It can be divided into two parts. One part is a survey of 478 Academies asking about how they are using their new freedoms. The other part is a theoretical argument as to how the power of Academy status can be “unleashed”.
Will the academy programme improve UK
Autonomy
It is important for this report to establish that giving school leaders autonomy will have a positive influence on educational outcomes. It suggests that there is a "body of evidence that clearly demonstrates" (p22) this and they cite:
- The OECD 2009 PISA Study which they quote as saying "Many of the world's best-performing education systems have moved from bureaucratic ‘command and control’ environments towards school systems in which the people at the frontline have much more control of the way resources are used, people are deployed, the work is organised and the way in which the work gets done. They provide considerable discretion to school heads and school faculties in determining content and the curriculum, a factor which the report shows to be closely related to school performance when combined with effective accountability systems." (p22)
- Woessmann (2007) whose comparison of international evidence found that "“students perform better … in schools that have freedom to make autonomous process and personnel decisions, where teachers have both freedom and incentives to select appropriate teaching methods, where parents take interest in teaching matters, and where school autonomy is combined with external exams that provide an information basis allowing for well-informed choices and holding schools accountable for their autonomous decisions.” (p22)
- Hanushek and Woessmann (2010): “Across countries, students tend to perform better in schools that have autonomy in personnel and day-to-day decisions, in particular when there is accountability.” (p22)
- "Angrist et al. (2011) showed that in
- "Machin and Vernoit (2011) showed that the autonomy of the first generation of English academies drove improvements in their performance in comparison to similar, less autonomous schools" (p23)
Collaboration
"School-to-school collaboration is a vitally important mechanism for improving the quality of teaching. ... The highest quality continuous professional development (CPD) is essentially collaborative, involving lesson observation, mentoring and sharing of best practice. CPD of this nature is at its most effective across schools, .... . The most effective collaboration goes further than simply sharing best practice and involves richer joint development of practice." (p7)
Accountability
It is commonly presumed that accountability must be externally imposed; eg by Ofsted and Performance Tables. However this report argues that a network of schools collaborating in a system of 'peer-accountability' "has huge benefits over the traditional centralised model." (p7) because:
- Schools take ownership of their own performance rather than leaving problems to be sorted by someone else;
- Peer schools will know one another much more deeply than Ofsted can;
- Peer schools can respond much more quickly when things go wrong.
Competition
“In a review of international evidence, Woessmann (2007) shows that ‘students perform better in countries with more competition from privately managed schools [and] in countries where public funding ensures that all families can make choices’. Böhlmark and Lindahl (2007) show that in Sweden, districts with higher proportions of pupils at free schools have better average achievement across the whole district. Bradley and Taylor (2007) show that English schools in urban areas improve their exam results in response to improvements in neighbouring schools’ exam results. Machin and Vernoit (2011) show that the competition effect arising from the (relatively) high performance of the first generation of academies in England also served to raise performance in neighbouring schools.”
Tensions
The problem is that these four factors often seem to be pulling in contrary directions. It is difficult to understand how autonomous, competing schools will develop collaborative systems of peer-accountability. The authors have to show how accountability and autonomy can work together and how competition can facilitate collaboration.
Accountability and Autonomy
There is a substantial body of evidence from Management Studies that performance is enhanced if decisions are made nearer to the shop floor. However, these do have to be the right decisions (this is the argument for management itself). So the level of decision making will always be a compromise between keeping it local and ensuring that the people making the decisions have sufficient experience or understanding.
This report rejects the traditional accountability methods of both governing bodies and central government. "Governors can lack the professional or relevant knowledge" (p47) to hold headteachers to account; they are criticized when they do attempt to impose restrictions on heads. Ofsted, on the other hand, is too slow and too remote. The report’s ideal solution seems to be ‘self-accountable’ networks of schools. Traditionally one is held accountable to pupils and parents, local communities, and to funding providers. Self accountability seems at first sight to be an oxymoron. They don’t explain how this would work and they offer no safeguards if these networks were to behave irresponsibly.
Competition and collaboration
This report sees collaboration at the very essence of driving system-wide school improvement. “The most effective way of improving the quality of teaching is for schools to engage their teachers in high-quality continuous professional development (CPD) that is essentially collaborative, involving lesson observation, mentoring and sharing of best practice. CPD of this nature can be undertaken within a school but it is at its most effective across schools. To get the best possible critique of teaching performance and to be exposed to a wide range of best practice, teachers need to look outside the walls of their particular school – however good a teacher or school is, it can still be difficult to avoid lapsing into “their way” of doing things." (p42)
This report claims that "competition can drive collaboration very effectively: if every school needs to improve then every school has an incentive to collaborate. Competition between schools is not a zero-sum game, since the whole system can get better; one school improving does not mean that another must get worse. Collaboration can also take place beyond the local area if there are specific issues inhibiting collaboration between local schools. Competition and collaboration are not, then, mutually exclusive, but rather can be mutually reinforcing. Even the best schools have an incentive to support other schools, since the evidence demonstrates that collaboration improves the performance of every school, even the high-performing school doing the supporting." (p8)
However, in one essential aspect competition between schools is a zero-sum game. There are a limited number of customers. If school A admits more pupils then school B will have fewer. The report explicitly calls for removal of barriers to competition by allowing "existing schools to expand and, where possible ... new schools to open." (p8)
It seems unlikely that the trust needed to support collaboration will exist if some schools are actively seeking to expand at the expense of others.
But the report suggests that the “traditional view” that “collaboration for school improvement needs to be facilitated by a ‘middle tier’ or ‘mediating layer’” such as a local authority is wrong because “it reinforces a hierarchy and the idea that school improvement is something that is ‘done’ to schools. This is the wrong approach, since school improvement work will be most effective if schools ‘own’ it themselves.” Again a network of schools is seen as the best outcome.
In summary, the report calls for the removal of restrictions to create autonomous, competing schools who will spontaneously come together in ‘self-accountable’ collaborating networks. It doesn’t seem to happen like that for supermarkets.
The survey
The second part of the report is a survey into the decisions that Academies have made or plan to make. The theoretical standpoint of the report authors does come through in the questions. For example, the survey asked about lengthening but not shortening the school day; they asked about increases but not decreases in admissions.
Most decisions made so far have been very conservative. The report authors clearly think that headteachers have not gone nearly far enough. For example:
· Most Academies have decided not to change the school year.
· 76% of Academies have decided against lengthening the school day mostly because of "concerns about union activism" (p27)
· Academies can change the curriculum and are split almost evenly between those who won't, those who will and those who have already. But most point out that "Ofsted or other DfE policies, particularly the EBacc performance measure, constrain freedom to innovate in curriculum." (p28)
· 64.9% of Academies have no plans to alter the terms and conditions of staff. Many "are concerned at the prospect of union hostility if they did." (p29) The most likely changes are to the terms and conditions of support staff.
· Inevitably the relationship between Academies and their Local Authority will change. 68.2% of Academies believe that this relationship is more or less the same; 17.1% believe it has improved or greatly improved; 14.7% believe it has worsened or greatly worsened. Very few (5.6%) believe their relationships with other local schools has got worse but perhaps they should ask the other schools!
· A quarter of Academies had experienced or anticipated an increase in admissions and nearly one third of Academies have changed or plan to change their admissions policies; such changes include giving preference to feeder schools, expanding catchment areas and selecting 10% of pupils on aptitude.
· Over a third of Academies are expanding or planning to expand sixth form provision. Factors constraining this expansion are the lack of buildings or site to accommodate expansion and the downwards direction of funding for school sixth forms.
· The money obviously helps. 76.3% said their financial situation had improved or greatly improved; 4.2% said it had worsened or greatly worsened although some Academies believe that the extra cash has not lived up to their expectations. This is being spent "to absorb cuts elsewhere in their budgets which would otherwise have led to staff redundancies" (p35) and to address the issue that "local authorities had allowed school capital to fall into disrepair" (p35). "The greatest single concern raised by academies was the costs that they are being expected to meet through the Local Government Pension Scheme [which deals with pension arrangements for support staff] which are considerably higher than those being faced by comparable maintained schools." (p35)
· There are significant frustrations with the legal complexities of becoming an Academy. "The most pernicious legal requirements for many academies are their status as being subject to Freedom of Information requests, the prescription associated with TUPE, the powers of teaching unions supported and financed by local authorities, and the need to continue submitting to their local authorities on a wide range of issues including admissions." In addition "the uncertainty surrounding the Local Government Pension Scheme is the greatest single source of concern for academy leaders."
In summary, this report welcomes the Academy reforms but thinks they should go much further. It attacks local authorities, governing bodies and unions. It would like a systematic removal of restrictions because these inhibit innovation. It does not seem to envisage the need for any safeguards.
[1] “Plan A+ Unleashing the Potential of Academies" by Dale Bassett, Gareth Lyon , Will Tanner and Bill Watkin; March 2012. Published by The Schools Network and Reform.
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