Justine Greening has used her start-of-term interview with Tes to reveal that she wants “to see more transparency” in the system that supervises and oversees academies.

They are extremely welcome words from the secretary of state. At Tes we have spent much of the past three months demonstrating just how opaque the workings and decisions of the regional schools commissioners and the head teacher boards (HTBs) that advise them really are.

They have become key bodies in overseeing an increasingly large proportion of our state education system. Yet their decisions over who should run taxpayer-funded schools - decisions that can have a huge impact on the local communities they serve - are covered by a veil of secrecy.

Diligent and dogged work by our political reporter, Martin George, has revealed how a wealth of information used by the commissioners and boards to help decide the fate of schools and academies is routinely withheld from the public.

In one cycle of meetings in autumn 2016, the eight HTBs in England received a total of 1,016 pages of documents, but only 32 pages of minutes were actually published.

And even when the Department for Education has been persuaded to release board papers under the Freedom of Information Act (FoI), officials have gone to great lengths to keep many important parts of their contents secret. Thanks to an intervention from the information commissioner, we now know exactly what the DfE tried to hide from the public in just one set of autumn 2015 papers from the East of England and north-east London HTB.

What the DfE tried to hide

The newly unredacted documents show that officials had wanted to conceal the existence of an investigation into an academy trust that they had wanted to become a school’s sponsor; the fact that education minister Lord Nash had urged an academy trust to expand rapidly, only for its quick growth to be raised as an “issue” two years later; and the way an unofficial Ofsted report was used to help justify the rebrokering of an academy.

But if the DfE has its way, we may never be able to see these kinds of papers again, in any form - redacted or otherwise. Its response when asked for the last set of HTB papers under FoI was a flat refusal.

This was not because all the material they contained was confidential, commercially sensitive or likely to inhibit free and frank discussion - we know from previous sets of papers that there must have been plenty there could have been released, without encountering any of those problems. No, the reason the DfE refused point-blank to release these papers was because of the time and resources that would have been involved.

When Tes contacted the DfE and suggested that this amounted to a ramping up of secrecy, the response was indignant outrage and threats of formal complaints if we ran a story saying as much. Officials argued that the previous release of full sets of HTB papers had only been “made in goodwill” to allow the requester to be in a better position to narrow down future applications.

To release another set would mean the DfE redacting the documents to remove sensitive material. And that task “would place a considerable burden and a significant strain on the department, in terms of time and resource”. So the entire contents of these papers are to remain secret.

Why the fuss?

Why is Tes making such a fuss about this issue? After all, FoI requests are everyday tools of modern journalism that get turned down all the time. FoI battles are not news in themselves, however protracted they become, so why have we bothered reporting this one?

There are two clear reasons. The first is the nature of the information that the DfE is attempting to keep secret. Martin George’s work has shown that these documents contain information on issues that will affect schools for years to come. They include details of potential new governance arrangements for academy trusts, proposals to bring schools into trusts, credentials of key people running trusts and information about the financial health of schools.

These are important matters that the public who fund these schools and the communities that use them have a right to know about. But at the moment the standard practice in the DfE is to keep them secret.

The second reason that makes the reporting of this issue essential is the light that it sheds on wider aspects of how education is run in England today. The department’s response is highly illuminating about where its priorities lie when it comes to operating our increasingly centralised state school system. On the face of it, officials’ explanation about the sheer cost and time involved in making the large redactions that would allow the publication of HTB minutes might seem reasonable.

After all, the DfE explains, “the exempt information cannot be easily isolated, because it is scattered throughout the requested material”. So why should large amounts of valuable civil service time be spent trawling through these documents to work out exactly what sections should be withheld?

Leave aside, for a minute, the fact that when the DfE has taken the time to go through this process, an appeal to the information commissioner has resulted in a decision that at least some of the redactions were actually unnecessary.   

There is a bigger point a stake. The only reason that “exempt” information is scattered throughout the board papers is that the DfE has allowed them to be compiled in that way. It did not have to do so.

It doesn’t have to be this way

In local authorities, the papers for the committees that decide on and scrutinise the running of maintained schools are usually organised so that any confidential information that needs to be withheld from the public is put together in a single closed section of an agenda. This allows the rest of the papers to be published as a matter of course, without the need for special FoI requests.

It also allows the press and public to attend the meetings where these matters are discussed so that the people who make the decisions can be held to account - a once everyday notion now at increasing risk of being consigned to history.

The DfE approach to running academies operates at the other end of the spectrum. If one was being charitable one might imagine that officials simply forgot to consider the need for transparency and public accountability when deciding how HTB papers were organised. Or maybe they just decided there was no need to give the issue any thought because these papers were not supposed to be seen by the public anyway.

Either way, it is easy to see how such a culture may have developed. Both the academies and free-school programmes have, from their inception, been deeply controversial. The ministers, and their advisers, who came up with them had to adopt something of a siege mentality to get them through their early stages - in the face of fierce opposition - without them being watered down or abandoned altogether.

So it is perhaps unsurprising that, from the beginning, openness has come fairly low down on the list of their priorities. It is more than 12 years since I had to resort to the FoI Act to obtain the first government-commissioned official report into its academies policy. It contained doubts over whether academies would achieve their key objective of introducing more innovative teaching, and warned that they could lead to a two-tier system based on social class and thwart the government’s policy of school collaboration.

Ministers decided not to publish the report and pressed ahead with a huge expansion of the academies programme anyway, only belatedly having to release the document to Tes months later.

Whether it is acceptable to ignore the needs of public accountability and openness like this to get radical policies up and running is a moot point. But you can at least understand the reasoning. Today there is no such excuse for the same thinking to surround the academies and free-schools programme.

Need to improve transparency

This is no longer about a guerilla policy designed to disrupt a complacent mainstream. Academies are the mainstream, and decisions about them should be open to as much public scrutiny as possible. Now Justine Greening’s comments suggest she may be sympathetic to that point of view.

Her national schools commissioner, Sir David Carter, has also made some encouraging noises about the need to improve transparency. Earlier this month we revealed how he had told Tes that HTBs could follow the model of local councils, which are legally obliged to publish as much information as possible in committee reports.

But Sir David tempered any optimism those words may have encouraged as the conversation continued. He said his biggest concern was about transparency for the academy trusts that he described as “the direct recipients of RSC decision-making”.

Pressed on the need for transparency for communities and parents about decisions affecting their schools, he appeared to regard this as a less important matter for his commissioners and their boards. Instead, Sir David put the onus on schools and academy trusts themselves.

“If the decision is about taking account of wider community opinion before the RSC makes an informed decision about what that school needs to have in terms of its support, I think there’s a role there for the school and the trust to have that conversation with parents,” he said.

All of which only adds to the impression that when it comes to the need for a publicly accountable state schools system, the DfE just doesn’t get it.

The steady stream of stories about dodgy deals and conflicts of interests surrounding academies acts as a growing testament to what happens when the inner workings of a system are allowed to be conducted behind closed doors.

Central government can’t carry out the necessary checks on our academised system on its own. It simply doesn’t have the capacity. As Tes has shown, it has been almost completely reliant on whistle-blowers to uncover cases of financial misconduct.

Ministers shouldn’t be trying to shut the public out. They need all the help they can get if the taxpayer and parents are not to be ripped off and let down. Public scrutiny should not be treated as an optional extra when it comes to running state schools. It is an absolute necessity.

William Stewart is news editor at Tes. He tweets at @wstewarttes

Want to keep up with the latest education news and opinion? Follow Tes on Twitter and like Tes on Facebook