Teaching union leaders have attacked what they call the government’s “badly flawed” evidence behind plans for all schools to join multi-academy trusts.
In the Schools White Paper, published on Monday, education secretary Nadhim Zahawi set out plans for all schools to either have become academies by 2030, or be in the process of joining a MAT.
But the NEU teachers’ union has criticised the evidence for the proposals as “badly flawed”.
It said that the Department for Education had produced a study on the benefits of schools becoming academies in 2014, and that the union had extended this analysis to “see how the picture has developed over the last decade”.
The union said the findings “do not look good” for the government’s plans, and that “on the basis of this evidence from Ofsted judgements, the government should not be proceeding with plans to require all schools to join MATs”.
“The evidence suggests that schools that join MATs are less likely to improve and more likely to fall back,” the union said.
The union’s statement comes after Tes revealed yesterday that researchers had cast doubt on the DfE’s aim for MATs to be made up of 10 schools or more.
A senior researcher at the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) claimed there was “no conclusive evidence” that MATs are more effective than maintained schools or single-school trusts at managing their finances on average, as per the department’s claims.
Ofsted grades ‘misreported’
The NEU’s analysis of Ofsted outcomes for state schools found that primary schools that were not academies were more likely to retain an “outstanding” grade from Ofsted in inspections than other types of schools.
It found that 30 per cent of “outstanding” primary schools under the local authority kept their “outstanding” status, compared with 7 per cent of primary schools in MATs.
For “outstanding” primary schools that were moved from one MAT to another, none retained the “outstanding” judgement.
Just 12 per cent of local authority primary schools rated “good” or better fell to less than “good” in their subsequent inspection, compared with 35 per cent of primary schools in MATs, the study found.
And it revealed that 50 per cent of primary schools previously rated “good” or better by Ofsted when in a MAT lost their status if they moved to another multi-academy trust.
For secondary schools that were local authority maintained, half kept their rating of “outstanding” over two inspections. The same proportion of secondary converter academies - former LA schools that joined a MAT - kept their status.
But for secondary schools that had always been academies, this fell to 30 per cent.
The NEU’s analysis found that the DfE’s 2022 “case for a fully-led trust system”, which argues the case for all schools becoming academies, had misreported Ofsted grades for many schools and claimed them for schools in MATs when they were achieved at a time when the school was under the local authority.
‘Highly misleading’ on Pupil Premium
The NEU said the DfE had failed to point out the best-performing MATs had lower proportions of disadvantaged pupils, while the worst-performing had much higher proportions of poorer pupils.
The union said the DfE had also failed to report Pupil Premium information for its samples and was “highly misleading”.
Kevin Courtney, joint general secretary of the NEU, said its analysis rendered the government’s “drive towards academisation in the name of standards” as “nonsensical”.
Mr Courtney said that the education secretary claimed to want to be “driven by evidence” and as a result should respond to the evidence and “pause this ideological drive”.
“Teachers and parents want the government to focus their efforts on supporting schools to improve what works and to drop their ideological obsession with marketisation.”
In response, a Department for Education spokesperson said: “The claims made are incorrect and based upon selective data, mispresenting our published evidence.
“We have a decade of evidence that academy trusts can transform underperforming schools. More than seven out of 10 schools that have become academies due to underperformance now have a ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’ Ofsted rating, compared to about one in 10 of the local authority maintained schools they replaced.
“We want all schools to be part of a strong academy trust so they can benefit from the trust’s support in everything from teacher training, curriculum, financial planning and inclusivity towards children with additional needs, to excellent behaviour and attendance cultures. This lets schools focus on what parents and children want and need - great teaching for every child.”
