Multi-academy trusts are a great way for schools to embed partnership working, but for improvement across the whole maintained school system, it will be necessary for the leaders of MATs to create broader collaborative networks.
For 30 years local authorities have been targeted by central government, with their funding being cut and their education responsibilities waning. Power has leaked away from them in both directions - to the government in London and to individual schools - but without any coherent plan as to what their role should be.
The White Paper of March 2016 made a welcome attempt to clarify the LA role in a fully academised system. There were to be three duties:
- Ensuring every child has a school place
- Ensuring the needs of vulnerable pupils are met
- Acting as champions for all parents and families
They will also continue to be expected to tackle welfare and extremism issues.
With a new secretary of state since then, it remains to be seen whether the white paper proposals will be put into practice.
Until all schools in their area become academies, LAs will continue to be the employer of staff in community schools, and will still have residual responsibilities for governance, organisation and curriculum in maintained schools.
Responsibility for school improvement in the future, which is not on the white paper’s list of LA responsibilities, rests with 20,000 individual school governing bodies and 1,000 or so multi-academy trusts (MATs). Most LA school improvement teams, which typically used to be around 50 people, are down to single figures. Expertise in school improvement now lies in the schools themselves.
The Department for Education has gradually accrued greater powers unto itself, but has found that it cannot run the system in any detail as the number of academies grows, so it has created the Education Funding Agency to distribute funding and the regional schools commissioners to broker academies where schools are not successful. The so-called ‘middle tier’ has been allowed to develop from LAs into a mix of academy chains, MATs, teaching schools and other looser federations.
The titles of government policy papers are generally more of a public relations exercise than a description of the contents, so the March 2016 white paper Educational Excellence Everywhere and its green successor Schools that work for everyone do not describe proposals that will create a universally good school system.
A state system must be a system
Tony Blair talked about ‘independent state schools’ and post-2010 governments have pursued that aim. While schools in England have a high degree of autonomy, compared with schools in other countries, that doesn’t make them independent. With the responsibility of educating every child, a maintained school system cannot comprise 20,000 separate units, selecting who they teach and going their own way. Like it or not - and governments since 2010 seem not to have liked it - a state system must be a system, with levels of responsibility allocated and shared in the interests of all young people and their communities.
Teaching School Alliances and Mats have become engines of collaboration and the baton of school improvement has, in some parts of the country, passed entirely from LAs to these groupings of schools. In this transition period, there is a spectrum of practice in different areas, with a few LAs trying to maintain the old model of employing school improvement staff through to a larger number of LAs that have largely thrown in the school improvement towel.
Most LAs have maintained an active interest in the quality of their schools (as they are statutorily obliged to do) and their small number of school improvement staff facilitate a partnership board, or similar group, of school heads, which creates the mechanism for schools to collaborate at an area-wide level. Where all local schools are in Mats, the CEOs of the Mats form this over-arching group.
If England is to have a successful school system, these middle tier groups need to take a strong degree of collective responsibility for the good of all young people in the area, utilising expertise from wherever it exists and looking outward to excellent practice elsewhere.
Mats are a good vehicle for partnership working between schools, but the large number of them and the very small number of regional schools commissioners are not sufficient to guarantee excellence everywhere. For success across the whole system, for which we should be aiming, schools need to be in Mats that are connected to each other in areas and regions and which participate in national networks.
All local authorities should be co-ordinating groups of Mats and RSCs need to go beyond their brokering role to establish regional school improvement networks. Nationally, there are already good support networks available to school leaders and teachers.
Stop fiddling with school structures
Last week I attended a seminar at Whole Education, where the leaders of Mats from many different parts of the country came together in a productive way to discuss and plan the things that really matter to them. They value the peer reviews that are conducted by Whole Education, Challenge Partners, the Education Development Trust and other organisations as a way of benchmarking a school’s performance against the best practice nationally.
A government that really wants a school system that works for everyone would not be fiddling around with school structures, enabling some schools to take a greater share of academically able pupils, leaving other schools to pick up the children who are rejected, but would be creating a system in which schools are encouraged to collaborate at local, regional and national level.
In the absence of such a government vision, it will be up to school leaders to take ownership of system improvement and take collective action within and beyond MATs and teaching schools to make a school-led system into a reality.
John Dunford is chair of Whole Education, a former secondary head, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders and national pupil premium champion. He tweets as @johndunford
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