The furore about the treatment of pupils at two supposedly ‘top' academy schools in Hackney, London, is growing.
The Guardian and Observer have been documenting these concerns, noting that:
A group of nearly 30 parents and former teachers has spoken out about treatment of children at Mossbourne Victoria Park academy (MVPA) in Hackney.
The secondary school, rated outstanding by Ofsted and known for its high examination grades and tough discipline, is in the same federation as the acclaimed Mossbourne Community academy, also in Hackney and originally run by Sir Michael Wilshaw, the former chief inspector of schools for England who led Ofsted from 2012 to 2016.
Both schools are now subject to investigation.
The allegations are of bullying, victimisation and intimidation of pupils, and a brutal policy of expulsion to ensure desired results for the school, but not the children it served, were achieved.
Of course, schools like this were the epitome of Tory education thinking. Management was (and is) outsourced to supposed education entrepreneurs, and results rather than education were (and are) prioritised. And now the abuse inherent in such thinking becomes clear.
As I had to sometimes remind governors when I chaired governing bodies, schools exist to serve children. Balancing budgets, meeting policy requirements, ticking boxes, Ofsted inspections and much else comes second to that, but not in the Tory-created world of education that, so far, Labour seem to have accepted without much question. Performance is the goal in that world. Children come a distant second.
Excuse me noting, for a moment, that changing this order of priorities is key to re-establishing politics that matters. It typifies all that is wrong in politics that this is the case.
But then, let me note something else: this education policy is neoliberal to its core. Its aim is to produce a homogenous child who can be a useful cog within the money-making machine that these 'academies' are presumed to serve. That is the sole purpose of education, which these 'academies' exist to supply and which people have been indoctrinated to accept.
Diversity of personality, aptitude, or pre-disposition in the child is ignored. Special needs are an inconvenience. Worse, they offend that assumption of homogeneity that underpins all neoliberal thinking. Meeting key performance indicators is the goal of the staff of such places; education is not, and the child comes nowhere in the list of their considerations, in my opinion.
That there is a crisis in such places is unsurprising. I have loathed all that they stand for since I first learned of them. That abuse might happen was obviously a very high risk.
The question is, when will Labour deliver child-focused education that meets the actual needs of society, whether or not it is directly comparable to the factory schools of Singapore and their supposed educational achievements?
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It fits with the neoliberal belief that we are all just units of economic activity, not actual people with diverse lives. If only we could all just be replaced with robots
Without following it closely I never understood what was the driving force behind these ‘multi academy trusts’ – including schools miles away from each other, and having management heirarchies. It seemed to go against the original reason to wrest schools from local authorities so they could be ‘free’ to run themselves.
Presumably there is money being made somewhere.
There is profit to extract for some very well paid people.
And the admin overload is extraordinary.
Academisation has served two purposes:
1) the privatisation of state education.
2) a further reduction in the role of local authorities. Education was their biggest budget item, and removing education provision from their role contributed further to the centralization of the British state through such things as the national curriculum.
The whole system is corrupt and incompetent.
Thank you, Richard.
This is appalling, but not a surprise.
Buckinghamshire has selective education. The league table positions of schools in my home county leave a trail of ruined lives in the background. This goes back decades.
Richard: “Schools exist to serve children.” Fun fact: Older readers may remember the drive for grant maintained schools in the late 1980s and 1990s. One of the leading lights in that movement, what one may call an astroturfing exercise now, later became chancellor of my university. I learnt some years later that he had interests in businesses making school uniforms (a thing for the promoters of opting out of local authority control), contractors maintaining schools etc. What sort of society treats children as profit centres?
I think this might be yet another example of things being done better in Scotland.
I thoroughly agree with you. I left teaching in 2005. I then did invigilation for 12 twelve years so kept in touch with real teachers. The old Title of County Chief Education Officer disappeared about this time to be something like ‘corporate director’. The whole ethos seemed to be about ‘delivering targets’. The neo-liberal cult of managerialism.
The largest teachers union is the NEU. It was formed by a merger from the NUT and ‘traditionally moderate’ ATL Association of Teachers ad Lecturers (of which I was a member ) . The ATL included most of the private sector staff and produced policy papers on various topics which were far better researched and more rooted in reality than the stuff produced by most think tanks and political parties.
The NEU has a paper on academies which may interest your readers. Thank you for raising this.
https://neu.org.uk/advice/your-rights-work/academisation/neu-case-against-academisation
Thanks, Ian.
Thank you, Ian.
Civil servant mum and I often talk about the destruction of the local civil service.
I was a foundation governor at a C/E comp, one of the last to get new (PFI) Schools for the Future buildings from Gordon Brown (built by Carillion!!!) in a rural market town, during a period when government policy was PUSHING us to academisation, and then as soon as we had spent thousands doing that, PUSHING us again to spend thousands more becoming part of an MAT. To avoid “takeover” we headed up our own “pyramid” MAT with some feeder first/middle schools. At the same time came the pressure for “professional” governors, with “relevant” business skills. Immediately we ran into problems with declarations of interest. One of our new business governors couldn’t see why their spouse running an educational services company in a field the school would be recruiting in, might be a problem. They walked out in a temper.
It was a challenging time. CAMHS was falling to bits nationally, children’s mental health was failing, teachers were stressed, Gove’s educational theories were being relentlessly forced down our throats and we had a child suicide – we were trying to plug the gaps with chaplaincy and a school counsellor. It was clear that v soon we would be a business-oriented effectively selective school that met its targets wirh a beefed up discipline policy (at the same time as pupil referral units were closing down). Our school would “succeed” while failing to serve its community. Retirement loomed. I jumped early. Since then the school has run into Ofsted troubles so bye bye “success”. It was a long way from the school I had first been part of, but what depressed me was that we had so little choice. With a legal duty to do the best for the kids, it was difficult to justify remaining with what would, and did become a rump underfunded education authority which would be contracting out its services anyway. I voted for academicisation under protest and said so, but felt sick while doing so. Gove’s hand still lies heavily on education.
Thanks for relating that
A colleague at work had a son who did very well for himself in the City and all three of his brood went to private schools. This was also the same chap who got Help to Buy subsidy from Homes England for his new rather large family home when he was divorced.
My colleague went along like any proud grandmother but told me that on sports days the really young children were screamed at – forced – to get into the water for swimming – any one looking nervous was not tolerated and was brow beaten or singled out – she was quite shocked at the treatment.
So, another generation or so of badly treated people to rule over us beckons…………….
I have tried to think about how to organise a system of multiple professionals/agencies around the needs of say a family/ or child at risk. This was mainly during the Laming Climbie Inquiry and others.
It is a bottom up ‘reverse management’ model leading upwards from the child , bringing in the particular combination of people/teachers/social workers/doctors/others that are needed to meet the needs of the child.
It needs someone alongside the child who ‘knows’ the child/family – has the full picture – and is senior enough to assemble the team appropriate to the child.
It’s not directly relevant to a school situation, but may be a good way to think about the problem . It would not be easy to implement – but in many cases in school, this will be fairly straightforward for children without complex needs.
[ There was some interest at the Laming Inquiries – and some in the subsequent parliamentary debates – but Laming’s proposals made things worse – more ‘data sharing’ more multi agency teams , but with nothing empowering the front line to have agency to actually do anything with or take responsibility for all the shared information. It often involved more tiers of management – with information being passed or not passed up and down the hierarchy.]
Although it is the Tories who bear blame for the current academy school type, they were essentially the brainchild of one Andrew Adonis, he of HS2 also.
It is interesting to delve into the biographical similarities he shares with Michael Gove.
Whatever, when the definitive history of this period is written, I have no doubt that one chapter will deal with both of them under the title “From One Shambles to Another”!
I have met Adonis and have always been deeply underwhelmed.
When I was on the NEC of the Christian Socialist Movement, Adonis came to speak to us twice bearing “tidings from HQ”.
I have to say, I found the encounter deeply unpleasant – skin-crawlingly so, I have to say.
One of his reports from HQ dealt with the introduction of student loans, which Adobe’s justified as being “fair”, since working class taxpayers, who usually didn’t go to university, were in effect subsidising middle class students who DID.
I’ve spoken elsewhere about how Thatcher’s desire to have academia mimic business being back-to-front, and this is a clear example of the same error = mistaking attendance at an institution for education, instead of asking how lifelong learning and education can be achieved.
The Learning and Skills Council idea claimed to address this, but was actually too much like Thatcher’s idea of academia mimicking business, with more emphasis on skills (VERY important, I agree) than on learning, in the form of both formation AND education.
For education is about freedom – not a Right Wing interpretation of that word, but about development. The teacher’s (and parent’s) task is to make himself or herself irrelevant, because the pupil/student will have grown enough to stand on his or her own feet.
Education that is not about the free development of the person is not education, but can be enslavement.
As the great educator, John Dewey, said words to the effect that in the end theory is the most practical of all things. Why? Because it offers a hypothesis against which reality can be tested.
So the working class students who didn’t – wouldn’t have wanted to – go to university could have been offered lifelong learning suited to their needs and interests that would have granted them the freedom to grow into who they really wanted to be – all free, grant-supported, as were university students.
Well, we’re still living with the mess of student loans, at punishingly high interest rates. Another failed experiment, IMO
Thanks, Andrew.
It was Blair who established academies with the Learning and Skills Act 2000, not the Tories. Mossbourne, one of the first, was transformed into a sort of boot camp for a disadvantaged area by Michael Wilshaw, who as noted went on to head Ofsted. Yes, it has got kids into Oxbridge but the regime is more like the army.
Academies are largely unaccountable to local authorities and parents. This has got to change.
Blair did indeed “impose” the, academy nonsense/scandal, based on deeply flawed Neoliberal guff, masquerading as thinking.
I sometimes wonder if I dreamed the following, so outrageous and fantasy-like the memory seems, but I worked as a Regeneration Co-ordinator (a task my boss likened to “nailing jelly to a wall”) at BVSC (Barnet Voluntary Services Council) between 1999 and 2003.
In that role we often had encounters with Government ministers, and I remember one meeting with the excellent, alas late, Malcolm Wicks, when he was a Junior Education Minister.
It is my memory that at this meeting – and this is where I wonder if my memory is playing tricks on me – he recounted how academies came into being.
Apparently, he was working on some legislation, almost certainly the Learning and Skills Act Jon mentions, when Blair allegedly “popped his head round the door” (I’ve no idea whether this was Malcolm Wicks’s way of describing the haphazard nature of the intervention, or the truth), and announced to Malcolm “We’re going to set up academies”, or words to that effect, leaving Malcolm to shoehorn in an entirely alien concept (a bit like the creatures in “Alien” actually, IMO – i.e. voracious invaders of organic development!!) Into the Learning and Skills project.
Would Malcolm Wicks have been as indiscreet as this? That’s what makes me wonder if I’m imagining the whole thing, but the memory seems real, and Malcolm Wicks was a decent, intelligent, quality politician, who may have nursed a real hurt from the experience.
Of course, the root and origin of academisation sprang from the poison injected into the education system by Thatcher.
I remember an article in the Guardian, to which I think I referred before, by Larry Elliott, about Thatcher’s desire to see universities become more like businesses, by adopting “business disciplines”
My memory is that Larry made the point that this was a classic example of “arse about face”, since it was BUSINESS that should have been learning from ACADEMIA, given that UK management was (is?) so poor in terms of understanding means and mission, where academia had clear ideas on both, with clear standards to support the means of achieving the mission
Businesses should, in other words, have copied academia!!
Given that fact, calling academies “academies” is the height of irony, based as it was on the false Thatcherite idea that business thinking was superior to academic thinking, as though “bottom line” would improve the delivery of education!!
Perhaps of training, or formation, but never of education, which relies on vision and passion, and the word Richard has recently stressed – CARE and empathy certainly, compassion even. (As, incidentally, does successful business, as also stressed by Richard in recent posts). And also a child-centred focus.
Of course, Thatcher despised local government, and local autonomy (who can forget Nicholas Ridlley’s desire, as Environment Secretary, that local Councillor’s should only meet once a year, to hand out outsourced contracts for the year, and then adjourn to their next AGM?), and did everything to quench it.
Remembering the vigour and creativity of 19th century local government, exemplified by Joseph Chamberlain in Birmingham, and replicated in Manchester, Leeds, Edinburgh and Glasgow many other towns and cities, the move away from local accountability and local innovation has been little short of disastrous, and in very few areas more noticeably than in education, library and swimming pool provision, and also in adolescent mental health provision, as also noted.
Black marks for all concerned in this disastrous development. Would that we could return to genuinely effective Local Education Authorities, with real expertise and power, providing they were more open to democratic accountability and the input from business they probably lacked, but only in due proportion, and not as the “be all and end all” business input has become.
Sheffield University sent me their accounts today. The commentary was as if the place is a business. Maybe it is.
Parent governors are now actively DIScouraged, and virtually non-existent in multi-academy trusts. Their views are not considered of any value or importance. We’ve been heading that way for a long time.
No surprise there
The author and educationalist Alfie Kohn has written extensively about this. He demonstrates that the whole education system from nursery upwards is geared to producing compliant workers and compliant consumers for a consumerist society.
John Seddon (of Vanguard Consulting) has written a paper recently outlining the urgent need for a lock stock and barrel redesign of the regulatory regime in the UK in all areas of the public realm. And of course as John has also demonstrated for decades, when targets are set for anything, then the system get compliance to meeting the targets in any way possible, including gaming the system!
When my son was ready to start school twenty years ago, I read the book ‘Dumbing us Down’ by John Taylor Gatto, an American. He came to the same conclusion as Alfie Kohn: the sub-title was ‘The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling’. In the book he admired the progressive English education system of the 1960s and compared it to his experience of American public education. Based on my own Primary School education in the 60s, I trusted my son to the system in 2004. (He turned out OK.) But, it seems we have ‘caught up’ with America now. Pupils are commercial units to be exploited for profit and trained to be exploited as ‘dumbed down’ adults. Perhaps I’d be more reluctant to trust the system now, but what’s the alternative.
I don’t really think school worked for my sons. But, university did.
Why stop at education? What about citizen centred governance?
I am a trustee at a small but growing academy trust and our primary focus is the children. We are proud of what our children achieve. However, we have to operate within the rules and regulations that are set out by the DfE and others. Falling Ofsted ratings means falling student numbers joining the schools that leads to falling income that leads to challenges to provide for our children. Yes I would love a better way to deliver for our children but if we don’t jump through the hoops our children suffer. Quite a dilemma!
The system has failed.
I don’t disagree but we have to work day to day with the system, or hand, we are dealt.
But I can complain.
Most definitely and please continue to do so. I don’t like it and wish it was changed.
Ive worked extensively in two really meaty academy trusts in the north of england.
One is an ‘inclusion focussed’ , narrative controlling, macchiavellian MAT of the year and is chock full of humble, virtue signalling leaders, bragging about never permanently excluding a pupil its all smoke and mirrors and because theyve got mates in the media they get a pass from the likes of their guardian mates.
The other trust is the original model for spectre in james bond, you’d be led to believe.
In this latter one I don’t see the factory cranking out pre stamped pupil- robots.
Neither MAT is what they seem of course.
What they do have in common is executive s who are massively overpaid, an economies of scale answer that fits all questions and the ability to syphon away public funding into salaries and dividends and associated vehicles. All the while having received land and resources transfers into their own corporate control. New broom sweeps clean required to shut them down or limiting trust size to 5 schools thereby breaking up restarting again as we should with ofsted
You reflect how OI view these instiutions, which do not have education as their focus.