In what is becoming something of an annual tradition, the Local Government Association (LGA) has claimed that council-maintained schools get better Ofsted grades than academies.
But for many years schools receiving the lowest Ofsted ratings have automatically become academies, so there are fewer of these now overseen by councils.
If you transfer poorly performing schools out from council control, the ones remaining are more likely to have positive ratings and so bump up the overall percentage score.
Local authority schools vs academies
This analysis may be statistically accurate but it doesn’t tell you much about how schools are really doing.
What the LGA’s report does show is that many schools that struggled in council hands have thrived as academies. The increase in top ratings for sponsored academies is more than three times that seen in the remaining maintained schools.
A separate analysis of Ofsted grades by the Department for Education, published last year, found that more than seven out of 10 sponsored academies are now rated “good” or “outstanding” compared with about one in 10 of the local authority-maintained schools they replaced.
Trading stats like this, however, isn’t very helpful. Inspection regimes change. Schools start from different places and are inspected on different time frames - or during Covid not at all.
It is extremely difficult to compare like with like here, and near impossible to give the counterfactual narrative of what would have happened if a particular school did or did not become an academy.
What we at the Confederation of School Trusts think is more instructive is to look at why trusts were established in the first place.
It was never because all council school improvement teams were failing; there is some great talent in the maintained sector.
The challenge was that in too many cases schools were languishing with low performance and with insufficient accountability. When pupils were getting a poor deal, too often nothing changed.
Why academy trusts work
School trusts work because they - unlike councils - can, as an organisation, focus exclusively on pupils’ education, and they have the agency and accountability to make change happen.
They are not the same animal as a local authority, where a council director of education could have all the great ideas in the world but limited levers to really drive change.
Schools coming together as a deeply integrated organisation within a single accountability structure have real power to transform.
Trusts work because they encourage the sharing of expertise between schools so that everyone benefits.
DfE research in 2021 found that maintained schools that have become academies found the sharing of skills and expertise between schools in their trust to be the greatest improvement, with around nine out of 10 primary headteachers citing it as a benefit.
Headteachers also said they benefited from improved training, an improved sense of direction and purpose, and cost savings and efficiencies.
Everyone benefits
Our sense is that this benefits the whole sector, including maintained schools. Recent years have seen an increasing focus on informed, evidence-based practice that makes for better classrooms, improved curriculum resources and smarter assessment.
Trusts have the freedom and the capacity to try new things; their successes can spread to everyone else.
Many trusts reach out and provide help and support to maintained schools, either directly or through initiatives like maths hubs and education investment areas. They often work directly in their communities, too, working as important civic partners to improve life beyond the school gates.
Being part of a school trust isn’t really about whether the local authority or a charity signs off the pay cheques, or who agrees plans for a new school boiler. It’s about how colleagues come together as a community to make life better for children.
Maintained schools can be great, outstanding even - but they can’t replicate the unique power of a school trust.
Steve Rollett is deputy chief executive of the Confederation of School Trusts
