The avowed intention of the shadow secretary of state for education, Rebecca Long-Bailey, to reverse academisation and return schools to the control of local authorities awakens a sense of déjà vu.
Arguments have raged for 20 years, through successive administrations, regarding the relative benefits of school governance structures.
In our uncertain Covid-dominated climate, a binary debate along the lines of local authority versus academy trusts is a retrograde distraction that ignores, if nothing else, the vital roles academies have played over the past three months.
Why kill off academies?
As we are all painfully aware, the education of all our children has been disrupted by the closure of schools to the overwhelming majority over the past 11 weeks.
Partial attendance is likely to remain the “new normality” for months to come, and in among this turmoil of readjustment, the plight of many thousands of disadvantaged pupils is set to worsen.
The edtech revolution has not provided equitable benefits, just as many past initiatives to raise attainment have disproportionately boosted those children who were already achieving success.
The sector needs determined, informed, principled leadership now more than ever to stand any chance of transforming dreams of social equality into reality.
The pandemic has been hugely problematic, but, like other crises, it has provided fertile ground for enterprise and creativity: we have seen strong partnerships making a real difference.
The power of partnerships
Regional schools commissioners and local authorities have collaborated on area-wide planning; multi-academy trusts and local authorities have worked together on the local response to Covid-19.
Local authorities have coordinated safeguarding for maintained schools and academies.
Trust schools have worked alongside local authority schools to create hubs through which they have cared for vulnerable pupils, built relationships with parents, developed online learning and provided food banks and other essentials.
Local authorities have used resources developed by trusts and vice-versa.
This symbiotic way of working, in which partners have defined roles and mutual respect, provides a blueprint for the future in which local authorities provide place-based leadership and strategic coordination and trusts operate as civic partners.
Local authorities’ championship of children through pupil place planning, safeguarding, facilitation of multi-agency working and leadership of special educational needs is indispensable.
Their capacity to improve schools by themselves has, however, shrunk as their community mandate has grown.
Why trusts work
Trusts, on the other hand, are solely preoccupied with schools.
They have developed the infrastructures enabling them to run high-performing schools, turn around weak schools, lead curriculum development, train teachers and embed practice informed by research.
We need a more coherent education system to reduce variability in the quality of education that children receive within regions and across regions.
Reverting to a system where a local authority controls its schools is neither an affordable nor a desirable solution.
Accelerating academisation and helping small trusts to join larger ones so that they can benefit from scale is a more sustainable, cost-effective approach than turning the clock back.
There is no tension between this vision and the need for community accountability. Schools in the very best trusts are rooted in the community, at the heart of regeneration and supportive of each other. Strength comes from collaboration.
We cannot subject an education system that has made significant gains in recent years to unnecessary reconfiguration; nor can we expose children to even more disruption than that wrought by Covid.
Hamid Patel CBE is chief executive officer of Star Academies
