In the midst of soaring university fees, England’s schools are undergoing a significant, structural upheaval. Since the passage of the Coalition’s Academies Act in July 2010, high performing state schools have had the option of applying for Academy status, while parents, businesses, charities and others have been able to apply to set up their own Free Schools, the first of which will open its doors on August 30th.
On the face of it, there’s much to like about the reforms.The motivation behind them, while typically conservative in its small-government ideology, is progressive in its aims. Michael Gove, the Minister for Education, hopes to improve the standard of English state education by giving schools greater autonomy and increasing competition. State schools that have been deemed of a sufficiently high standard by Ofsted are able to apply for Academy status, which will see them gain significant autonomy from their local authority (LA), while newly established Free Schools will enjoy a similar level of freedom.
Coalition policies to reform and reduce bureaucracy are welcome. Data collection by schools, which constitutes a large proportion of teachers’ workload, often gets in the way of the more important task of teaching, and the government wants to slash it by 30% for this coming academic year. Similarly, financial regulations are to be loosened, giving schools significantly more control over their budgets.
The government is also moving away from Labour’s culture of centralised targets, with a new emphasis on schools developing their own targets as they see fit — as well as having greater say over what they teach — while still conforming to broad governmental standards. Similarly, the Department for Education has scrapped school self-evaluation, which has proved time consuming and an inefficient form of appraisal of the quality of the school. Moreover, while discontinuing regular inspection of the best schools, the Department for Education has ensured mechanisms to trigger an inspection by parents or the Secretary of State (but not the LA) if there are concerns about a school’s performance. The general trend of decentralisation is one that will free up teachers’ time, and certainly looks promising in its intention to change the prevailing ethic of schools and government in conflict. By letting schools have a greater say in how to teach their own pupils, the hope is that claustrophobic conditions, in which good teachers are stifled, and well-intentioned educators are frustrated into apathy or exhausted from paperwork, will be lifted, and with them the standards of state education.
But there are problems with the reforms. First of all, the cheery big-society view espoused by the government, in which freedom from central authority is promptly followed by unprecedented success, may need some reconsidering. That’s not to say that private groups have not rushed to take up the government’s offer. Just under two dozen Free Schools have been set up since September 2010, with hundreds expected by Rachel Wolf (of the New Schools Network) by 2015. By April of this year numbers of Academies had swollen to one sixth of all secondary schools, with 357 schools converting since last September.
However, while enthusiasm has been taken by the government as a ringing endorsement of the reforms, and certainly indicates widespread support, it is by no means a clear indication that the reforms will have the desired effect on standards of schooling. Some elements of the Coalition’s savagery of existing red tape smack of cost-cutting, sold under the guise of liberation from the dead hand of central government. For instance, legislation requiring LAs to provide School Improvement Partners, for schools which fall under their authority, has been revoked. This means that schools must actively decide to seek external consultancy. In the absence of good leadership, the opportunity for undertaking a very useful process to work out realistic aims and targets within the school, by private organisations which can conduct a proper assessment of the school’s situation (i.e. not the sort of remote guidance that the Government is keen to do away with), may be lost.
Not only might the switch to Academy status have some of the above drawbacks, it may also lack all the unifying perks that the government had in mind. Much of the incentive to become an Academy lies in the extra funding that becomes available from the group sponsoring the Academy — whether that be a charity, university, or football club (Everton are looking to fund a new Free School). Because the application process allows for schools to submit their request for a change of status, and be granted the right to do so, without consulting parents (with the exception of the two parents required to be on the board of governors for each academy), we may well see a slew of schools becoming academies against the wishes of parents. This would neatly undermine one of the underpinning rationales of the reform — to make schools better by putting authority in the hands of the school and in the hands of parents, creating a positive ethos for success. In fact, just this sort of reaction has occurred already in Lincolnshire, where parents have formed a group called Save Our Schools, in opposition to the prospect of their children’s schools becoming Academies.
This government has executed several policy U-turns already, after facing strong opposition to reform. It should be bold in its plans for education, continuing along the path to instil what former Schools Commissioner, Sir Bruce Liddington, has called the Academy “state of mind”. But it should be wary of not heeding the advice of experts in the field. Mike Baker, a pre-eminent education journalist, maintains that the whole policy is ill-conceived, labouring as it does under the misapprehension that local authorities still have real control over state schools beyond a basic level. It would be an ironic fate for the education reforms if they proved to be misguided from the outset, undone by the very same bureaucratic maladroitness which they are trying to eliminate.