Multi-academy Trusts: Ofsted

Debate between Dan Poulter and Jonathan Gullis

Tuesday 23rd November 2021 Westminster Hall

[Dr Dan Poulter (Central Suffolk and North Ipswich) (Con)]

I commend my hon. Friend on securing the debate. I wonder whether he will touch briefly on the issue of the regional schools commissioners. As he has rightly outlined, there is concern that multi-academy trusts lack transparency in their governance structures and are difficult to hold to account, but there is also concern about how we as Members of Parliament can access the commissioners, interact with them and help to raise concerns through the system. Will he draw that to the attention of the Minister and give his own thoughts on that particular challenge?

[Jonathan Gullis]

I am very lucky to have had a really healthy working relationship with the west midlands regional schools commissioner, who is a former headteacher at the Mill Hill Primary Academy in Stoke-on-Trent North. However, I have serious concerns, and the purpose and role of regional schools commissioners is an issue that was raised in the Education Committee. When those posts were originally set up, it was absolutely the right thing to do, both to have accountability and so that parents, Members of Parliament and teachers in the schools could raise any concerns. In my opinion, regional schools commissioners should be brokering deals, such as new deals for multi-academy trusts to come into a local area, holding to account boards of trustees that they think are underperforming, and feeding that information back to the Department for Education.

At this moment in time, I do not think that regional schools commissioners are utilised well enough, and there has to be a discussion at some stage about whether they are the right model to bring this change about in the long term, and whether they could be given more powers. Hopefully, we will ensure that regional schools commissioners are not just civil servants, whom I am sure are very noble and worthy people, but that they have spent years in the classroom at all levels of governance and management and can bring their experience with them. That is when a regional schools commissioner can really work. At the moment, they are simply not fit for purpose. I know that the Education Committee raised this issue, and I am sure the Minister will look at it.

We have had a great 10 years of Govian and Gibbian reforms. We will now have the Zahawi-Walker reforms over the next 10 years, and I am sure there will be a White Paper in which we will start to see the next 10 years of mission for education. I hope the role of regional schools commissioner can be explored by the Minister, and I look forward to hearing his thoughts on that. If he cannot tell us today, I am sure he can write to us to let us know how he sees that going forward.

Teachers are accountable for the education they provide to pupils, with Ofsted inspecting schools, including individual academies, and children’s social services. To restore faith between teachers and trusts, multi-academy trusts and their leadership teams must be accountable in the same way as teachers. Ofsted’s chair, Dame Christine Ryan, has agreed with the need to inspect schools’ governing bodies, noting in the Education Committee meeting in September this year:

“I always felt it was absolutely essential to carry out inspection activities on the governing area and its interactions with the schools that it owned.”

Hospital trusts are subject to inspection by the Care Quality Commission, so why can Ofsted not inspect multi-academy trusts in the same way?

We have been moving in the right direction. In 2018, Ofsted trialled inspecting individual academies under the same multi-academy trust before visiting the trust’s head office to evaluate its effectiveness. Although that certainly highlighted the requirement to inspect multi-academy trusts, inspections remain focused on individual schools, meaning that wider issues at the heart of the trusts that run them can go undetected. Inspections that cover only individual schools are the crux of the multi-academy trusts’ accountability problem. Education Committee meetings with Ofsted chief inspector Amanda Spielman in June 2021 were revealing, as she said:

“We still operate what in some respects is historic inspection legislation that constrains us to look at the level of the individual school”.

That clearly limits our ability to hold those responsible to account. The chief inspector noted in November 2020 that

“accountability needs to be able to look at the multiple levels in the system to ask the right questions at the right level”.

To ensure that multi-academy trusts truly use their power for the benefit of our schools, accountability must reflect the top-heavy leadership style of many trusts, and thus hold those responsible to account.

Ultimately, multi-academy trusts can, and do, turn schools around, just as the Inspirational Learning Academies Trust has done across schools in Stoke-on-Trent North, Kidsgrove and Talke. By holding trusts to account through regular inspection—they do not fear being held to account because they are proud of their work—we can ensure that schools, staff and students alike are performing to their full potential. The inspection of multi-academy trusts will allow us to recognise those that perform well, and incentivise the best multi-academy trusts with generous funding to take on struggling schools. By keeping trusts responsible for their performance, we can seek to harness their power, especially in parts of the country where school outcomes are weak. With my personal experience in the teaching profession, I believe that multi-academy trusts are the proven route to ensuring that every child, no matter where they live, can attend a school where they will reach their potential, and open doors to the career routes they wish to pursue.

When I was elected, I promised to level up communities like Stoke-on-Trent North, Kidsgrove and Talke, and providing a quality education for every child is vital to doing this. Multi-academy trusts have had a crucial role in the great improvements in school standards in the last decade; it is our responsibility to identify the best of them and use their power to prove to every child, up and down our United Kingdom, that they are not forgotten and opportunity sits right on their doorstep.

This debate comes off the back of my introduction of a ten-minute rule Bill, for which I was delighted to receive cross-party support from members of the Labour party and from the Liberal Democrats. It shows the strength of feeling on this issue. I was lucky enough to secure the signature of my hon. Friend the Member for Wantage before he was promoted to become Parliamentary Private Secretary at the Department for Education. He knows how great this is, and I am sure that he will use his position within the Department for Education to lobby the Minister. Ultimately, I think this shows the strength of feeling that this is the right way to have fairness, accountability, transparency and to ensure that multi-academy trusts are a positive driver for improving education outcomes across England.