my experience from the local authority side of the fence having worked for a number of Councils of different political flavours, it seems to work a lot better with one political party in charge of the local authority than the other.
But I’ve never known the relationship to be as smooth as the one you seem to suggest, regardless of who was in charge (there is always a bit of argy-bargy, with egos involved on both sides). Not saying that’s a bad thing in itself, but it was a bit of a fact of life.
More than one: both Labour and Conservative
More experience with the latter though
And not unconnected with this announcement was another: that “failing” schools, once they are deemed to be in what we might call turnaround mode, will not be inspected for three years. This is clearly to save new academies the embarrassment they currently face, when the public are told that by turning a school into an academy all its failings will disappear – and then OFSTED comes along a year or so later and finds that in many cases very little has improved. I suspect that if the government can get rid of Wilshaw they’ll water down the inspection regime for academies even more.
As an attendee of the Audit and Accounts Committee in 2014, I questioned the drop in assets on the balance sheet of 120 million in my local county council. It was stated that this was the (forced) hand over of school title deeds to private trusts.
I noted a link provided by a commentator on the Guardian last week, showing the rent of the new executive class running the academies.http://schoolsweek.co.uk/academy-ceo-pay-how-the-biggest-trusts-stack-up/
I also noted the BBC report last week stating that the government wants to remove parent governors. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-35837783
I fear that the whole intention is to remove the expensive quality teachers for a cheaper version, remove the scrutiny of local councillors and parents, which made schools places of excellence and equality, for the sake of rent seeking and profiteering. I cannot see what other conclusions anyone could reach. I believe that standards will fall.
I agree with all of your final paragraph
Richard
I commented on this elsewhere on your blog. My partner’s family work in education – from teachers to CE level (honest).
This government will do to schools what they did to housing associations. They will be bribed with lots of money up front and once they are academies (are the provider the Government wishes them to be) the Tories will then begin to underfund what they have created.
This will lead to finding investor finance through the Banks and this means that the private sector will get its hands on one of the last big major public sector funding streams.
Things could go the way of the railways though – where funding actually goes up compared to nationalisation to support investors or it could go down as schools – like housing associations did – go to the banks for extra funding. Cue cost cutting to protect the investor and highly paid managers to up[hold the status quo.
Housing Associations were also encouraged by government to set up chains (mergers and acquisitions) in order to get the economies of scale investors demand. Something schools are already mobilising for it seems.
All of this is done in the name of localism but in fact hands over control of schools to the Government who then pass it onto unelected unaccountable companies to run them on a group/regional basis in most cases. So much accountability.
Having seen the dire performance of parent governors in my own area (and so called tenant board members in the social housing sector I work in) , I am happy to see the possible end of school governors. I believe that getting lay-people involved in the governance of the complex things like schools and housing is a waste of time. All I have seen is manipulation by senior officers and the killing of innovation by governors and board members who get above themselves. We do not need board like structures in schools or elsewhere when we know that such bodies often lose touch with reality.
Instead schools should be made to produce an annual report detailing their performance, costs, investment in staff etc. which should be made available to the local community through open days once a year. The schools should be proactive at seeking feedback from all parents – not just those on the governing board throughout the school year. That is the only feedback loop they need and they should deliver to that.
That is why I also regret the increased marginalisation of the Local Authorities in the management of schools whose role should be to support parents as users of the schools services.
I could go on…………….
Democracy should rule
And it does not
I should add I was never a parent governor, always a co-opted
I am not sure what that says….
You know what it says Richard!!!!
“Oh dear – he is a bit too clever to be here so we’ll reduce his power to influence matters by co-opting him but leave the others who aren’t as clever (and more easily led) with the full power to vote”.
There are many greedy head teachers and CEOs of housing associations and ALMOs Richard who think like this – not to mention the captains of industry in the private sector.
I agree that this is ultimately yet another way to shift the financing of a public service from taxation (of the rich, banks and their corporations) to private debt based funding (at interest to the rich, banks and their corporations).
If you look at the end game being played out here, it is the same with all of the last 25 years of public sector privatisations, PFI’s, university fees, marketisation of the NHS and now education.
This is the final chapter of Thatcher’s dream of corporate heaven (aka public hell), being played out by her doting adopted b**tard children (the devil and his handmaidens).
I am in no doubt there is a battle between good and evil going on here, and at the moment evil has the upper hand!
Governors do not have to be experts in the running and teaching and assessment of the school. Democracy is important to maintain standards, and only needs technocratic advice as a servant, not a master.
The role of governors is to make sure that scrutiny is maintained. It should always be assumed that nothing is ever perfect and that somebody or something could be wrong in any place or system. Parent governors are useful as they have the ear of the teachers and the parents, which could highlight a problem with say, bullying, or a poor teacher, or a lack of special needs for a particular child.
Council governors can scrutinise the staffing levels, attainments, after school provision etc. In other words, the quality of the environment for children is maintained.
The only reason for removing these checks and balances is that they are expensive to maintain and cut into profits. But without them, inequalities rise. This is because the parents of very wealthy children would not put up with this at schools designed for them.
Sandra
In my experience, it is precisely the fact that Governors and their ilk are not experts that causes the problem. I’ve seem them hoodwinked by senior staff.
I’ve also seen board members and governors bring their own prejudices to the process – to the school – and then have that indulged by senior officers in order to get pay rises and also to curry favour – develop alliances.
Boards, governors all just amplify the politics in the management of housing and schools at the cost to quality and monitoring.
I certainly have no faith in it whatsoever. The emphasis ends up on there being a structure for governing – with very little emphasis on its actual outputs. So the assumption is “There is a Board so it must be managed well”.
The best way to manage your business or your service to regularly listen to end users and adjust your service to that input.
The rest of it (boards, elections, going through the minutes blah blah blah) is just guff. Expensive and time consuming guff.
I do not agree
Good governors add enormous value
I accept they are not common
I had not heard until last week that there are some schools being run as co-operatives. What do you know of these, Richard, and do you see that as being a viable alternative?
I do not know of them
Interesting article here
http://www.theguardian.com/education/2011/aug/15/cooperative-schools-antidote-academies-independent
I’m surprised we don’t hear more about them
Isn’t there the possibility of a conflict of interest when the single customer of a workers co-op is a public body funded by the taxes of all?
The fate of Further Education Colleges provides an example of what is likely to happen to schools. In 1993 the colleges were ‘freed’ from Local Authority control and became corporate entities funded directly by the Department of Education. The immediate consequence was that teaching staff were arbitrarily transferred to inferior conditions of service and, by inventing new lower grade positions – like ‘learning mentors’ – wages were slashed. Unions lost their national negotiating rights and could no longer protect staff on ‘catch all’ contracts. Colleges actually competed to reduce the percentage of income they paid to staff. The one exception was the salary of the each college principal which rapidly crossed the £100k threshold and soared ever upwards whilst most teachers received no wage increases above the rate of inflation and still don’t.
The second major consequence was an increase in corruption which led to a range of scandals involving such extravagances as round the world tours, gaming the funding system and in one case outright fraud running into millions of pounds.
Examples of the above can already be seen creeping into the Academy chains as Mike Rosen mentions in today’s Guardian. The Head of an Academy earning £390k whilst running a dating site, a health club and an accommodation agency from his school premises would be small beer in FE.
Worthwhile reading this:http://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/feb/23/senior-executives-struggling-academy-chain-big-payoff-warwick-mansell
A world of grift, graft and ‘chiseling’ if ever there was one!
And here’s the latest outsourcing idea from the Tories, the giving of grants to charities is to be managed by a private organisation (but which one?).
Thereby moving the potential of abuse from politicians to shareholders – what a great idea that is!
http://www.civilsociety.co.uk/finance/news/content/21498/government_tenders_to_outsource_all_public_sector_grant_giving?utm_source=21+March+2016+enews&utm_campaign=21+March+2016+enews&utm_medium=email
Of course there’s an economic logic to pirate-ising schools! It’s called TTIP, and it’ll allow the 1% to vacuum up more of government resources. And then they’ll start bringing in charges to cover the everyday costs of education, payable by parents, once they’ve spent most of the taxpayers money on executive salaries…and there won’t be a damn thing we can do about it.
Should the cenralised support service for multi academy trusts be renamed the Ministry of Truth? Only compliant managers & teachers in future will be appointed to instruct future children. Be afraid.
Be interesting to see what manner of economics they choose to educate their charges in. That’s if they bother at all, after all, serfs don’t need education.
It seems to me that the next Labour government – hopefully with Jeremy Corbyn as PM – will have to put public ownership centre stage, and education will be a key component of this. By 2020 it is likely that the schools sector will be dominated by a few large-scale academy chains; these could be nationalised at a discounted price (taking into account the fact that publicly owned school assets have been gifted to academy chains at discounted prices, so there would be some tit for tat involved here.) I think it’s radical policies like these that will ensure a Labour victory at the next election; polling shows that academies are increasingly unpopular.
Agree
And pay them with bonds that cannot be redeemed for a considerable period
This I like.
As no input has been offered here from the Socialist Education Association, of which I am a member, I thought the text of an e-mail from the General Secretary might be of interest, given its succinct reasoning for opposing the academisation process (EASILY Tony Blair’s silliest idea!), an e-mail that backs up much of what has been said above:
Here’s the e-mail:
Dear SEA Member
I’m sure most SEA members will be aware of the government’s announcement that all schools are to become academies by 2022.
They have now published a White Paper entitled “Educational Excellence Everywhere” which sets out the proposals in more detail.
It can be found at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/educational-excellence-everywhere
SEA has consistently opposed the academy programme and will continue to do so. Some of the reasons that take this view are:
-academisation removes the accountability of schools to their local communities. It places an unacceptable amount of power in the hands of ministers and their officials. The 1944 settlement deliberately ensured that decision making was shared between schools, local authorities and government. This balance is being destroyed.
-academies have been shown to be less effective overall than maintained schools. The case against academies on grounds of effectiveness is summarised by Henry Stewart at http://www.localschoolsnetwork.org.uk/2016/03/forcing-schools-to-become-academies-will-mean-more-inadequate-schools-and-worse-results
-forcing schools into multi-academy trusts gives the control of schools to private organisations of all kinds. Public assets have been handed over to private trusts with no proper safeguards or accountability. They have been roundly criticised by Michael Wilshaw who pointed out the extravagant salaries paid to trust executives as well as their ineffectiveness.
-the government has been shown to be incapable of managing effectively even the existing academies. House of Commons committees have consistently pointed out how poor the DfE’s systems are. The lead agency for academies (the Education Funding Agency) has been described as perhaps “the most incompetent body in government” (Chris Cook, Newsnight)
-multi academy trusts actually reduce the autonomy of the schools within the trust. The trust controls how much money each school gets, holds money back for its own purposes, appoints staff and often determines the curriculum policy of the schools in the trust. The White Paper takes further the process of getting rid of individual school governing bodies and in particular the role of parents on governing bodies.
-Academy status entrenches self-interest as the prevailing ethos in the school system. Academies commonly obstruct local collaboration between schools. We know many of them abuse their powers over admissions to try to gain an advantage over other schools and seek to avoid their responsibility for children with additional needs..
I have evidence that Local Authorities did not get a penny for the Schools that were removed from their balance sheets. I would not do this – I would impose a very large land tax on the schools until they dropped the assets.
Here’s a related link I came across the other day. Did Gove really give away somewhere in the region of £15 billion in school assets? Can anyone confirm this?
http://anotherangryvoice.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/michael-gove-ideological-vandalism.html?m=1
The creation of the United Nations Global Government requires children to be educated in loyalty to the Global State & the eradication of allegiances to; individualism, family, local groups or your Sovereign Nation. This is the destructive battle now going on in Europe.
Unfortunately our governing elite appear to have turned into crazy megalomaniacs.
The UN has a plan for “The Global Citizen” which is linked here.
THE GLOBAL CITIZEN: Global Government brainwashing programme for school children.
http://goo.gl/LfCxi0
Are you Tea Party, you? Or are you a Trumper?
Trump is the trigger for a USA Civil War when he pulls out.
They are all NWO.
When you open your mind to the alternate possibilities for a few years you may understand a microcosm of what is going on.
If you accept anything that is in the media you are a fool.
Making judgments on a few minutes thought leads to false assumptions.
I am therefore a 9/11 conspiracy theorist in your book.
Noted
But I should add I think you are wasting our time
Mums net on the same issue
http://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/education/a1540850–1billion-of-title-deeds-for-schools-transferred-to-private-companies
Is this legal, can it be challenged. Just read the mumsnet info
I fear it is legal
The aim is to make it irreversible.
“The academy programme makes no economic sense unless privatisation is planned”
I believe this is exactly the plan. Same in the NHS. ‘Privatizing the world’ is full steam ahead in UK and the endgame approaches. Hunt is again threatening the ‘nuclear option’ on junior doctors.
As said by one doctor in the documentary ‘Sell off’, “they’ve played a blinder”, referring to successive governments measures to covertly prepare the path for NHS privatisation.
An amazing post.Good Work.Keep it up.
Of course the purpose is for enhanced privatisation. As for there being no means of extracting a profit ‘at the moment’ I spent years working alongside economic social enterprises set up to supposedly support the voluntary and social enterprise sector. There were millions of pounds funnelled through the umbrella organisations and trusts supposedly for projects but on closer scrutiny it was clear that the Board Members also had their own private profit making enterprises and consultancy businesses which ‘sold’ services to the Trusts at hugely inflated cost and the trustees themselves all claimed large allowances. This is already happening in the current academies
Why hasn’t this ‘superhead’ of a free school academy chain been suspended and an investigation started? If he’s done as alleged, surely it’s fraud.
http://www.localschoolsnetwork.org.uk/2016/03/damning-reports-show-problems-at-perry-beeches-were-more-than-a-little-confusion-over-the-law#comment-form
How can he claim that he’s been paid a ‘second salary’ of over £100k without knowing that it would be illegal?
This man has already been reprimanded by the (now defunct) General Teaching Council for obscenity in a public place. I’m a former teacher and I know that teachers have been sacked/blacklisted for less.
I just don’t understand how the government can turn a blind eye to this sort of thing. It has even been claimed that the alleged miraculous improvement in results has been nothing of the sort. http://www.wwwords.co.uk/rss/abstract.asp?j=forum&aid=4763
Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time that a free school/academy chain has been found wanting. Fortunately, it seems as though even Tory councils are rebelling.
I admit when I gave seen teachers suspended for the most trivial offences there appear to be issues here
But the media cannot pass judgement
I know (although it doesn’t stop some of them). I’m just outraged by the attempt to force something on people. There have been so many reports of corruption (and I worked inside schools, so I knew there were even more) and yet this whole change was being introduced without any democratic consultation whatsoever in conjunction with the abolition of parent governors. The schools budget is (I believe) about £100bn, which is an awful lot of money to hand over to private providers when there doesn’t appear to be any accountablity. Fortunately, it looks as though there might by another U-turn looming.
The aim is quite specifically, I am sure, to let business get a rake off
There is no other reason