Education: Multi Academy Trusts

Baroness Blower Excerpts

Wednesday 6th April 2022 Grand Committee

[Baroness Blower (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Lingfield, on bringing this debate, and I absolutely welcome the opportunity to speak in it, but I may not make remarks that are entirely consistent with his approach.

Regarding some of the things the noble Lord said, as he knows, before we had LMS we had local financial management; I just add that to his history of education. I believe he said that schools will be given their own cheque books, but it is not always schools; it is sometimes the trusts, and that does not necessarily play to the advantage of every school. Autonomy can be a moot point.

The schools that Michael Gove allowed to become academies had, of course, become outstanding as members of their local authorities; they were outstanding schools, and then they changed status. I am very interested in what evidence the noble Lord has—I will come on to this later in my remarks—for the assertion that, the more variety there is in the system, the higher achieving it will be. I would be delighted to have that conversation with him at some other point.

As has been noted by the noble Lord and various papers, primary schools have been much more reluctant to change their status and have chosen, in large numbers, to remain with their local authorities. But, often, they have collaborated with other schools that have remained in their local authorities. Indeed, sometimes they have also collaborated with primary schools that are in multi-academy trusts or local stand-alone trusts, and it seems to me that that has worked quite well.

As chair of the Public Accounts Committee in the other place, my honourable friend Meg Hillier has noted that MATs have had a somewhat chequered history regarding the processes for tackling what she described as “egregious” financial and other mismanagement, and that they appear “painfully slow” and “lacking transparency”. As noble Lords will know, some cases have arrived in the courts. I entirely concur with the noble Lord: it is not a question of mismanagement, but there are questions about the very large sums of money being expended on leadership salaries, particularly if the schools are not doing especially well.

It is true that the White Paper is anxious to say that all schools should become part of a trust by 2030 or should have plans to join or form one. But that, of course, is fully two decades since the Academies Act, and if it is such an attractive proposition, I wonder why it has taken so long for schools to see that. Is this actually one of the reasons why we see a nod in the direction of local authorities being sponsors of multi-academy trusts in the White Paper?

Of course, in the White Paper there is talk of stronger local schools. I again agree with many of the things that the noble Lord, Lord Lingfield, said there. Some MATs are made up of schools that are spread across the country and it is therefore hard to see how they can have any kind of serious local connection. The Ormiston trust, for example, stretches from Liverpool to the Isle of Wight—scarcely a local area.

Her Majesty’s Government are at pains to talk about evidence-based policy but is that really accurate? None other than Professor Stephen Gorard has recently written about this and, frankly, he doubts it. However, I am going to draw on the work of Warwick Mansell. Many noble Lords interested in education will have read a lot of what he has written over the years. He has a long history of scrutinising education policy and I shall reference three observations that he makes about evidence-based policy.

Mr Mansell wrote to the DfE to ask for the evidence base for the introduction of the times table test for year 4. He asked why it is apparently better to have recall of multiplication facts rather than knowing how to achieve answers through understanding and reasoning. He did not get a reply. On the question of GCSE modern foreign languages, in which I have a particular interest because it was a subject that I taught as a secondary teacher, there is no published evidence base for changing the approach to teaching them. Teaching unions and a number of other people have said that there is no evidence for, and they are not at all happy about, structuring languages in the way in which the Government intend. The third example is on coasting schools, on which the DfE says it sees strong academy trusts as the key vehicle to improving educational standards. However, in 2018, the then Permanent Secretary at the DfE, Jonathan Slater, admitted to MPs that there was no proof that forcing schools to become academies was better value than leaving them with local authorities. Therefore, academies policy and a lot of other educational policy, Mansell concludes, is not made on a hugely definitive evidence base at national level.

Even the numbers that have been used in the White Paper are either open to interpretation or perhaps even slightly suspect. This is a quote, which states:

“Where schools underperformed, they were increasingly transferred into multi academy trusts … as sponsored academies. The impact has been transformative—more than 7 out of 10 sponsored academies are now rated Good or Outstanding compared to about 1 in 10 of the local authority maintained schools they replaced.”


It says, “compared to” but it should say “compared with”, actually. The paper says that the department is so impressed by the claim that it puts that in bold on page 1 of the White Paper. But, of course, that is not a fair comparison because a large proportion of sponsor-led academies were previously rated as less than good. However, a fair comparison would be this: 90% of maintained schools that were previously rated as less than good improved to be good or outstanding, whereas only 74% of sponsor-led academies improved to be good or outstanding. Some 11% of maintained schools that are currently rated as less than good were previously good or outstanding, whereas 28% of sponsor-led academies were downgraded. One has therefore to look at the way in which the evidence is being used.

A briefing from the LSE produced for this debate—so other noble Lords may have seen it—makes a number of points and interesting observations. I will pick two. The briefing states:

“Academies in MATs also can have no autonomy over their curriculum”,


because it is the MATs that decide about the curriculum. The briefing continues:

“This can be centralised by the MAT, giving schools less flexibility than they would have”


had as a single academy or, “as maintained schools”. On the financial arrangements, the briefing states:

“MAT accounts, while having to be signed off by an external auditor, do not provide a detailed account of how public money is spent, and data published by MATs can mask the financial decisions made by individual academies. This is in contrast to the accounts of maintained schools”.


I think there are some questions about the particular advantages of MATs. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Lingfield, that if we have to have this system—and I would prefer that we did not—smaller and local would be considerably better than enormous and widespread.

I conclude with this from The Case for a Fully Trust-led System. I quoted earlier from a document from the National Education Union. Noble Lords will know that I had a relationship with the National Union of Teachers, which was the precursor union of the NEU. The Government document notes the percentage of schools in MATs per region. The region that has the smallest number of MATs is London. There was a time when schools in London were not especially well performing. It was patchy: there were some excellent schools, but it was not especially well performing. What happened was that London—and I am proud that I was teaching in London then—put on the London Challenge, a wholly different approach from academizing; it was about schools working together. I venture to suggest that the reason why there are fewer MATs in the London region is because the success of the London Challenge propelled schools forward in wanting to work together while retaining their relationship with their local authority. I hope that the Minister agrees.