Forced Conversion of Schools to Academies

Debate between Andrew Turner and John Pugh

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?