A solution to the organisational chaos of LEA Schools, Faith Schools,Academies, Free Schools...

The academies model of education is damaging, costly and unsustainable

Posted by

Ron Glatter on the Guardian website on Wednesday 9 July 2014

Summary

Recent scandals, such as the Trojan horse affair, have highlighted key faults with academies and free schools. The maintained trust school model would work better

The penny seems finally to be dropping. The enormous structural flaws in the school system that's been developed by the coalition government have been brutally exposed by a series of recent cases concerningacademies and free schools, as well as the Trojan horse affair in Birmingham. It is fragmented, incoherent, susceptible to impropriety and essentially unsustainable.

Professor Andy Green, a leading researcher on comparative education at the the London Institute of Education, has pointed out that the constant reorganisations since the 1980s have created "a byzantine complexity of school types, and a school 'system' so fragmented that it barely warrants the name". The huge increase in academies and the growth of free schools since 2010 have laid the fault-lines bare.

More and more minds are now focused on the problem of picking up the pieces. The task is a daunting one and has at least two distinct components. The first is to recreate a proper degree of local oversight, greatly complicated by the generally poor image of local authorities in education. This image has been created partly by politicians hostile to state bodies (particularly those they cannot control), partly by the withering of expertise following more than two decades of onslaught by central government and partly by indifferent performance by some authorities. For example, some local authorities were too ready to close schools and this gave a strong impetus to the creation of a number of free schools when the policy was introduced.

For this reason – and because politics thrives on change rather than a reversion to the old status quo – the search is on for something different. The government has been appointing regional commissioners supported by "headteacher boards", but there are just eight of these to cover the whole of England and they are essentially agents of central government overseeing only academies and free schools.

A review for the Labour Party by former education secretary David Blunkett has proposed a new tier headed by a director of school standards who would oversee all publicly-funded schools, not just academies and free schools. This individual would have a remit for planning and quality issues over a wider – often referred to as a "sub-regional" – area while leaving other tasks to the existing local authorities.

The dilemma about creating any new middle tier structure is acute. If you create another level and split the tasks between the two levels, you can be accused of breeding more bureaucracy and confusion, a charge the prime minister has already levelled at Labour. On the other hand, if you strip local authorities of all their education functions and hand them over to new, larger bodies, that may make them more remote and less responsive to local people.

But picking up the pieces isn't just a question of finding a structural solution for the "middle tier". Process is just as important as structure, perhaps more so. Central to the current set-up is the process of commissioning, currently involving the secretary of state and his officials issuing "funding agreements" for academies and free schools and then attempting to monitor them, mainly through Ofsted and the Education Funding Agency.

This wholesale contracting out of state schools to a huge number of different and highly disparate bodies is the prime cause of the current chaos and the chief barrier to effective oversight and support. But it's being given much less attention than the middle tier issue. As David Walker, former director of public reporting at the Audit Commission, wrote recently: "Whitehall simply has not acquired the capacity to write contracts that stretch contractors, including third sector providers… Officials seem to have given up on monitoring performance." It's not at all clear that this thorny process would be handled any better if it were passed over to new or existing local bodies.

As well as being damaging and costly, the system is clearly unsustainable at anything like the current scale, let alone at the kind of scale that would be involved if the government's aim of the academy model becoming the norm were ever realised. It must be phased out as existing contracts come to their end and gradually replaced by a more robust model for all schools, such as that of the maintained trust school introduced by the Labour government in 2006. That gives schools ample autonomy and allows outside expertise to be brought in while upholding taxpayer-funded schools as interdependent public institutions. That's exactly the kind of model that should become the norm.

Ron Glatter is emeritus professor of educational administration and management at The Open University and a visiting professor at the Institute of Education, University of London.