Tory Education Policies Are Not Working !
Blog 20 considers how the recent EPI report points to the failure of academisation and the NEU conference debate on OFSTED shows how abolition would improve accountability. Plus the NEU and Ukraine!
The EPI Report into School Groups Could be the Beginning of the End for Academies
James Whiting, SEA General Secretary, explains.
The Tories can find no justification for its academies programme in the recent EPI report into school groups. The data available stubbornly refuses to acknowledge that groups of schools in MATS perform better than those still under the aegis of local authorities.
This report shows there is no identifiable general optimal organisational structure for school groups. We cannot conclude that, based on performance alone, the MAT structure should be preferred to the local authority model, or vice versa.
The agenda the DFE have been pursuing over the last 14 years appears to be about taking schools as community assets out of the public realm and handing them to unaccountable trusts rather than trying to improve the quality of education.
The report does raise questions though around the performance of disadvantaged pupils.
these larger MATs admit greater rates of disadvantaged pupils and have higher attainment outcomes for low prior attaining and disadvantaged pupils.
It does appear that a relentless focus on rewards and sanctions, zero tolerance behaviour policies, heavily monitored teachers delivering off the shelf lessons, lead to better performance in today’s knowledge rich curriculum by disadvantaged pupils. The difference is small though and the report does not indicate how significant it is.
The local authority where I live, London Borough of Merton, has three large MATS secondary schools (all Harris Federation) three local authority secondary schools and three diocesan ones. All the Harris schools have 40% plus disadvantaged pupils (and one of these is on the edge of an affluent area) whilst the two high performing LA schools only have 20% plus. In spite of their outstanding OFSTEDs and high progress scores as a Chair of Governors of a primary school I get the sense that these are not chosen schools for more middle-class parents. Overall numbers going to them have declined. Unlike in the EPI report, though performing well, Harris is out performed by LA schools on progress and attainment for all pupils. The most recent to open Harris academy is top for progress and attainment of disadvantaged pupils but the two more established Harris Schools do worse by their disadvantaged pupils than most other schools. The EPI report is now only partially replicated in this borough
It would be interesting to research the perception of Harris schools in the community. Whilst in this authority they are managing to remain fully subscribed for the moment other Harris schools in other boroughs are reporting vacancies (info from vacancy lists sent to primary schools). Perhaps the reticence is to do with the notion of brand. Whilst Harris profess to allow their academies autonomy and make claims about personalised provision, the way they are branded, the uniforms and school bags give the opposite impression; one of drab deindividualised uniformity.
At what cost did the marginally better outcomes for disadvantaged pupils come pre-pandemic? The main cost appears to be in pupils voting with their feet not to attend the pressurised and standardised environment these MATS create or pupils are removed by the MATS altogether through exclusion. The EPI report states:-
Larger MATs (with 10 or more schools in a phase) have, on average, higher rates of persistent absence, suspension, and unexplained exits than smaller MATs and local authorities
How sustainable are higher performing large MATs like the Harris Federation? The EPI report points to higher teacher turn over,
At secondary, multi-academy trusts have higher turnover of classroom teachers than local authorities. Small secondary MATs (with fewer than five secondary schools) have, on average, lower rates of annual teacher turnover (15.9 per cent) compared to larger MATs (19.5 per cent).
Teacher burn out has long been a suspected attribute of large MATS. Warwick Mansell (see his website ‘Education Uncovered’) has researched the issue in the Harris Federation.
Teachers working for schools within England’s second-largest academy trust are at “breaking point” over workload, one of them warned as a collective letter from more than 1,000 staff members was presented at the (Harris) chain’s headquarters.
One of two teachers to speak on behalf of the signatories said that many colleagues were “often working 12-hour days” at school, and that “many have said [that] workload is unmanageable alongside family life”.
Teachers were living in “constant fear of support plans and additional work being piled on if all their students don’t make ‘average progress,’” this teacher warned.
As the EPI report points out, teacher turn over does not necessarily lead to poorer outcomes particularly with disadvantaged pupils. However, the report is based on pre-pandemic figures. The recruitment and retention crisis, as outlined in previous blog posts, was not as severe then, as it is now. There are signs locally that teacher ‘burn out’ is now having a more direct impact. First the two established Harris Schools in Merton whilst still performing well have slipped down the local league table even with disadvantaged pupils. In neighbouring Wandsworth, the seemingly miraculous performance of Harris Battersea before the pandemic when it regularly topped the league with well above average progress, has now slumped to average progress with a slight minus score for disadvantaged pupils.
Much of this post is surmise and it is a shame that the EPI report comparing groups of schools is using pre-pandemic data. Even that does not identify any justification for the massive upheaval caused by moving schools out of local democratic oversight to semi privatised academy trusts. The marginally better performance of disadvantaged pupils in these larger MATS is cancelled out by poor attendance and exclusion rates and this was before the pandemic. Now, the way MATS like Harris treat their staff, whilst its CEO owns half a million pounds, is coming back to bite them. Recruitment of teachers is becoming more and more difficult. Another report on the same lines in five years might well reveal the cost of the large MATs’ policies
in damage to vulnerable pupils. It might also reveal the unsustainability of the model, caused by teacher burn out, and settle the argument about academisation: it has not only failed to improve education in England but is a cause of its decline.
Abolish OFSTED? The case for peer review.
An SEA delegate at this year’s NEU conference, argues that abolition of OFSTED could lead to better accountability than OFSTED provides.
In a unanimous vote at its 2024 conference, the NEU has taken its policy on inspection further since the Beyond OFSTED enquiry and aligned it more closely with that of the SEA.
Part of the discussion was about what sort of accountability there should be of schools, and what makes for the most effective system.
One delegate said in the debate that we can’t go to parents saying ‘we don’t want schools to be accountable’. However much teachers or others don’t like the experience that they have of OFSTED - and that experience varies, she said - accountability of schools to parents and the local community is crucial. To be - or to appear to be – opposed to that accountability would be a non-starter.
I don’t actually disagree with that at all. There should be more accountability of some schools and MATs. But the question is whether or not the current arrangements actually provide that.
There is more than one model. There was an accountability system before OFSTED (formed 1992, the year I started teaching) and there will be one after.
The SEA ‘manifesto for education’ includes a number of measures proposed for the next Labour government including, for example, setting up “an independent peer review process for schools where staff from member schools review each other’s provision led by an experienced external reviewer”.
Closely paralleling that, the policy passed by the NEU conference is for OFSTED to be “replaced by a system which is based on self-evaluation, support and collaboration between schools, and overseen locally” and which “promotes cooperation rather than competition between schools”.
Lord Jim Knight’s Beyond OFSTED report gives this role instead to a revived of the ‘school improvement partner’. The role of inspectors (OFSTED) is to be pushed into the background to ‘focus on the governance of, and capacity for, school improvement… including the relationship between the school and the SIP’ and ‘not routinely inspect teaching practice and pupil outcomes.’ ASCL’s The Future of Inspection policy paper retains OFSTED in this role, but within a vastly changed set of arrangements including removal of all graded judgements.
So which of these – if any – provide that accountability to parents and local communities that was raised at conference? Certainly not the current arrangements, which provide really only quite scant information in a report, distorted by the focus on a one word headline judgement.
There is also no means by which parents – or pupils - can enquire further.
Better accountability to parents and local communities can be achieved by ensuring that elected local councils have a role in the oversight of all schools – something that the current MAT system prevents for two fifths of primary schools and four fifths of secondaries. It would also be improved by ensuring that there are elected parent governors at every school - something that is not currently a requirement of academies. For that to work, those governing bodies would need delegated powers, many of which do not in MATs. (The SEA Manifesto calls for elected student members too, and for representative LA parent and carer forums with a meaningful voice).
These measures would provide more ongoing democratic accountability than a two day visit every four years over which communities have no oversight.
Peer reviewers can feed back directly to staff teams, something I have seen working many times. In an OFSTED inspection, the evidence base from the inspection is completely wasted once the inspection is complete. Only the headteacher/SLT hears the full feedback - governors hear less, staff even less than that, and the final report gives even less - the whole focus being on one headline judgement. If a school wants access to the actual evidence which may well be useful to their improvement journey, they have to resort to a freedom of information request.
Imagine that - those who have been involved in the review coming back and working with the school, not just walking away. This happened for a short after the RI judgement was launched in 20212-13: HMIs had ‘RI-time’ allocated to work with schools. This included sessions with governors, school leaders and subject leads to help schools focus on next steps. HMIs loved it, but the mantra that OFSTED inspections were only about evaluation ensured it was discontinued. In a system of locally-overseen peer-review, the experience gained by the ‘reviewers’ would be recycled back into their schools to help their own innovation, improvement, and readiness to face new circumstances.
In the early days of OFSTED there was great stress on the idea of school self-evaluation. In successive frameworks this has been whittled down, and whilst schools are still required to provide “a summary of any school self-evaluation or equivalent” by 8am, it has no actual role in the inspection, largely replaced by the pre-inspection phone call. Returning a focus to collaborative whole-school self-evaluation would make reviews have more impact and would fit well with a mutually beneficial peer-review model.
Current inspection of safeguarding is superficial, as the failure to spot how girls are often treated in schools revealed by the ‘Everyone’s Invited’ website, showed. Collaborative peer-review informed by the local safeguarding context would be more rigorous. OFSTED procedures do not allow for discussion and do not help a school team crack the real issues. I visited a school on behalf of the LA, and after talking with children, I fed back on those conversations to the whole staff, enabling discussion and questions.
OFSTED now have a much more intrusive role than the pre-OFSTED HMIs and local authorities had. Features OFSTED say they want to see, drive leadership agendas in schools. The recent focus on sequencing the curriculum and retaining facts in long term memory was the cause of a massive workload in schools. OFSTED are not inspecting schools and evaluating what they see – but instead are laying down what they expect to observe and then checking it is taking place. OFSTED subject training materials, leaked 18 months ago, clearly evidenced this approach. This goes well beyond the remit of an inspectorate. OFSTED has become an unaccountable ‘national steering committee’ of the education system. That is why ASCL’s The Future of Inspection calls for an end to these diktats. It demands the national curriculum should be the only document ‘which sets out the government’s curriculum requirements or expectations. This is backed up by another demand for OFSTED to publish “inspector training and associated training materials”.
Unaccountable OFSTED now functions to push an ideological view of education that distracts from the real issues. No evidence supports its assertion that its activities improve schools.
Nick Wigmore, NEU district secretary for Rochdale, who wrote the original OFSTED motion agreed at NEU conference , was quoted in the Independent the next day addressing that point: ‘OFSTED turns up every four to five years to provide one-word judgements and cause distress. It’s a system that doesn’t work. Hours and hours are spent playing to this accountability game which is meaningless to teaching and learning but teachers feel like they have to do it. It’s really difficult to find evidence to suggest that OFSTED inspections do anything to improve teaching or education incomes - but there is lots of evidence pointing to the fact that OFSTED have a negative impact on the workforce.’
I don’t know anyone who thinks there should be no external scrutiny of schools. A peer review process led by an independent reviewer with a degree of local oversight, enabling schools to work together around an agreed framework, will make a more effective and transparent accountability system than OFSTED ever could. If OFSTED is abolished, the NEU, schools and communities should be proud to say ‘we can do better’.
The NEU and Ukraine
Dave Barter, SEA NEC and delegate to NEU conference, regrets the failure of the union to develop solidarity policy at national level on Ukraine
The National Education Union gives a high profile to international solidarity work. There are different views in the union about aspects of that work but its high profile is something many NEU members are proud of, and is for many an important part of the union’s identity. The NEU organises a network of local ‘international solidarity officers’, holds an annual international solidarity conference, sends delegations abroad, and provides considerable financial support for the Steve Sinnott Foundation, named after a former general secretary of one of the NEU’s two predecessor unions, the NUT.
Undermining that reputation, NEU Conference has for a third time ended without a policy about the Russian invasion and war against the people of Ukraine.
Since the invasion NEU local districts have made direct links with schools in Ukraine, raised thousands of pounds for generators and other equipment, and hosted children and students having respite in the UK. They have organised for Ukrainian trades unions to address district meetings remotely, and in person at Conference fringe meetings.
NEU activists have publicised the plight of children and trades unionists in the occupied territories, circulated information about schools forced underground in cities like Kharkiv, and responded to the call from education trades unions for solidarity and for vigilance against the risk of western governments abandoning Ukraine or pushing for surrender - a risk that would grow hugely in the event of a Trump victory in the USA.
But there is still no policy at national level.
After more than two years of schools being destroyed, power and water infrastructure repeatedly damaged, trades unionists being murdered in the occupied areas and children being abducted into Russia, the NEU conference has not even called for withdrawal of Russian troops.
This weakness was expressed at the last TUC congress, when the NEU delegation actually abstained on solidarity, at odds with the vast majority of UK trades unions, all education unions in Europe, and the education trades unions organisation ‘Education International’
The 2024 NEU conference was an important opportunity to set that right, and to bring conference policy into line with the work on the ground, multiplying the effect of that work many times over.
That prospect started well. A large number of NEU districts submitted motions on Ukraine - all being for solidarity. It was high in the NEU priorities ballot, putting it second in the international section after the situation in Gaza. The NEU’s official international solidarity fringe meeting heard from Olga Chabaniuk (Vice President, Trade Union of Education and Science Workers of Ukraine) about the war and occupation. Julien Farges, (Head of International Department, SNES-FSU, France) and Maike Finnern (President, German Education Union) gave their solidarity in their speeches at the same meeting.
A conference fringe meeting held by the ‘NEU Ukraine Solidarity Network’ attracted over 150 conference delegates hearing again from Olga as well as Kateryna Maliuta, international officer from the same union, John Molony of the PCS, and John McDonnell MP speaking on behalf of the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign. Two young Ukrainian refugees, Iryna Rura and Daniil Zavalniuk, both spoke powerfully about their experiences. Iryna spoke about living for a year under Russian occupation in Kherson. The meeting was chaired by Labour peer Christine Blower, a former general secretary of the NUT and a member of the SEA.
It was clear that the support among delegates for passing policy was easily sufficient for the solidarity motion to pass, in contrast to the two previous years. Support for Ukraine had been expressed also at other fringe meetings and by Palestinian representatives present. A fringe meeting held by ‘Stop the War’ was noticeably smaller than the Ukraine Solidarity fringe, even though its focus was Gaza, and around a third of the meeting expressed their opposition to StW’s call for the big western powers to use their might to pressure Ukraine into surrender by withholding arms.
But it was still not to be. Although no motion had been submitted opposing Ukrainian solidarity, there was a ‘delete all and insert’ amendment which - unusually for ‘delete all and insert’ – was placed as amendment one by the conference arrangements committee, whose chair later seconded the very amendment. Under NEU conference rules, delegates had to debate this amendment as soon as the main motion had been proposed and seconded. Shortage of conference time (as a result of some time-wasting earlier in the agenda) meant that no vote was taken on the solidarity motion. Unusually for a labour movement conference, the NEU doesn’t just curtail debate when time runs out, but drops the votes too, making itself highly vulnerable to time-wasting tactics from minorities who know they will lose a vote.
The Ukraine debate ended with no vote, with the final speaker denouncing the situation and what she termed a ‘wrecking’ amendment as ‘unworthy of this union’.
There is undoubtedly a genuine difference of view in the NEU about Russia’s war on Ukraine. There is a discomfort for a minority of activists in appearing, in Britain, to take the same stance as our own government on opposition to Putin’s war. There is sufficient pro-Putin misinformation circulating on social media (and through political groups that see the world in geo-political rather than class terms) to reinforce that discomfort. What is undoubtedly unworthy - and an attack on the NEU’s commitment to international solidarity work - is that such discomfort has been used to oppose not only Ukraine’s right of self-determination and to self-defence, but even the basic idea of NEU districts making links with education trades unions in Ukraine, an absolute core of trades union solidarity. It is to the NEU’s credit that Olga Chabaniuk was invited to address the union’s official international fringe, but the policy to extend this in districts – to ‘support districts making direct links with trades unionists in Ukraine, including Ukraine trades union speakers for local meetings’ was opposed by that first amendment.
Direct links and solidarity would undoubtedly have been supported by conference had a vote been taken.
The NEU Ukraine Solidarity Network is now working to pull together the growing number of NEU districts that are implementing this policy on the ground. We hope that from this conference every district will hear from Ukrainian trades unionists and join the efforts of practical solidarity. It is to be hoped that more and more of those who focus on an appearance of ‘being on the same side as the UK government’ will be able to take a wider, internationalist, view by listening to what Ukrainian trades unionists themselves are saying.
This work on the ground can help to ensure that the NEU’s pride in its reputation as an internationalist union can maintained, and practical solidarity can be made with education trades unionists fighting for their survival. The network can be contacted at neuukrainesolidarity@gmail.org
SEA member Dave Barter is International Solidarity Officer of Rochdale NEU, and a represents the North West on the NEU’s International Solidarity National Organising Forum. He writes here in a personal capacity..
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Speech from the final speaker in the Ukraine debate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQpykEAuBUw