Forced Conversion of Schools to Academies

Andrew Turner Excerpts

Tuesday 12th March 2013 Westminster Hall

[John Pugh (Southport) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Main.

I do not know whether those present have ever had the privilege of reading Evelyn Waugh’s “Decline and Fall,” but it starts with the main character, Paul Pennyfeather, being debagged by something he refers to as the “Bollinger club” and having to leave Oxford in shameful circumstances after being caught running across the quad without his trousers. He subsequently takes up a career as a school teacher after going to an agency—a thinly disguised version of what used to be called Gabbitas-Thring—that tries to interest him in going to a school somewhere in Wales that is recommended to him as follows:

“We class schools, you see, into four grades: Leading School, First Rate School, Good School, and School. Frankly”—

says the man at the agency—

“School is pretty bad.”

We may be reaching a point where to confess to being a school, rather than an academy, might be seen as a sign of failure.

I am relaxed about school types. On a personal note, I was educated in grammar schools. I taught for a short period in a secondary modern school, and for much longer periods I taught in an inner-city comprehensive school and a top-flight independent school, so I think I know a fair amount about school diversity.

The result of my experience is that I am not particularly impressed by the labels that schools bear, and I am fairly agnostic about their structures. However, I differ in that respect from most Ministers, of whatever political persuasion, who seem preoccupied by structures, which interest me far less. The reason for that may be because structures are, as far as the passing occupants of the Department for Education are concerned, quite easy things to change. Frankly, on a wet Thursday afternoon in an inner-city school, or in a rural school for that matter, with a class of difficult adolescents, the name on the board outside the school, or the school’s governance structure, makes precious little difference to the reality inside the classroom.

What does appear to make a difference is good school leadership, committed staff, a relevant and inspiring curriculum, a sound ethos and above all—this has been proved to be the principal determiner of educational success—parental involvement and interest. Those ingredients are independent of governance structure. They are not necessarily present in an academy, although I am prepared to acknowledge that some academies exemplify those ingredients, and they are not necessarily absent in other sorts of schools that happen not to be academies. My conclusion is that the best thing we can do with a school that has all those characteristics is to support it and, so far as possible, not to tinker with it.

There are some, quite a few of whom are around at the moment, who recommend academisation as a solution to all educational ills—it is rather like the old medics prescribing leeches for everything—arguing that it is a sure-fire way of improving educational results. In fact, the evidence is mixed and clearly debatable, particularly when taking into account things such as changes in admission policies, pupil profiles and so on. We can believe the likes of Professor Gorard at the university of Birmingham, who sees no benefit from the academy programme; or we can believe the DFE, which has quite a different view; or we can believe neither. However we cut it, the mooted effects of academisation appear not to be exactly game changing.

[Mr Andrew Turner (Isle of Wight) (Con)]

Will my hon. Friend tell me how academies that were good schools are coping with the opportunity for more freedom and independence? At the same time, there are frankly awful academies that were forced into becoming academies after being run by the local authority.

[John Pugh]

There is a lot to be said for letting schools elect the structures they genuinely prefer and with which they can work. My hon. Friend may be illustrating in advance some of the possible dangers of forcing schools to make a choice they simply do not want to make.

My point is simpler. Academisation itself is not obviously fundamental to solving our biggest education problem in this country, which is the tale of boys from poorer backgrounds losing interest before their education concludes—the not in education, employment or training phenomenon. I do not intend to pursue the debate on academy outcomes, real or alleged, or, for that matter, the difference between converter and sponsored academies, which have chosen to be academies, and those academies that simply found themselves becoming academies, possibly against their will.

Instead, I simply want to point out the self-evident truth that I do not think anyone sane would dispute. Academies are not the only way to improve results, and they are not necessarily the most efficient way to improve results in this cash-constrained world. That also applies to the Labour programme, which later in this debate might be distinguished from the current Government’s programme.

I clearly do not need to say much about the slush funds the Government have found in surprisingly tough times to support the academy programme—I see that £1 billion has been found from somewhere or other—but I would like to draw attention to the National Audit Office report on the Labour academy programme, which produced bright, shiny, new and very impressive buildings and institutions. The NAO compared the Labour academy programme with its predecessor, which was called excellence in cities, and it found that, although there were improvements under the Labour programme, the improvements were not significantly better than those achieved by excellence in cities at a much lesser cost.

We must accept that none of us comes to this debate without in-built convictions and biases, so I will get some of mine out of the way by fessing up to them. I must acknowledge that I have a principled and ideological instinct against assets funded over many years by local taxpayers being alienated or removed from the direct control of local taxpayers. I have also never been sure how the lack of any local strategic oversight can be part of a proper, efficient funding model for education in any area, which bothers me. And I have never been able to understand why the remedy for constant interference by central Government, about which schools commonly complain, should be independence from local government, given that local government’s powers in respect of schools have declined dramatically over my lifetime. I do not grasp why Government should impose less on those schools for which it has sole charge than on those schools left under the umbrella of the local education authority. I feel that the rationale eludes all but the most brilliant among us.

There is a strongly held view, which I accept—I accept it of the Government; I do not accept it as the best view—that being an academy is a good thing. But even if we accept that view, there is still one more unexplained puzzle: if the Government are confident of their case, and they are clearly unafraid of big-scale change, as we have seen, why do they not just make all schools academies and make the case for abolishing LEAs, thereby ending the division, disruption and death by a thousand cuts?

I have pondered that, and the only answer I can give is the answer the Government normally give, which is that they want schools to choose whether to be autonomous. I understand that is the rhetoric surrounding the programme, but as the programme has rolled out that particular answer has come to seem odder and odder. First, choosing has been confined to a limited group of people. Parents and staff were excluded by the Academies Act 2010, and during its passage I moved an amendment on the Floor of the House that sought to allow parents some sort of voice, but the amendment was not supported. So we moved from a position where parents decided to one where only a limited number of people decide.

Secondly, the choice is constrained by the fact that opting for autonomous independence is linked to another choice about funding, because the funding packages are not the same and depend on whether the school chooses to stay a local education authority school or become an academy. Thirdly, the choice to be an academy is being linked with a choice to be inspected less and have less bureaucracy and prescription from Whitehall. What is actually involved in the choice argument is a skewed choice, vested in those who have the most to gain from making that choice in terms either of power, in the case of the governors, or of remuneration, in the case of the head teacher. Unsurprisingly, the choice to become an academy has gathered some momentum. That is the current state of play as we can best understand it.

However, the Secretary of State has gone one step further and, with gifts bordering on the prophetic, has told us that by a certain date, a fixed number of academies will be in place, with primary schools firmly within that range. Primary schools are normally not big enough to provide all the administration and back-up that independence entails, so it is a puzzle to me how the Secretary of State could possibly know how many schools will choose of their own free will to become academies.

[Mr Andrew Turner]

The hon. Gentleman is concerned about the size of primary schools. I draw his attention to a school in Cheshire that had 12 pupils at the time when it became a grant-maintained school. When grant-maintained schools were abolished, it had about 36 pupils. Size did not prevent schools from becoming grant-maintained schools; why should it prevent them from becoming academies?

--- Later in debate ---

[Rosie Cooper (West Lancashire) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure, Mrs Main, to serve under your chairmanship this afternoon. I congratulate the hon. Member for Southport (John Pugh), my neighbouring MP, on securing this important and crucial debate.

The ideological crusade that the Secretary of State for Education seems to be on with his academies programme is deeply concerning, and offensive to the education profession. I do not believe that it has the best interests of our children’s education at its core. I am not idealistically opposed to academies. I believe that for some schools the academy option is in their best interests, but I do not believe that it is the only option for school provision in the country, and schools should not be intimidated and bullied into being academies.

Today, I want to speak up for schools in west Lancashire and throughout the county, which has become an enclave of resistance against the Secretary of State’s absolutism on academies. Throughout Lancashire, head teachers, governors, teacher unions, Members of Parliament and even the Conservative-controlled county council have been steadfast in their opposition to the deplorable antics of the Department for Education, and in their rejection of academies for academies’ sake, and I support them in that.

In recent weeks, there has been significant media comment about the conduct and behaviour of the Department for Education in its promotion of the academies programme, and it seems that the experience in Lancashire is being replicated throughout the country following a certain pattern. It starts with creating a myth about failing schools in an area, irrespective of the truth behind the headlines. Then come the threats that underperforming schools will have to become academies. When that fails, the bribes start.

It seems that the same approach is being taken in Lancashire as in one of the areas that is continuing to resist all attempts by Whitehall to foist academies on them. In the middle of last year, threats were dished out, and in July 2012, the county received a visit from Dr Liz Stillwell. Ahead of the visit, a press release was issued that stated boldly and aggressively that

“weaker schools across”

Lancashire

“should aspire to the success”

of the academy she was visiting that day, and that poor standards of primary education in Lancashire would no longer be tolerated. That press release listed the schools that the Department deemed were underperforming, and four primary schools in west Lancashire were on the hit list. I spoke to each of the head teachers, who were surprised—even astonished—to be on that list. They accepted there had been a blip, but both the LEA and the Department accepted that the performance of the schools was improving. Therefore, against the Department’s measures, the schools were not failing.

The schools commissioner travels around the county, peddling the Education Secretary’s ideological wares as if she was some kind of snake oil saleswoman. With her half-truths and misinformation, she leaves fear and instability in her wake among communities. Surely, she should be absolutely committed to supporting all types of school to improve their standards and performance. She should not be forcing schools down a path that may not be in the best interests of their children.

[Mr Andrew Turner]

One problem is what we mean by a blip. How long were the blips? Were they one year, two years or five years? Five years is a lifetime for a child.

[Rosie Cooper]

I can assure the hon. Gentleman that it is nothing like five years. I would be happy to supply him with the detail. There are four schools involved, and each is different.

The situation in areas such as Lancashire has been manufactured under the pretext of improving underperforming schools. That raises the question why the National Audit Office report stated:

“most converters…have been outstanding and good schools”.

In a letter to me on 31 January, the chief executive of Conservative-controlled Lancashire county council wrote:

“we do not understand why some rapidly improving schools are being targeted for academy conversion.”

We are back to the myth-creating: everyone is told a school is failing, when the truth is that it had a blip and its performance is improving. We are then told to make it an academy, and, in a couple of years, it is claimed that the success is the result of academisation. We are encouraged to ignore the good work and the fact that the improvement would probably have happened anyway.

From the safety of Westminster, the Education Secretary has called Conservative-controlled Lancashire county council a “failing education authority”. That makes me wonder on what basis he claims that it is failure. I am sure he would say it is performance. However, he is probably referring to the academy conversion rate.

Let us look at performance. Some 69% of schools in Lancashire have improved, compared with the national average of 29%, and that is to be commended. However, according to the Secretary of State, the academy conversion rate in Lancashire is just 3%, compared with the national average of 9%. Is that the source of his frustration? Just four out of 484 Lancashire primary schools have chosen to become academies, while three others are in the process of being forced to become academies.

In November, the Education Secretary wrote to MPs to ask them to do his bidding by getting our schools to become academies. I doubt whether he will be welcomed with open arms by Conservative candidates campaigning in the forthcoming county council elections in Lancashire.

Let me be clear: failure and unacceptable performance in our schools cannot and should not be tolerated. By the same token, however, the sustained and cynical denigration of the hard work of our schools and schoolchildren should not be tolerated, simply because those schools are not academies. Perhaps the Department for Education, to refer to comments made earlier, should apply its anti-bullying policies to itself and its agents.

All the evidence points to a Department that is ideologically wedded to the promotion of academies for all, rather than the best education for all. In our education system, only 10% of all state schools are academies and free schools, and the figure for primary schools is only 5.3%. Yet one third of Department for Education staff are assigned to the academies and free schools programme, which accounts for 18% of the Department’s revenue and capital budget—a level completely disproportionate to the size of the programme. Then we come to the £1 billion overspend. No doubt that money is being taken from the budgets for non-academy schools, many of which most need that investment.

The whole situation is compounded by the Gove army of brokers. Given that they earn up to £700 a day, some might suggest they are more like mercenaries. I would suggest they are conflicted mercenaries, because many are alleged to have connections to academy chains. These conflicted mercenaries—these brokers—are running round the country offering inducements of £40,000, plus £25,000 for legal costs. That approach to academisation is deplorable, and it is all being done because of the ideological war being waged by the Education Secretary.

Our ambition and aspiration should always be to ensure that our children have access to the best possible standards of education from the start to the end of their school life. Simply forcing schools to become academies is not the solution. We know that one-size-fits-all policy making does not work. In our schools, we need good, strong leadership from the head teacher and governing bodies, with investment in schools buildings and school resources, irrespective of whether the school is LEA controlled or an academy. There should be a consensus among parents, teachers, governors and the community about the type of school they want; that decision should not be forced on the community.

I agree that we need to ensure that all schools reach the required standards. However, we should do so based on the needs of the individual school and its children, not on the imposition of a one-size-fits-all model driven by ideology. I am sure the Minister has come here today replete with the usual lines about school improvement, education for the 21st century and investment, but I remind her that we are talking about the forced conversion of schools into academies.

My message to the Minister is this: nobody believes you. As each day passes, fewer and fewer people believe you.