When MATs Can Offload Schools They No Longer Feel Are Worth The Effort, Arguments About ‘Autonomy’ Start To Ring False
Schools aren’t supermarket chains that can decide a few stores are unviable and just jettison surplus stock, says Fiona MIllar
- by Fiona Millar
Ever have the feeling you’ve had a very lucky escape? I did, when I read the story last month about the academy trust that wanted to hand back all of its schools.
Only 18 months ago, no doubt along with many other governors of the remaining maintained schools, I was reluctantly considering the possibility that our school might have to form or join a multi-academy trust. The then government’s plan to change the law would have made this unavoidable.
In the event we sat tight, waiting, and hoped for the tide to turn, which it duly did. Former Secretary of State Nicky Morgan was obliged to change course, largely due to disquiet amongst her own back benchers.
Then there was the referendum, a change of Prime Minister and Education Secretary, and the academy/free school fervour seems to have faded somewhat. We are now in a no man’s land where the majority of secondary schools are academies, the majority of primaries are not.
Schools are overseen by a random collection of trusts, local authorities, and regional commissioners. Neither fully academised, with a coherent system of regulation and oversight, or fully maintained, the ‘system’ is in stasis.
Meanwhile the bad news for the academy enthusiasts comes thick and fast. There may well be good academies, free schools and MATs – but the media isn’t really interested in them. Scandals and disasters, financial impropriety, bloated chief executive salaries, tussles between parents and schools over discipline and poor performance make much better copy.
And the saga of the Wakefield City Academy Trust, which wants to offload 21 schools – claiming it doesn’t have the capacity to continue running them – has struck a particular nerve. This is not altogether surprising, as most people realise that schools aren’t like supermarket chains that can decide a few stores are unviable and just jettison surplus stock.
Schools are living, breathing institutions made up of real children, teachers and families. It is hardly a great start to the school year for these communities to be summarily rejected in the first week of term and even harder to see how schools can nurture relationships and build respect in their local areas if the ‘trade’ in pupils is to continue in such a cavalier way?
The DfE would like to present this story as an isolated incident. If only that were true. At least four other academy chains have been wound up in this way, often writing off taxpayer losses in the process, not to mention the money invested in them in the first place.
As with so many academy related matters, the truth is often hard to uncover. In addition to the trusts that are wound up there are academies being ‘re-brokered’ all the time – 120 to be precise in 2016 – but the transfer costs remain hidden behind ‘commercial confidentiality’.
Any notion of real autonomy and freedom is laughable. Most academies in chains don’t exist as legal entities in their own right, they are subsidiaries of a master company which rakes off a proportion of their income and, as we know now, can dispose of them peremptorily. Needless to say they have no parallel right to jump ship if they are not happy. Decisions about their longer-term future rest with the ultimate overlord, the Secretary of State.
Academy schools and chains were designed to offer a more efficient and entrepreneurial response to failure, yet overall they perform no better than the local authorities they were supposed to replace. The obsession with expediting the process and notching up numbers of independent state schools at the Department for Education has taken precedence over sound educational judgement.
Barely a sentence was uttered about this shocking state of affairs in the recent general election, by any party, and for an obvious reason. We have created a monster, which no one really knows how to tame, or kill off.
Fiona Millar is a columnist for The Guardian and a co-founder of the Local Schools Network; for more information, visit fionamillar.com or follow @schooltruth.
