I very much enjoyed reading Jon Severs’ editorial yesterday (exclusive to the free daily newsletter - you can sign up to receive it here) in which he raises the question of a national plan for academy trusts.
It is fascinating to hear Sam Freedman’s take on this. Jon cites Sam, a senior fellow at the Institute for Government and a former senior policy adviser at the Department for Education, explaining that in the early days the Department for Education believed “academisation” would be taken up at a similar slow pace to grant maintained status in the 1990s.
Of course, this has not been the case. In January 2010 there were just 202 academy schools. At the most recent count, 13 years later, there are 2,426 trusts with 10,254 academy schools. Over half of children and young people in England are now educated in schools run by trusts.
In public policy terms, this kind of change is unusual and significant. Looking forward, is there a national plan? And perhaps more importantly, is it desirable that there should be a national plan?
A national plan for education
I absolutely agree with Jon that structures underpin how everything, from funding to Ofsted, affects an individual school. And I agree that we need a robust discussion about how we sort this out. We cannot limp on indefinitely with a fragmented system.
The Confederation of School Trusts (CST) has repeatedly made the case that groups of schools working together in deep and purposeful collaboration in a single governance structure is our best bet for a school system that can keep getting better. I make this case not on ideological grounds. I believe this to be true for the following reasons, but I offer these tentatively in the spirit of respectful debate.
Firstly, trusts are potentially robust and resilient structures
Resilience is the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties. In organisational resilience theory, it also means the ability of an organisation to shape itself to respond to long-term challenges. The challenges of Covid-19 will have long-term economic, health, social and educational impacts. On top of these challenges come more recent perturbations - global economic uncertainty, shifting macro global trends and the impacts of all of this on our children, families and communities. We need school structures that can withstand these and new perturbations.
Secondly, trusts are a new form of civic institution
No public institution can solve all the problems we face as a society. Like the NHS trust and the university, the school trust is a new form of civic institution that can work with other civic actors for the greater common good.
Thirdly, trusts can be knowledge-building
A growing body of literature places teacher professional development at the heart of efforts to improve the school system. School improvement - in order to be lasting and sustainable-- should be underpinned by deliberate and intentional knowledge building. Professional development of teachers is core to these knowledge-building efforts. And trusts control the conditions, create the culture and have the capacity to do this at scale.
Fourthly, trusts are (or can be) protective structures
Protective factors are both individual and environmental attributes that are associated with positive adjustment. We have heard a lot in recent weeks about the pressures of school inspection and external accountability. As trust leaders, we will never be able to mitigate all the stress of external accountability, but we can notice when our leaders are feeling the burden and put protections around them.
And finally, the singularity of purpose
The power of trusts comes primarily from the power of purpose - the capacity to link people and schools through a shared belief about the identify, meaning and mission of an organisation.
So, what’s the plan?
How schools should be organised
I do not believe that it is desirable for this government - or, indeed, any government - to determine a grand plan that reorganises state schools. And I don’t think the sector would accept it if there was one.
We don’t tend to respond well to government diktat. And compliance tends not to create excellence in school systems.
The challenges we face as a society are unlikely to be solved by a single actor - and we should stop thinking that the government of the day is the single actor that has all the solutions.
This is a big and exciting exercise in public service co-creation. We share accountability in this regard for public service reform. We should not think of it is being done to us.
We do need to make the values-based and evidence-informed case for why a group of schools working together in a single legal entity is our best bet for a system that keeps on improving and is the right thing for the education of our children and young people. We need to exercise new forms of civic and system leadership that drive change at local, regional and system levels. Those leading our trusts needs to act on, not just in, the systems in which we operate.
This means a grown-up conversation about design and growth strategies for academy trusts. It means doing all we can to build intentionally strong and resilient organisations. And it means that we must act not just in organisational interest but in the interests of building coherence locally, regionally and nationally. It is a different mental model of leadership and requires something other than looking just to government or its agencies for solutions.
What might the role or roles of government be in this plan?
I do think there is a role for government. Through the regulatory and commissioning review, a new model of commissioning is emerging. It is unlikely to be perfect. Commissioning is complex, multi-faceted and certainly not straightforward. It deals with competing interests. It is full of moral and ethical hazards. It will involve us being able to hold both good intention and ambiguity in regulatory and commissioning conversations.
Perhaps most of all, it is about the centrality of the culture we want to create - of cooperative spirit and collective action in the service of the sacred bond of trust we hold with children.
I think Sam Freedman is right that education itself is unlikely to be a big election topic, but this does not mean that the intricacies of system construction have no chance of being discussed. We can discuss them. We can put them at the top of our agenda. We can build on the strengths of the past two decades of public education and create something important.
I’d actually prefer that political parties did not see themselves as the sole architects of the system.
Andy Wolfe, executive director of education at the Church of England, talks about cathedral-building. We are building cathedrals - we are the architects of a school system that I hope will outlive us all. We need the courage to exercise this new kind of public leadership.
Leora Cruddas is CEO of the Confederation of School Trusts
