Most of the Schools White Paper reads like a lengthy way of saying “we have no money”.

There’s nothing particularly objectionable in there. It’s not like Theresa May’s appalling Education Green Paper, which, with its proposed expansion of grammar schools, would have made everything much worse.

But only the fourth and final chapter on academies contains anything that is new and significant.

The three policy levels 

All of the announcements in the first three chapters fall into one of three categories.

The first is “re-announcements” - for instance, the entire chapter on teacher development is a rehash of existing policy. The Early Careers Framework; the expansion of National Professional Qualifications and the new Initial Teacher Training Framework - which the Department for Education insist on calling the “Golden Thread” - are all already very much at the implementation stage.

The second category is “tweaks that could have some benefit but are hardly game-changers”. This would include things like the plan to create a register of homeschooled children; better data tracking around attendance; and a new sample test for year nine, which will give us a sense of national performance levels without adding another high stakes exam into the mix.

All of these things are good but small scale, and, crucially, cheap.

Then we have the gimmicks. The things designed for headlines that will have very limited real-world value or impact.

This category covers the proposal for schools to be open for at least 32.5 hours a week, which most are already. The 40 per cent or so that aren’t are mostly within 15 minutes a day, so will most likely add a bit of time to their lunch hour or an extra break. It is a pale shadow of Sir Kevan Collins’ proposal for an extra 30 minutes of high-quality teaching a day that would have been properly funded.

The “Parent Pledge”, that schools will have to provide “evidence-based” support for your child in English and maths if they fall behind, is so vague as to be meaningless.

What exactly am I supposed to do as a parent if I’m not happy with what my children’s school is doing? It’s also pretty patronising for the majority of schools that already do this. Those that don’t would struggle to get a good Ofsted anyway.

The reality of a lack of cash

All of this is the consequence of a spending review settlement that left the DfE with no resources to do anything on the scale of what is required to make a dent in the disadvantaged gap, which has widened again during Covid.

Even the extra money for schools, which was supposed to take them back to what they had in 2010, has now been inflated away.

So in 2025, schools will still have less money, in real terms, than they did when the coalition came to power.

Schools with the most pupils from low-income families will be even worse off due to a funding formula that has prioritised the core per-pupil amount, rather than extra money for those who need it most.

With these kinds of financial pressures, compounded by the rapid increase in child poverty caused by a toxic mix of benefits freezes and inflation, schools are running to stand still at the moment, and it’s hard to see what’s going to change this in the absence of any help.

Academies focus is the only real insight

The final chapter of the White Paper, which focuses on finalising the academies reforms begun under Michael Gove, is by far the most substantive.

I have to declare an interest here, as many of the recommendations bear a striking resemblance to a paper I wrote for the Institute for Government a few months ago. So it’s not surprising I think it’s mostly pretty sensible!

I’m particularly pleased to see a commitment to putting academies onto a proper statutory footing, rather than relying on contracts, and a shift to a simpler regulatory model, even if the details still need to be decided.

This regulation will now be based on clear expectations for multi-academy trusts (MATs), around things like school improvement and workforce development, as well as collaborating with local schools.

There is also some welcome clarity over the local authority role, offering some additional powers to allow them to fulfil their statutory duties, though it doesn’t go quite as far as I’d have liked.

All of this sounds dull and technical - it’s certainly not the stuff of front-page splashes. But it does matter as the academies policy has been plagued by a lack of clarity over roles and responsibilities.

I am concerned about the proposal to allow local authorities to run trusts directly as it feels like this blurs the hard-won clarity.

I can understand, too, why some MATs are worried about the proposal that individual schools might, in exceptional circumstances, be able to request a shift to another trust.

This will need to be done very carefully, but I do think there is value in schools ultimately having some ability to direct accountability upwards, as well as being on the receiving end.

Devil in the detail 

The remaining questions are all about the detail.

The White Paper says that all schools will be in a trust by 2030 but doesn’t say how. There is no commitment to making this compulsory but also no indication it will be voluntary if schools don’t fancy the idea.

There is also an “expectation” that trusts will have at least 7,500 pupils or ten schools, but again no sense of how that will be enforced or delivered.

The regulatory model that we end up with will be crucial in making all this work. But it does at least give us a plausible endgame for the system reforms that began over a decade ago.

The main barrier in achieving this endgame will be the same one that has left the whole White Paper so constrained: money.

There already aren’t enough good MATs and, if we want all schools to be in one, we’re going to need a lot more, especially for primaries.

That requires capacity building and capacity building requires cash. The principle of having great schools lead trusts that scale good practice across a group remains a logical one. But if the great schools are, themselves, struggling to keep their heads above water then it doesn’t work.

Ultimately there’s little the DfE can do without support from the centre of government.

The real author of this White Paper is Rishi Sunak, who, by insisting on spending cuts to fund a pre-election tax giveaway, has left Nadhim Zahawi with little opportunity to do anything that would fulfil his rhetorical ambitions.   

Sam Freedman is a former senior policy adviser at the Department for Education and a senior fellow at the Institute of Government