Academy schools have been much in the news this week. The government has today announced additional numbers of new academies. But more significant have been two pretty damning reports on the ability of ministers to manage the academies programme. The Financial Times reported yesterday that £174m has been overspent in just one year by Michael Gove’s education department on the programme – a scale of waste equivalent to four times the West Coast Mainline fiasco and a shocking example of government incompetence.
And the final report of the Academies Commission, a joint initiative from the Royal Society of Arts and Pearson, has found that the government has lost the focus and drive for school improvement that existed under Labour’s academies programme.
While Labour’s programme focused on driving up underperfomance in some of the most challenging circumstances, since 2010 the programme has mainly focused on changing the structure of already outstanding schools. Three quarters of academies are now what are known as “converter academies”.
Michael Gove enjoys giving the media regular updates on the numbers of schools becoming academies but playing a simple numbers game is not the way to secure educational excellence. It’s no wonder that the head of the Academies Commission, Christine Gilbert, warned “there’s a real danger in equating an increase in the number of academies with an increase in the quality of our schools. Academisation alone is not going to deliver the improvements we need.” In another part of the report, the experts also warn that the process for selecting academies sponsors is “no longer rigorous”. This is especially worrying given how critical the input of sponsors is to school improvement.
Ministers have failed to ensure schools that have converted to become academies since 2010 work with other schools to raise standards across the system. This is critical for One Nation Education – we need collaboration to tackle underperforming schools to ensure that no school is left behind.
I talked in a recent speech about how we must tackle an arc of underachievement in some schools. For me, the key is to ensure that strong schools work with weaker schools, so no school is left behind. That was the key lesson from the London Challenge I was involved with setting up in 2003, which has seen schools in the capital go from being some of the worst in England to some of the best.
I was pleased to see that the commission also supports Labour’s call for a Royal College of Teachers to further strengthen the training and professional development of teachers. Improving practice in the classroom is critical to the life chances of the next generation, but the government seems uninterested.
While changing a school’s structure can help to galvanise change, the most important factor in a school’s success is the quality of teaching and leadership. There are serious problems with Michael Gove’s management of this programme. Under Labour, academies were about raising standards and this government is putting that legacy at risk. Reports like that of the Academies Commission illustrate the importance of developing schools policies based on evidence and not dogma.
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