Should the “Wild West” nature of the fragmented structure of the school system be a priority for any future government? Or are workforce concerns, crumbling buildings and funding issues more pressing?

This was the crux of a forthright debate at the Schools and Academies Show in London on Wednesday - nicely timed with a government announcement that more than 50 per cent of schools are now academies.

End the experimentation

Paul Gosling, the 2022-23 president of the NAHT school leaders’ union, was clear that bringing clarity to the structure of the system is a necessity and what many are crying out for from government.

“I don’t think we’ve sorted out what education is for and how we’re going to deliver it,” he said.

“What we need is leadership: for government to be clear about where the system is going, and to communicate to the people working in the system.”

However, he said the last few years had been “a bit of an experiment” and “a bit of Darwinian evolution” that now needed to end - if nothing else to help give staff in the sector clarity over what the future would look like.

“At the moment we’ve got a Wild West, and that’s disheartening for those people working in a school. With clear leadership and a clear vision of what the future of education looks like, it might keep some people in the job that we would otherwise lose,” he added.

Not a vote winner, but vital

Agreeing with this view was Tom Richmond, founder and director of think tank EDSK, who said that while he acknowledged school structures might not be a pressing issue for voters - “parents will not tell you at the doorstep that this is the thing you need to focus on” - it does need addressing.

“I know this doesn’t feel like the right thing to do...but it would be my pitch to the Labour Party,” he said.

“We are wasting a huge amount of time, money and effort trying to prop up two completely separate state-funded school systems. If you’ve got an unstable school that is going to make all the other issues harder,” he added.

Richmond also added that this not only means time and energy that could be spent fully focused on fixing issues like recruitment and retention but also denies pupils and parents a fair and equitable system.

“It’s the most disadvantaged and most vulnerable learners who are the biggest losers from the current system,” he said, citing issues such as the “mess of the school admission system”, where schools “make up” their own rules for entry. “How is that fair for anyone?” he asked.

Other areas of focus

Meanwhile, Emma Balchin, co-chief executive of the National Governance Association, agreed having two different systems makes it harder for the sector to operate as effectively as it could.

”[Having two systems] makes it more difficult to share good practice, because oftentimes the thing that will solve a problem is context-specific. [So] we’re having to deliver different ways, different messages, at different times,” she said.

However, and perhaps surprisingly given his role, Steve Rollett, deputy chief executive of the Confederation of Schools Trusts (CST), said while there is a “long-term need” to resolve the structure of the system and academies are “the right destination”, it is not something CST sees as a priority.

“We’re not banging on the door of the government and saying, ‘This is the thing that we want you to focus your energies on at the moment’,” he said.

In fact, Rollett said he would be concerned by ”creeping centralisation from central government” and cautioned against assuming “the solution necessarily lies with central government diktats”.

Instead, he said the four areas of priority for the CST - drawn from insights from its membership - are workforce issues, including recruitment and retention, funding, accountability in regulation and services for children.

“Underpinning all of that there is a cross-government focus needed on really tackling what we see as a worrying, significant increase in child poverty,” he added.

Decision time

Indeed, given the scale of the challenges facing education, it is possibly unlikely resolving the structural setup of the educational system will be top of any future government’s agenda after a forthcoming election - as Richmond from EDSK acknowledged.

“When you’re up against a No 10 that says, ‘We need to get more teachers, and we need to fix all the school buildings’, trying then to say, ‘Oh, by the way, can we also have a conversation about the technocratic set-up of state-funded education in England?’ It’s very hard.”

Nevertheless, with the current government of the day celebrating reaching a point in which the sector is evenly split between two distinct types of schools, someone is going to have to make a clear decision about where it goes next - and possibly sooner rather than later.

Ellen Peirson-Hagger is senior writer at Tes

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