How a Labour government can make a difference in education
Blog 12 Sept 2023 The National Policy Forum policy document is out. The SEA challenges the front bench to build on it to improve the service for all learners.
Schools at the heart of their community
The above is a sub-heading in Labour’s National Policy Forum document. The SEA position is that without breaking up MATS and bringing academies back into the local democratic fold, this will be near impossible to achieve. John Bolt SEA Officer, explains what would have to be done to start the process with our academies, given the pledge not to ‘focus on top-down structures’. Will the MATS play ball though? This article is the first in a series.
That schools should be at the heart of their community is something everyone can happily sign on to. But agreeing what that means is more difficult. The Tory approach can too often seem like that of the 19th century missionary – the colonial masters coming in because they know what local people need better than the people themselves. In this case the colonial master is too often the predatory multi-academy trust.
What Labour should want is that schools reflect in everything that they do the hopes and aspirations of their communities. They need to be in continuing dialogue with local people, listening to them and not just telling them what they ought to want. Many schools are genuinely like this, and the experience of the pandemic coupled with the collapse of many other local services have brought many schools and local communities closer together – even if it is distressingly through a food bank or by trying to make up for the lack of mental health support.
But the structures within which schools operate don’t always support this kind of commitment. And structures drive behaviour. Genuinely inclusive schools competing with schools that are socially and economically selective are more likely to hit problems with Ofsted and with league tables.
Labour’s National Policy Forum’s final report says that “Labour believes that place is crucial and that all schools should be working together for the benefit of the local communities they serve. Under the Conservatives, too often schools are incentivised to compete against one another, including through admissions and exclusions policies that are not always in the best interests of all children.”
SEA has always maintained that this ambition is not compatible with the academy and free school system as it has evolved in the last 13 years. This is because:
· Many academy trusts have schools scattered across the country. This means that decisions about how schools are run are taken by a centralised office, tens or even hundreds of miles away.
· In too many trusts there is minimal involvement of parents, local communities and even of their own teachers. Complaints procedures are commonly almost impossible to access. We regularly read of the imposition of centrally determined curricula and procedures even down to the details of classroom layout and lesson planning. Most recently, for example, an academy trust decreed that:
“Teachers at Astrea secondary academy were told to remove all items from the front of their classrooms – and to have all year groups reading with a ruler”
School autonomy and indeed teachers’ professional autonomy seem no longer to be core values that drive the system
· Academy status is what enables schools to follow “admissions and exclusion policies that are not always in the best interests of all children” because they can’t be required to follow local authority policies and procedures. There are too many cases of schools using their independence to turn away (or off roll) children that they don’t want and who might put their league table position or Ofsted rating at risk. Evidence is clear that the more complicated these kinds of systems are, the more pupils are segregated by class and religion and the greater the segregation the worse the outcomes are for those children.
The Policy Forum says however that “rather than focus on imposing top-down structures, Labour will demand collaboration and cooperation in the best interests of our children.”
So the party’s view is that it will be possible, by some combination of persuasion and regulation, to get schools to behave nicely towards one another and towards their local communities whatever their form of governance. The history of the last 13 years suggests that this is an unrealistic position but, given that commitment, it will be essential to identify what exactly would need to be done to make collaboration and cooperation actually work. Hope alone will not hack it. Therefore:
1. All schools in MATs should have, as of right, a local stakeholder governing body rooted in the local community with real powers. MATs should be required to set up a Schools Forum (as is the case in local authorities) and should have to get schools’ agreement to MAT wide policies and centrally held budgets.
2. “Labour will require all schools to cooperate with their local authority on admissions, SEND inclusion and place planning” needs to mean that local authorities should have the same powers in these areas in relation to academies as they do in relation to maintained schools – including setting admission criteria and requiring the admission of vulnerable pupils There should be no need to involve regional directors or the ESFA. The background of falling rolls in much of the country will make the strategic planning of places all the more important.
3. At the same time there is a need to reduce the part played by competition in the system. Getting rid of single word Ofsted judgements is a start but needs to be followed by a full review of what test and exam data is published and how. But beyond that we need to address all the insidious ways in which some schools try and carve out a favoured position. This can come through devious admission criteria which try to signal that this is the school for ambitious parents. And we shouldn’t forget how things like uniform requirements can be used as a competitive and exclusionary tool.
4. The free school programme needs to be ended. Decisions about new schools should be taken on the basis of an evidence driven local school organisation plan. Not doing this has resulted in huge waste and the diversion of scarce resources from, for example, dealing with RAAC.
5. Academy complaints procedures need reform. Complaints need to be dealt with locally not by a central MAT office or a regional director miles away.
6. The commitments to requiring academies to employ qualified staff and to follow a revised National Curriculum are welcome. The concept of “academy standards” can be a useful way of ensuring academies adhere to a Labour government’s expectations but it shouldn’t involve trying to micro-manage everything from Westminster.
7. Restoring national pay and conditions for teachers and support staff would ensure academies pay staff fairly and stop paying inflated amounts to MATS CEOs.
8. The NPF recognises the crucial importance of place but too many of the most influential MATs don’t reflect this and have schools scattered across the country. Labour should give priority to enabling schools to work together in local clusters, something that is emerging in many parts of the country.
However, squaring the development of local clusters of schools with an academy system that makes schools accountable to some distant central authority is a real problem. The only real answers are that MATs should restructured around identifiable places and that local collaboration should be better defined and made a requirement for all kinds of school. Sadly, Labour appears to have ruled out bringing schools back under local democratic oversight which would be the obvious solution to these issues.
9. Current decision-making systems in relation to academies lack any transparency. Decisions are taken by advisory boards meeting in secret and by regional directors without any meaningful consultation with local communities and, not uncommonly, in defiance of local opinion. All decision making should follow established local authority standards for consultation and making decisions in open public fora.
10. There is no evidence to support the assumption that academisation automatically improves struggling schools. Removing that presumption would require legislation. It needs to be replaced by a local and collaborative approach to school improvement which provides a bespoke solution for schools in need of support.
Given that the leadership has made it clear that it does not intend to unpick the complex network of institutions that it will inherit, it is important to have a clear view of the kind of re-wiring that will be needed if the worthy objectives in the NPF document are to be anything like achieved. These ten proposals could be a starting point. Resistance from the MAT fraternity to these proposals might just push a Labour government into taking more radical action. Let’s hope this is the case.
Back to a comprehensive future!
This article from James Whiting and Ian Duckett, SEA Officers, was first published as in the Forum journal blog.
The movement for comprehensive education has been stuck in the doldrums since the unfinished attempt by the Wilson government of the 1960s to end academic selection at 11. Slowly but surely the right chipped away at comprehensive schools. Specialist schools, City Technology Colleges, Grant Maintained schools, partial selection, selection by aptitude… all played their part in undermining the idea that one school can provide quality education for all the young people in a local community regardless of so-called academic ability. The SEA does not believe that simply abolishing the 11+ in areas where it still operates will restore the comprehensive ideal. Changes since 2010 have accelerated the move away from quality local schools for all children and towards competition in a rigged education market.
First, let’s agree with Comprehensive Future (the non-party political group campaigning to end the 11+ exam and open the last existing grammars to all pupils) that selection at 11 is simply wrong. The SEA is committed to this position and always has been. Second, let us state quite clearly: selection at 11 is unnecessarily early. Why select at 11 when the KS3 curriculum is the same in both selective and non-selective schools? In many countries (such as France and Germany) selection plays a role at 14 when vocational/technical courses become available for many pupils, whilst others progress to the academic hothouses (like Lycees or Gymnasiums). To an extent, selection for vocational/academic courses at 14 was starting to happen under New Labour’s diploma within schools, but was cut short by Gove’s reforms. Furthermore, selection at 11 is based not on achievement in particular areas of the curriculum but on an IQ test which favours those from more privileged social groups. The intellectual basis on which the test is predicated has been criticised from a range of perspectives. It is unreliable, discredited, arbitrary and unfair. The SEA alone is demanding in its manifesto that selection at eleven is ended once and for all.
However, it is illogical to oppose selection at 11 but not consider how it operates, often more insidiously, at other points in the system. 163 out of 4188 secondary schools in England are grammars: 4%. While we accept that such schools often affect the school ecology in a wider area, just arguing for changing their character whilst not addressing selective practices in the system as a whole will always only be relevant now to a small minority of parents, pupils and teachers.
From the right’s perspective there is no urgent need to introduce more grammar schools. Gove, arguably the most ideologically driven education secretary ever, left the topic well alone because he knew it was a diversion from his project. Simply put, this was to introduce a knowledge-rich curriculum, and linear examinations which measure how far pupils have retained and understood that knowledge, and then use these exams to select pupils for the best sixth forms and then the best universities.
Now there is an increasingly selective market in sixth forms, with, ironically, many pupils who failed the 11+ welcomed back to grammar schools post-16 because of their subsequent GCSE success. (Thus undermining arguments for the effectiveness of the 11+ in identifying the ‘most able’). On the other side of the coin lie so called comprehensive schools such as Brampton Manor in Newham or Twyford in Ealing which set high entrance criteria for their sixth forms in order to maintain an ‘academic ethos’ and do not provide vocational courses. This results in students being creamed off from other local school sixth forms and, worse, those of the schools’ own pupils who do not make the grade being told to find FE places elsewhere. Surely pro-comprehensive campaigners should be arguing for comprehensive post-16 provision too?
A good start would be to join the growing movement across the sector calling for GCSE abolition. If successful, the practices outlined above would cease. The SEA manifesto argues for the abolition of GCSEs and for a single overarching qualification at 18 within which students should be able to pick vocational, technical and academic elements of equivalent value and switch institutions at 16.
The Tories have deliberately disrupted the idea of a quality local school for all children through the free schools and academies programme. This move has massively increased marketisation in the cities where there is an illusion of parental choice. Whilst centralised control over the curriculum, teaching and assessment has increased, the variety of schools competing to deliver the prescribed diet has expanded. This inevitably leads to hierarchies of schools, particularly in cities. Nearly a third of pupils did not get their first choice of school in both London and Birmingham this year. This shows the hierarchy very much in play, with some schools vastly oversubscribed at the expense of others. At the same time, the design of Multi-Academy Trusts means that schools within them are no longer accountable to local communities. They are run by trusts—such as United Learning, in charge of schools from Carlisle to Poole—that roll out the same curriculum in all their schools. This was not the intention of those original campaigners for comprehensive schools who sought to educate pupils from all classes of a community in the same schools. The SEA manifesto argues that all schools should return to local democratic oversight. We believe too much autonomy was given to heads under the 1988 Act and that local authority control in the past was opaque. No mechanisms existed for teachers, parents and community stakeholders to have a say in the running of local schools. For local comprehensive schools to make a comeback, democratic planning has to replace the rigged market the Tories have created.
The SEA manifesto also tackles the last hidden barrier to true comprehensive education: the segregating of disabled children and those with special needs. The manifesto calls on Labour to re-state its commitment to inclusion and to work towards the position where mainstream schools become the default providers of education for these children. Newham council, for example, has a strong record in this regard.
Selection throughout the system is deliberate. Right wing ideology insists on hierarchies in everything. The rigged market ensures a hierarchy of schools in an area. A hierarchy of knowledge prevails in schools where Gove decided which subjects are worth studying at GCSE (EBAC) and A level (facilitating subjects). The arts, social sciences, design technology and vocational subjects were either excluded or labelled second class. Within subjects, for example in English, a traditional white cultural perspective was imposed, and in History the struggles of the peoples who were subject to exploitation by our empire ignored. Pupils are sorted into hierarchies within schools through setting and streaming. They are then made to sit examinations in the so-called higher forms of knowledge. If they do poorly they are diverted to vocational education which continues to be viewed as second rate. Unfortunately, and unsurprisingly, vocational courses are not always a positive choice for pupils. Finally, the ‘best’ are selected for our elite universities.
If implemented, the SEA manifesto would drain selection from the system and reinvigorate the comprehensive ideal with quality democratically-run inclusive local schools emerging, for all children.
You can read the SEA Manifesto for Education here: https://socedassoc.files.wordpress.com/2023/05/a-manifesto-for-education.pdf