In the educational wild west, appetite for wholesale structural reform is growing.

With revelations that some multi-academy trusts pay their CEOs more than any local education authorities do or ever did pay their education directors - while workload, recruitment and retention of teachers continues to dog schools - it’s tempting to want to hark back to more innocent times. But what if the answer is both more radical and less disruptive?

Scandals about eye-watering pay-offs, orphaned schools, re-brokering costs, failing trusts and related-party transactions aside, the story is still being written about the true extent of off-rolling.

This week, new details have shown that there has been an increase of 20,000 over just two years - from 37,500 to 57,800 - in the number of students being home-schooled, a rise of 54 per cent.

It is evident that something is broken in our educational culture. Vulnerable students and families are at the sharp end of it, and this very fact makes a mockery of our so-called public education system. The institution of school is dying.

High-stakes poker

No matter the debates about educational purpose, school is dying from a lack of vision. No matter the debates about exclusions, school is dying from lack of inclusivity. No matter the debates about school shaming, the very idea of school is dying of shame.

But blaming schools themselves is nothing short of despicable buck-passing. Our culture is second to none for its micro-management, its top-down, toxic accountability regime. The game stakes are high. So if the blame lies anywhere for gaming, it is with policymakers themselves. They create the incentives, and they have the power to change or scrap them.

Yet somehow the house always wins.

We know from research paper after research paper that academies and free schools provide no marked improvement on results when compared with local authority schools. And why should they? It is and always has been a nonsense to expect them to. The causes and circumstances of school improvement are complex.

But the simple truth is that in our competitive system, one school’s gains are all too often achieved off the back of another’s losses. That is the logic of a league table, sure as it is the logic of norm-referenced assessment. In fact, the very existence of the Progress 8 measure is a response to that truth, a lifeline for schools whose attainment - for myriad reasons - is pervasively lower than the norm. Unfortunately, it isn’t working either.

The Department for Education has accepted that Progress 8 drives perverse incentives in the school system. This concession came in October this year, five years (almost to the day!) after it created Progress 8 to tackle … you guessed it … perverse incentives in the school system.

Is the irony lost on us? On them? Will nobody stand up to the culture of incentives itself, given that they can be nothing but perverse? Isn’t it time we stopped believing that we can wriggle our way out of this hangman’s noose?

Cut the rope

So it is with some trepidation that I bring into this Death Valley of inspiration that watershed moment in the academies policy, the infamous Educational Excellence Everywhere White Paper published by the DfE under Nicky Morgan. The place where the academisation policy wave crashed, and finally rolled back. I opposed that document vehemently at the time. And yet, for eight years now, the political rhetoric has been about freeing schools. Today, to misquote Rousseau’s The Social Contract, schools are born free, but everywhere they are in chains.

But what if the solution was to move on from this rhetoric, to actually see the policy through. What if we actually freed schools - from academy chain gangs as well as local authority possession, from Ofsted’s last-chance saloon as well as DfE’s high-stakes casino?

Yes, you’re hearing me right. What if every school was an academy? What if every academy was, truly, a free school?

Our state education is being lynched by the accountability sheriff who was meant to keep it safe. And the very rope by which it hangs is lifting up the political careers of gold miners at the other end. It’s time to cut that rope. It’s time to take the star off the corrupt sheriff’s chest and give it to a deputy with a commitment to democracy and the rule of law.

In other words, it’s time to rethink school accountability from scratch. Educational excellence everywhere is a fine ideal. The operative term is everywhere.

If we are willing to hold up Kent’s average results as above Cornwall’s without looking at the gap within Kent between its selective and non-selective schools, then we don’t mean everywhere.

If we are willing to look at a free school’s results without considering the impact it has had on the comprehensive next door, then we don’t mean everywhere.

If we are willing to look at a snapshot of an academy trust’s Ofsted grades without looking at the financial machinations that allow it to defund where Ofsted has already validated them, in order to put funds where Ofsted is expected to turn up next, then we don’t mean everywhere.

And if we’re willing to accept the DfE’s wholly centralised vision of curriculum as a proxy for what our communities need or want, then we don’t mean excellence either.

Bust the trusts

So here are some policy ideas to bring some law and order to these here parts:

• End the legal framework that allows multi-academy trusts to exist;
• Scrap the national and regional schools commissioners - a layer of bureaucracy that exists solely for MATs;
• Allow schools to choose freely whether or not to academise;
• Give school admissions back to local authorities;
• End competition by holding all schools responsible for all the students in their region;
• Map those regions to MPs’ constituencies.
   

That’s not the sum total of my political programme, but together with my proposals to reform the national curriculum so that communities get their voices and responsibilities back, to de-politicise Ofsted appointments, and to ditch the Ofsted grades in favour of brokering support, we might well be on our way to a rebirth of school.

If only someone pinned that star on my chest. I ain’t fixin’ for big bucks, just for doin’ what’s right.

Then again, in this lawless wild west, maybe that’s precisely my problem.

JL Dutaut is a teacher of politics and citizenship and co-editor of Flip the System UK: a teachers’ manifesto, published by Routledge