By John Galloway With minor edits by Louise Vincent
Despite the assertions of both front benches in the House of Commons recently, any improvement in school standards is not as a direct result of the broadening of the academy schools system since Michael Gove gave it a fresh remit and impetus in 2012. This experiment in Neo-liberalism, bringing quasi-commercial principles into public services has had an impact on the state funded education system in England, but it’s not in the way our politicians would have us believe.
Had the Tory party remained in power they would have pushed for a 100% academised school system. As it is, just under 50% of English state schools are academies (although this varies by sector) of which 75% are secondary, and 40% are primary schools. If it were such a boost to outcomes, you would expect the sector to have expressed its confidence in it with a higher number of transitions. Whilst many of these would have been compulsory, for being alleged ‘failing’ schools, the programme is meant to be voluntary, with the obvious benefits seeing the programme sell itself. As it did not, the last government drew up legislation to make academisation compulsory for all English state schools.
The legislation fell, despite the supporting document, “The case for a fully trust-led system” (March 2022). This made the claim that, “Where schools underperformed, they were increasingly transferred into multi academy trusts (MATs) 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.” Given that the promise of compulsory – i.e. ‘sponsored’ – conversion was that failing schools would be redeemed, the fact that this did not happen with 30% of such schools is not a compelling argument.
In fact, the House of Lords in its own research paper, “Improving schools’ performance: Are multi-academy trusts the answer?” (September 2023) found that, ‘Data on Ofsted ratings does not show that schools in MATs have better ratings than other types of school, according to information published in the same paper.’ Also, that ‘On academic results the picture is mixed, according to figures in the same government paper. The percentage of pupils achieving the expected standard in reading, writing and maths was, overall, slightly higher in maintained schools than in MATs.’
Similarly, research by the Local Government Association published by the Guardian headlined that ‘Council-maintained schools in England outperform academies in Ofsted rankings,’ going on to quantify this difference: ‘45% of academies that were already an academy in August 2018 managed to improve standards from inadequate or requires improvement to good or outstanding, compared with 56% of council-maintained schools.’
So, if they haven’t had the impact on raising standards that they were supposed to have had, just how has the expansion of academy trusts changed the state school system in England?
Well, for a start it is is a lot messier. Where once state education was provided by local authorities, with a bit of variation around church schools, now every borough has a plethora of providers for its schools, as the website https://fragmentedschoolsystem.org.uk/ readily demonstrates. The London Borough of Bromley, for instance, now has 29 trusts running 94 of its schools, whilst still running 11 schools itself. Whereas in neighbouring Lewisham, the council has 70 schools, with nine trusts running a further 17. This piecemeal, fragmentary, picture has been deliberately created by government policy right across this country. Part of its agenda of rolling back the power of local government and opening the provision of public services to private, commercially driven, entities, ones that don’t necessarily espouse the ethics and values that have underpinned public services for decades.
This is very evident in the controversy around executive pay in large multi-academy trusts (MATs). As the Public Accounts Committee put it, ‘Unjustifiably high salaries use public money that could be better spent on improving children’s education and supporting frontline teaching staff.’ (PAC 2018). The Campaign for State Education (CASE) commissioned a report into this from education journalist Warwick Mansell, entitled, “Systems Matter: the cost to classrooms of the academies programme.” (May 2023)
Mansell compared the pay of managers and administrators of MATs with that of local authority staff running children’s services, not only responsible for schools, but also for children’s social care. He showed that ‘the 50 largest academy trusts had seven times as many people paid at least £130,000 a year as did the 10 largest local authority areas, despite the two sets of organisations educating roughly the same number of pupils, with the trusts spending eight times more per pupil on £130,000-plus employees than were the local authorities.’ As all English state schools are funded at the same per pupil rate the cost of these excessive remunerations must result in less money going into classrooms.
Whilst MATs might argue that economies of scale mean they are lowering costs and overheads, in “Understanding the Middle Tier: Comparative Costs of Academy and LA-Maintained Sectors,” (Bubb et al., 2019) the authors found that, ‘Large MATs might be expected to gain from economies of scale, but the figures do not support this. As an analysis of income and expenditure shows, academies belonging to large MATs (11+ academies) had the highest cost per pupil.’
The question then becomes, how can MATs afford to pay these inflated executive salaries? To answer this CASE again turned to Warwick Mansell and in October 2024 published “Systems Matter II: the impact of the academy system on staffing.”
Here, Mansell found that in large MATs, ‘Classroom teachers within the local authority-maintained sector are paid more, on average, within both primary and secondary schools, than are their counterparts from the academies sector,’ with an even greater differential in schools that had been compelled to convert due to Ofsted outcomes. This difference in pay could be for a number of reasons. For one, ‘teachers in academies, and in sponsored academies in particular, tend to be younger – and therefore less expensive – than their counterparts in the local authority-maintained sector.’
Another is that large MATs employ a higher proportion of unqualified teachers: ‘the rate within sponsored primary academies is double that of local authority primaries, while it is 55 per cent higher in sponsored secondary academies.’
Perhaps it is unsurprising that these trusts also have a higher turnover of staff. Education Policy Institute research published in April 2024 found that MATs ‘have higher rates of workforce turnover than local authorities.’ Analysis by Mansell showed that, ‘teacher turnover rates are higher in academies, and particularly so in the largest academy trusts, with some of the largest chains losing up to a quarter of their teachers – in one case, the figure was 30 per cent – each year,’ with similarly higher rates of staff leaving teaching altogether than from LA schools.
Maybe these teachers are leaving teaching because of limitations placed on their professionalism. Kevan Collins, the government’s School Standards Tsar was quoted in SchoolsWeek in November 2024 saying he had, ‘never seen teachers more enslaved”, with some “being told what to do” in “every lesson”.’ This could be a result of the use of greater numbers of unqualified staff who are seen as simply there to read a script against the background of a prescribed presentation. Further evidence of this is the transfer of initial teacher education away from higher education establishments and into academy trusts. Another is the growth of Oak Academy, an online repository of oven-ready lessons set up during the covid pandemic and subsequently developed with further government funding. The academies system is leading to teachers becoming de-professionalised, delivering homogenous, pre-packaged lessons.
At another level, the academies system is also leading to perverse decision-making. Whilst local authorities are responsible for place planning – that is, ensuring there are sufficient places within their area for the number of schools age children – they no longer have the capabilities necessary to do so. Since 2012, all new schools must be academies, their existence and location determined by the civil servants of the Regional Schools Commissioner, and they don’t have the authority to close or merge academies, only the schools that they themselves run. Because of this, in Autumn 2023 Hackney council was forced to close four of its own schools even though they were not necessarily in areas that were undersubscribed.
An even more bizarre case in the Summer of 2024 found Islington council forced to close one of its schools deemed ‘Good’ by Ofsted because another that had been found inadequate was converting to an academy, and therefore beyond the reach of the local authority’s decision-makers.
The ideologically driven expansion of the academies programme has not provided its intended outcome, that of driving up school standards. Rather, in freeing up salary constraints it has driven up executive remuneration and driven down classroom pay. Further freedoms in curriculum content and delivery have seen teachers’ professionalism eroded, with greater numbers leaving our schools, and unqualified staff coming in to do the job.
The disruption of the school system intended by the government ideologues has run its course. Our children are not achieving better outcomes than if local authorities continued to run schools. Our teachers are lower paid and demoralised, and our local provision is fragmented and forced into irrational decisions.
The results are in. The academies experiment has failed.
Just to add that there's no real evidence of overall standards having improved at all since 2010. Since the Conservatives lost power, various Opposition spokespeople have been trying to establish the narrative that raising educational standards was a significant achievement of the last government but the only evidence adduced in support of this claim has been from OFSTED and a couple of results in recent international comparisons.
Firstly, there is no evidence that OFSTED tick boxes correlate meaningfully with any objective measure of educational standards. In 30 years of constantly changing inspection frameworks to suit the whims of politicians, OFSTED has never been able to show that its inspections have led to any general improvement.
Secondly, while it is true that England moved up the league table in various subjects in the 2022 PISA (Programme of International Student Assessment) tests, it is also true that the actual test scores of English children did not improve at all. The move up the tables was entirely due to children of other countries performing worse than usual. Moreover, the sample of English children submitted by the DfE for the PISA tests was dismissed by the OECD as not having met the required standard, a judgement that the DfE was obliged to publish on its own website (a long way down the list. of course). This was not due to any fiddling by the DfE but to the problems created by the COVID pandemic but it does cast a great deal of doubt on the validity of the results.
Thirdly, it is also true that English pupils in year 5 (10 year olds) appeared to do very well in comparison to most other countries in the 2021 PIRLS (Programme of International Reading and Literacy Study) tests but again, thanks to the pandemic, there was no consistent approach to sampling across the countries taking part. The University of Oxford, which studied the PIRLS results, said that "direct statistical comparisons across these groups are not sensible to make, and rankings for this cycle should not be emphasised". This has not stopped the DfE from alleging that English children are "the best in Europe" at reading.
Michael Pyke
There is a general point about contracting out state services to quasi-private, albeit registered charities and about how much control is surrendered. Where the gain is clear and beyond, in this case, what local education authorities could achieve then we can praise 'the third way', that calm partnership between public and private. As John Galloway makes clear there is no clear gain, much misuse of finance and bizarre choices being forced on LAs managing their schools in this ridiculous context of 2,500 Trusts managing our schools, half of them stand-alone institutions, sending in annually their accounts to Companies House. This chaos has been labelled a 'Wild West' by Anne West of LSE. Sensibly, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have not gone down this route, and seem in no way tempted!
The long history of politicians being strongly influenced by their own experience of independent or quasi-independent schools casts a shadow over policy in this area. It is as though they believe that the "school system" as a whole should consist merely of autonomous institutions. In their eyes, schools never fail and no one needs to save their pupils when they do. Add to this the peculiar absence of any understanding that the tasks of maintaining safe buildings, ensuring financial probity, providing pupil transport and specialist support for special needs or subject areas must continue. Barring local authorities from opening new schools has meant reliance on "the market" somehow meeting new or changing needs. Just wait for when, in an area with falling roles, "someone" has to persuade a Multi-Acdemy Trust to close its school(s)!