GOVERNANCE & LEADERSHIP
in relation to school accountability. The local authority is expected to champion the interests of young people by commissioning suffi cient school places to meet local need and by taking responsibility for standards across the area. But both legally and technically, academies are outside the control of local elected members.
Councillors face the dilemma that they are responsible for the welfare of every child in their community, but may be unable to give direction to enough education providers to ensure that every child’s needs are met.
For example, an academy, having the right to set its own admissions and behaviour policies, may exclude a child for misbehaviour and leave the local authority to fi nd a school place for that child. But if most of the schools in that local authority are academies, the options may be limited.
Against the background of this new model for school governance in England, weaknesses are emerging in a system in which every academy is directly accountable for its performance to the secretary of state for education. Without the intermediary role of local authorities, it is diffi cult to strengthen accountability at local level.
Academy chains can be challenged – and in the recent example of the E-Act chain, can lose some of their academies to other chains as a result – but few academy chains are local in scope and many academies are not in a chain.
Most local authorities have had to dismantle their ‘school improvement service’, but still there are attempts to hold local councils accountable for school underperformance and for having a single vision for their school provision. For example, a recently published Ofsted letter to a director of children’s services includes the judgments that “schools do not have a clear understanding of the vision for school improvement across the local authority”, “there is not a cohesive approach to schools that are not yet good”, “senior offi cers have not responded quickly enough to a rapidly changing educational landscape” and “the local authority does not have the capacity to provide signifi cant support”. There is an evident mismatch between expectations and capacity.
Accountability: academy chains
There is, as yet, no coherent process for the performance management of academy chains. The government publishes performance data on individual schools and academies and sets them out according to their local authority area. But in September 2014, only fi ve academy chains are described in detail on the Department for Education website, under the title ‘Profi les conducted with established
academy chains and early evidence to inform new sponsors of previous examples of success’. Between January 2013 and August 2014, Ofsted published inspection reports or letters on 75 local authorities and no academy chains.
If there is a new ‘middle tier’ to replace local authorities, it is not yet a publicly accountable one.
Autonomy?
One of the claims made for the academy governance model is that it gives governors, schools and head teachers more autonomy. The phrase ‘freedom from local authority control’ is frequently used both informally and (Department for Education, 2010) offi cially. School leaders are supposed to experience a sense of liberation, responsibility and the ability to innovate.
In fact this freedom dates back to the 1988 Education Act. Since then, fi nancial control has been in the hands of governors and headteachers rather than local authorities. A school has been able to change its status – for example by becoming a specialist language college or a community school – either by gaining approval directly from a government agency or more recently by unilateral decision. It has been able to negotiate its own contracts for a full range of services.
Associating ‘autonomy’ with academy status is more a matter of perception than of reality. If there are constraints on headteachers’ ability to innovate, they are more likely to be imposed by the school accountability system – performance tables and Ofsted inspections – than by local bureaucracy.
Indeed, within the academy chain concept, there may be more prescription about operational matters than in any local education authority since the 1980s. An academy chain may dictate to the school leadership how its policies must be written, how the school budget should be allocated, what the staff structure should be, what priorities the curriculum should include, how the building should be confi gured, what colour scheme should be used, what uniform the pupils should wear, and even how some subjects should be taught. No local authority would encroach on the autonomy of governors and school leaders in these matters unless legal or statutory requirements were being breached.
The ‘Trojan Horse’ aff air
Recent events in Birmingham have exposed some of the contradictions within this educational picture. The ‘Trojan Horse’ letter set out a strategy to take over the governance of a number of schools in Birmingham and run them on Islamic principles.
It would be too simplistic to ascribe the controversy and confusion in this aff air to the fact that some of the schools involved are academies. The offi cial inquiries have identifi ed weaknesses in scrutiny dating back several years, some of which are clearly attributable to the local authority. But academies appear to be particularly vulnerable when scrutiny is insuffi ciently rigorous. The Education Commissioner for Birmingham, appointed by the secretary of state, reported: “The autonomy granted to those who run academies is generally a welcome development yet can make those institutions vulnerable to those without good intentions. Academies are accountable to the secretary of state but that accountability can prove inadequate in circumstances where the governors are pursuing an inappropriate agenda but where the educational and fi nancial performance of the academy indicate that everything is fi ne.”
The Commissioner recommended the Depart- ment for Education “should review the process by which schools are a) able to convert to acade- my status; and b) become multi-academy trusts, to ensure that appropriate checks are conducted on the group and key individuals and that there is an accurate assessment of the trust’s capabil- ity and capacity. It should also consider urgently how best to capture local concerns during the conversion process, and review the broker- age (and re-brokerage) system through which schools are matched with academy sponsors”.
This is, then, a changing and developing picture, yet to be made fully transparent. It is perhaps symptomatic of the turbulence in an English education system that is, as ever, subject to a range of political, economic, cultural and social pressures.
About the author
Stephen Rayner has been a school teacher, deputy head teacher and local authority adviser. He currently works
as an
independent adviser to schools, colleges and local authorities.
He
is chair of governors in an academy and is studying for a doctorate in education.
Former education secretary Michael Gove at the London Academy of Excellence in Feb 2014.
© Stefan Rousseau, PA Wire public sector executive Oct/Nov 14 | 33
Stephen Rayner
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