In May we published a short analysis of what the next steps in implementing the white paper ‘Educational Excellence Everywhere’ might mean in reality. [1] The Government had recently rowed back from forcing all schools (including outstanding schools) to be open as academies – or in the process of becoming one – by 2020, and had instead planned to seek powers to intervene in local authorities that it considered to be non-viable or underperforming. This had already been proposed in the white paper and, as we argued at the time, could have been far more significant in terms of the number of schools reached. With some fairly crude assumptions we estimated that it was possible to reach the majority of the remaining 15,000 local authority maintained schools in this way.
Government priorities in education have moved on somewhat since then. The publication of the consultation ‘Schools that Work for Everyone’ at the start of September put the issue of academic selection and grammar schools front and centre of the political debate with a softening of messages around full academisation. Last week, in a written statement introducing the Technical and Further Education Bill, the Secretary of State confirmed that ministers would not be seeking the new powers to force academisation at local authority level – at least not in this session of parliament. Instead the focus would be “on building capacity in the system and encouraging schools to convert voluntarily” whilst still retaining the ambition that all schools should achieve academy status. No new legislation is required for this. [2]
The focus on quality rather than rapid expansion is welcome. Our own research demonstrates the variable performance between multi-academy trusts in both primary and secondary academies with the difference between the highest and lowest performing being equivalent to about five grades at GCSE. [3] Our work with the LSE has also shown that academy conversion does not appear to have had an impact on those secondary schools previously rated as good or satisfactory. [4] The National Schools Commissioner’s ‘health checks’ for expanding MATs, being rolled out in the new year, may go some way to preventing further MAT failure [5] but it is still the case that there are nearly 80,000 pupils in academies rated as inadequate. [6]
Whilst the Government has backed away from introducing new legislation for now, it is likely that academisation will continue at pace. In political terms the Education and Adoption Act feels a very long time ago but it is not yet eight months since it received Royal Assent and one of its significant reforms, the power to intervene in ‘coasting schools’, will not be felt until the publication of the school performance tables in December (for primary schools) and January (for secondary schools).
Draft regulations setting out the proposed definition in full were also published last week and our analysis of the provisional secondary school performance tables data identified 374 secondary schools that would meet the criteria. [7] Many of these schools are already academies (and in fact sponsored academies will not appear in official counts until they have three years of results as an academy) but local authority schools that meet the definition come the publication of performance tables will face intervention and potentially forced academisation.
There is then the question of what happens in local authorities in which large numbers of schools are already academies. Whilst there will not, for now, be a legal definition of what constitutes a non-viable local authority it is possible that, faced with the loss of the £600m Education Services Grant and having a limited pool of schools from which to top-slice funding for school improvement services, some authorities will in fact view themselves that way and encourage schools to convert.
It is difficult to identify at what point this would happen and is likely to relate to local circumstances and politics as much as pupil numbers (and as such funding). What we can see from the data is that pupils in academies and free schools are in the majority in around a third of local authorities – i.e. less than half of pupils in those authorities remain in local authority maintained schools. There are seven local authorities in which less than a quarter of pupils are in maintained schools (data for all local authorities is available to download.)
Figure 1: The 47 local authorities in which more than half of pupils attend academies or free schools [8]
In some of these areas it is likely that the authority will soon cease to have a role even without compulsion from Government. As the number of academies continues to grow, through voluntary conversion or intervention in failing schools, the number of local authorities finding themselves in this situation will grow too. If a significant number of local authorities cease to have any role in running schools, the Government may find it easier to win the argument that the rest should too. Much will depend on how schools and local authorities react to the latest announcements.
Download: Number of schools and number of pupils by local authority and school type, October 2016
[1] ‘Educational Excellence Everywhere – next steps’, J. Andrews, May 2016. http://epi.org.uk/analysis/analysis-education-excellence-everywhere-white-paper-next-steps/
[2] ‘Technical and Further Education: Written Statement’, J. Greening, October 2016.
http://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/written-questions-answers-statements/written-statement/Commons/2016-10-27/HCWS223/
[3] ‘School performance in multi-academy trusts and local authorities – 2015’, J. Andrews, July 2016
[4] ‘Academies Summit: 15 years on’, presentation from O. Silva, July 2016
[5] ‘Academy trust health checks will be rolled out in January schools commissioner reveals’, J. Dickens, October 2016
[6] ‘Ofsted dataview’, October 2016. https://public.tableau.com/views/Dataview/Viewregionalperformanceovertime
[7] ‘Provisional Performance Tables and implications for intervention’, J. Andrews & J. Hutchinson, October 2016
[8] Source: Education Policy Institute analysis of Edubase (October 2016) and School Census, January 2016. Includes studio schools and UTCs. Includes pupils at state-funded primary, secondary and special schools and alternative provision and PRUs.
