Posted 15th January 2013
There has been an incredible increase in the number of
secondary schools converting to academies: from 203 academies in 2010 to an
incredible 2619 this week.
When asked by journalists headteachers wax on about the
greater freedoms schools have as academies and how we can design our curriculum
to suit the individual character and ethos of the school. This is nonsense: it
was the money that did it!
The average secondary school picked up over £250,000 to
become an academy and none of us could refuse our students that resource. In
case legal costs frightened us, we were given £25,000 to soften the blow.
Lawyers have done very nicely thank you out of academy conversion.
The government used to pay Hertfordshire Local Authority
(LA) all the money to run education in Herts. The LA top sliced for their
salaries, support for small schools, music and library support, curriculum advisers and the like and then each school got a formula-devised share. Whether
my school used them or not we contributed in advance for all these services. So
now we don’t pay for things we don’t want.
Academies get the money direct from central government. We
can buy back the services we want and do this in a competitive market. We like
Herts Human Resources but other private companies have signed up Hertfordshire
schools to their HR service. LA’s are declining and the services they can now
offer have become “traded”, which means a small school can pay £480 for a
single day’s support.
The cost to the government of the academy drive is an
unbelievable £8,300,000,000. That’s £8.3 billion – enough to build at least 900
brand new secondary schools.
£8.3 billion was £1,000,000,000 over budget, and that is what
we call a government success story? Well, it is if your intention was to
destroy LA’s and ideology is more important than the deficit reduction mantra
that has justified wage freezes and reduced living standards for most working
families. I guess we can be pleased we haven’t found a new war at which to
throw money. (Oops! Mali begins)
Over half of secondaries are academies but only 5 per cent
of primaries. The government agenda is to extend academies, creating
independent schools in the state sector. With LA’s in decline, Mr Cameron announced that more than 400 of the weakest primary
schools will have their leadership replaced, turning them into so-called
“sponsor academies” run by private groups. To speed up the process Cameron also
offered a £10 million sweetener to “big organisations” such as the Harris Group
(whose owner is a personal friend of Mr Cameron, a major financier of the
Conservative Party and the Labour Party nominated Baron of Peckham).
The Ofsted endorsed future is for Academy Chains to run
schools and our Education Secretary of State, Mr Gove, has encouraged academy
chains to grow "at the fastest sustainable rate", with sponsors
granted freedom to manage curriculum, budgets and staffing. In 2012, sponsor
E-ACT announced its plan to run 250 schools within the next five years. The
state will withdraw from a unified education system and give the schools to
private companies. Gove said in 2010: “I have no problem if any of my proposed
academies make a profit,” well, why else would you take on 250 schools?
The accountancy costs of academy status are beyond the
budget of an individual primary school so unless these schools get together to
buy accountancy services they will be sitting targets for the chains who will
do it all for them. Primaries beware and take care. Accountants are doing very
nicely out of this.
By the way, academies do not necessarily provide a better
education for children nor are academy chains cost effective providers and
here’s the evidence.
The well-respected Sutton Trust warned against academy
sponsors contracting services out to one of their own companies. In 2010, The
National Audit Office, said: “Some academies felt they were being pressurised
into buying central services from their sponsors” with 25 per cent of these schools
reporting that sponsors did provide paid services.
The National Audit Office described this as “a conflict of
interest,” and worried that academies in chains could lose significant control
over their budgets which could result in schools receiving services which they
did not want and did not represent good value. At present, there appears no
restriction upon those Federations imposing services of their own choosing and
paying for them from the unilateral top-slicing of their schools’ funds
A 2012 study, led by Ofsted's former chief inspector
Christine Gilbert, warns that the government's push to boost the number of
academies is not leading to a consistent rise in standards. A number of academy
chains are seemingly more focused on expanding their empires than improving
their existing schools, her report concludes.
The Academies Commission, led by some of Gove’s favourite
people, found that some academies seem
to be taking advantage of the ability to set their own admissions criteria by
cherry picking more able pupils. This, says the report, has "attracted
controversy and fuelled concerns that the growth of academies may entrench
rather than mitigate social inequalities".
The Academies Commission concluded that “overall, research
provides that there is no academy effect but considerable variability, and that
disadvantaged young people generally do no better in academies than in other
schools”.
Whenever they talk about bridging the gap between rich and
poor the rhetoric gets shafted by the thirst for private profit.
Dennis O'Sullivan
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