Schools and teachers face “uncertainty, confusion and irritation” because the sector is “limping” on with a messy and unresolved system, headteachers’ leaders have warned.
Julie McCulloch, director of policy at the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL), said that the government needs to work with the sector to fix the “middle tier” of the schools system, amid questions about who is responsible for decision making in education.
In a new blog, she also said that it would be “incredibly frustrating” if the Schools Bill, which she said had attempted to remove some of the confusion, “ends up being ditched because it was shoddily written”.
The bill was going to introduce a new regulatory framework for multi-academy trusts but great swathes of it were withdrawn after concerns that the way clauses were drafted gave Whitehall too much power over schools.
And now the plans for it are uncertain after a period of political upheaval that has seen three prime ministers in as many months.
In a blog for ASCL, Ms McCulloch highlights several recent controversies in the sector as examples of uncertainty over who is responsible for decision making and oversight of schools.
This included the row over Covid in 2020, when Royal Greenwich Council told schools to move online for the final week of the December term only for the Department for Education (DfE) to take legal action, insisting that schools remained open for in-person learning.
She also highlighted the publication of Ofsted research reviews and the subject aides memoire for inspectors, which were leaked online but were not officially published by the inspectorate.
She said: “This term, we’ve seen the leaked publication of a set of ‘aides-memoire’ used by inspectors. These go much further than what’s in the inspection framework and, according to the head of Ofsted’s curriculum unit, include “messages from our published research reviews”.
“So, is it a requirement for schools to heed these subject reviews? Definitely not. Is it an expectation? No, not really. But now that these aides-memoire are in the public domain, and Ofsted has been explicit that inspectors draw on them in individual reviews, it would be a brave school which decided to ignore them completely.
“I’m not making a judgement on any of the examples I’ve given here - whether or not schools should have been open or closed in the run-up to Christmas 2020...whether or not Ofsted should take a particular view on curriculum design. What I’m saying is that all these examples illustrate the mess we’ve got ourselves into about who can tell schools what.”
She added: “My point here isn’t about those issues in themselves. My point is that the longer we attempt to limp along with a messy middle tier, which leaves these sorts of questions unanswered, the more uncertainty, confusion and irritation we create for leaders and teachers. And, as the teacher recruitment and retention crisis deepens, that’s the last thing we need.”
In the second part of a two-part blog, Ms McCulloch outlines a series of questions the sector needs to have resolved.
These include: “How we move from an approach to trust development which, initially at least, was based on letting a thousand flowers bloom, towards one which is carefully structured to ensure every school and every child is properly supported.”
She also asked who should define what a strong trust looks like and how the system avoids overloading schools with more and more responsibilities, particularly as the cost-of-living crisis deepens?
Her blog concludes: “These are big questions. But thinking them through is essential if we’re to build a system fit for our post-pandemic world. And - crucially - the answers to these questions need to be developed with the leaders in the system, not imposed upon them.”
The DfE has been approached for a comment.
