I was riffling through some news reports on education the other day and came across something that must have shocked you to your core. Your permanent secretary at the Department for Education, Jonathan Slater, was up before the Commons public accounts committee. I can well imagine you were keen to know what was said, and even keener to know if your own permanent secretary was on-side with what you Tories have been doing in education for the past eight years.
The Labour MP Gareth Snell asked your guy: “Is there any evidence that rescuing underperforming schools via forced academisation provides better value for money than a rescue package inside the local authority?”
This is a question many of us have been asking for years, particularly in the hundreds of schools where parents and teachers have opposed forced academisation, (though I see in the press that the government is now soft-pedalling on forcing schools). Parents, teachers, pupils, ex-pupils and indeed the whole country is entitled to know whether this flagship policy has done what it set out to do, and whether other methods could have been used at much less cost.
I might add here that turning schools into academies has involved much more than cost. At its core it involves changing the public ownership of schools into 125-year leasehold properties where the leaseholders (the academy trusts) can run the school site, manage the pay and conditions of its staff how they want, and conduct business on site if it can be shown to benefit the school. One consequence is that academies are employing untrained staff and at the other end of the scale, leadership teams can pay themselves eye-watering salaries.
Meanwhile, back at the committee, how did your man answer the question?
First he tried a bit of jousting: “It’s pretty difficult, isn’t it, looking at the counter-factual [of] what would have happened [with no conversion]?”
To translate: he has no way of proving that turning a school into an academy was or is a fail-safe way of improving it, nor whether a failing school could have been improved without conversion.
Let us remind ourselves of the huge upheaval, time, effort and cost of converting hundreds of schools, and your chief wallah can’t commit himself to say that it was worth it.
Snell then asked your man for “quantifiable, tangible evidence” that academisation provided better value for money for schools rated “inadequate” than did local authority support. Your official said, “I can’t prove that … nobody could.”
This, then, has been government policy by whim and dogma. No evidence, no proof, either before, during or after to back it up.
Now, I would have thought that your permanent secretary might have been a little deflated at this point, but no, back he came with: “international evidence” showed that turning schools from “good” to “great” involved de-centralising powers to those schools, and that the purpose of conversions was to help needy schools to “pair up” with schools that could help them.
This was a pathetic effort at clawing back some credit for a mind-blowingly expensive experiment, as if the only way to “decentralise” was to run the country’s schools from your office. Then, the Labour committee chair, Meg Hillier, picked up on your secretary’s last point: “There are other ways of pairing up – federations, families of schools, school improvement areas.”
I expect that the moment you read about this exchange you leapt into action, banning all future forced academisations, putting out a memo to all schools warning them that turning their school into an academy is no guarantee that it will improve, and that you deeply regret the draconian actions of your predecessor, Michael Gove, in forcing so many schools down this path.
Yours, Michael Rosen