Against the Current

I’ve written and spoken about the city academy scheme so many times now that the full horror of what they represent sometimes passes me by. On street stalls and in meetings I churn through the pre-rehearsed explanations of what an ‘academy’ is and the reasons why - as a teacher - I’m opposed to them. Two recent events have made me think again about the scheme and Blair’s overall plan for education: the first being the publication of the government white paper on secondary education and the second a meeting of the newly formed ‘Anti Academies Alliance’. It’s become overwhelmingly clear to me that the inspiring anti-academy campaigns around the country deserve renewed and extended support from the NUT on a local level and that the ‘firefighting’ approach taken by our union ‘leaders’ is no longer sufficient.

‘Tony Blair and his government believe that the public sector is so atrophied that the only hope for regeneration comes from the private sector. Teachers and other educationalists are so stuck in their ways and seemingly incapable of effecting change that decision making has to be wrested from them and placed in the hands of new, dynamic, commercial forces. In essence we live in a time where those who attempt to govern have conceded defeat in the public sector and decided that only market forces [forces with real interests other than public service] can provide answers.’ This ‘tabloid’ version of events is only part of the story. Whilst some would like us to believe that civil society is incapable of and teachers unwilling to make changes, we know differently. We’re not opposed to change – in fact many of us would agree that major changes are necessary – we just oppose the changes at the heart of Blair’s proposals. The sort of changes we’re opposed to are deregulation and privatisation. The attacks on our pay and conditions, evidenced by the MA to TLR scheme and the meddling with our pensions is part of a preparatory process for the wholesale transformation of the education system. These are changes we can do without.

You see, Blair hasn’t conceded defeat in the public sector – he just objects to the idea of a public sector. He inhabits the same sort of mental space as the Tories who thought it ‘silly’ to have public transport and ‘immoral’ to set minimum wages in the 1980s. He dares to take a hammer to the public services in a way undreamt of by Thatcher and Major, he dares to take to their logical conclusion the neo-liberal policies practised by successive administrations for the last thirty years because he suspects he’ll get away with it. We have a responsibility to prove otherwise.

As evidence for the disastrous road we’re on and as a precursor to an outline of the new proposals, let’s revisit the record so far of the Academy scheme. There are currently twenty seven academies up and running with forty in the pipeline and a target of 200 in short order. Academies are ‘backed’ by a sponsor – generally some seemingly benign company or trust but all too frequently a fundamentalist businessman (no, there don’t seem to be many fundamentalist businesswomen). The sponsor is interested in a combination of indoctrination, self-promotion and getting a toe-hold in a soon-to-be deregulated education market. In the last school year the Academies have demonstrated their ‘tremendous’ success in a more than fourfold improvement on GCSE results as compared to the national average (8% increase in A*-C). So we have material proof of the validity of the scheme – unless, of course, you live in a world where you analyse results rather than throw figures about. 5 out of the 11 Academies open in 2004 failed to improve results at all and the 6 that managed it have substantially ‘recomposed’ their intake. The three academies with the longest history (opened in 2002) have mixed results. Two of them have significantly improved results and one is in special measures. Only in cases where the make-up of the school has been distorted towards middle-class children has an ‘improvement’ been measured.

The Academy scheme doesn’t just mean a name change and an adjusted curriculum. The governance of the school and working conditions are also different. The now famous PriceWaterhouseCooper report showed that staff in school had an overwhelmingly poor assessment of the appointed Governing Bodies. The majority saw them as inaccessible, unrepresentative and non-participatory. On the workforce front, Academies do not sign up to national conventions and agreements and do not recognise trade unions! The PWC report showed that 60% of staff in Academies thought that workload is heavier in the new institutions as compared to previous schools. So in addition to being an assault on the comprehensive system, Academies appear to be relatively unsuccessful when the extra investment and ‘dynamism of the market’ are accounted for. As for teachers, they have less say in how the school is run and are denied the representation of their union.

In the light of the new white paper, the Academy scheme is best seen as a combination of experiment and an integral part of a market driven diversification process. The existing Academies have shown that it’s at least possible to find a ‘sponsor’ and that schools can run ‘autonomously’. Academies give a glimpse at the reality of a new system and are potentially an important lever in encouraging schools to set up trusts and gain some level of independence.

So what’s in the new proposals? Schools will be encouraged to set up a Trust that will have a private sponsor that can have a majority on any governing body. The sponsor will have to act as a ‘charitable organisation’. At the heart of the new proposals remains the dominant theme of Academies – the private sector is a necessary agency to push through reforms and that the market can manage the public sector better than specialists from the public sector. The implications of the scheme are as follows: extended private control over schools, less role for LEAs and parents and a new layer in school hierarchy. The question is why should these proposals be any more popular than Grant Maintained status under the Tories? Why should schools bother to set up a trust and hive themselves off from LEA control? What’s in it for them? There’s no extra money, loads of paper work and all you’ll get is a new layer of people to meddle in schools. Why should a head and Governors go for it? Some schools will go for it just for an increased sense of status, others because they want to become a religious school – but I don’t think many will do it for these reasons alone. At the moment the incentives don’t seem very strong, unless you take at look at the impact of the new Academies.

I teach in Nottingham where we have an existing Academy and three more in the pipeline. To make way for the new Academies, three (or possibly four) community schools will be closed completely and another three transformed to Academy status. In Nottingham, we have a large number of students who travel out of the city to nearby county schools – schools with a certain status and reputation. Whilst city schools take all-comers from the various deprived inner city areas, county schools take students from Nottingham’s less deprived suburbs and middle-class students from the city. The three new Academies could potentially stem the exit of students from the city and force county schools to accept ‘less desirable clientele’ from our deprived areas. One of the major planks of the Trust is the ability to define specific catchment areas, thus ruling out undesirables from the city. Could this be an incentive? It only takes one school in an area to set up a Trust for others to consider the implications of being left out. In these circumstances, Academies can be seen as the market lever to induce the whole process – it’s no accident that these proposals have been engineered in combination.

If schools do carry out the steps in the new White Paper there are a number of other implications: Popular schools will be able to ‘expand’ and in doing so force out the competition and schools that change status – though merger, special measures etc… - will have to become Trust schools. To top it off, no new school can be a community school. So even if schools don’t choose to become Trusts they’ll be islands in a market ocean and risk being completely overwhelmed by the logic of the market. Blair has a plan and it seems (from his perspective) to make sense.

How did we get here and what is to be done? The warning signs for the Blair education agenda have been present for some time in the initial enthusiasm for specialist status schools and then the introduction of Academies. The BSF proposals that have been knocking around for some months now clearly included a significant amount of PFI. Now the White Paper has been unveiled with a dramatic agenda for complete reorganisation of our school system. We should have seen it coming (many of us did), our union leadership should have seen it coming and done something about it. There have been criticisms of the scheme from our leaders in the press but no proposals for how it will be stopped – this is not good enough. The planned/talked-about anti-academies demonstration and conference has yet to emerge and insufficient materials are making it into schools. So far it’s been down to individual associations and groups of campaigners to resist the moves. Up and down the country imaginative and effective campaigns have sprung up to resist the move towards Academies – some have been successful in driving away crazy sponsors and in making ‘respectable’ businesses think twice about putting their toe in the water. The campaigns should be congratulated and supported not just by all NUT members but across the labour movement. The newly formed Anti-Academies Alliance is a national initiative of teachers, campaigners and other trade unionists to coordinate activity and launch some national initiatives. The Alliance is a vital part of our efforts to stop the White Paper because it incorporates existing activists and because – as I hope I’ve shown – the Academy scheme is integral to the implementation of the proposals in the paper. The campaign against Academies shouldn’t be limited to those areas and associations with Academies but should be supported by all who want to stop the new proposals. I encourage you all to seek affiliation, to support the campaign and to spread the message throughout our union that unless we stop these proposals, comprehensive education will be a thing of the past.

(Thanks to colleagues at the Anti-Academies Alliance steering meeting for many of the ideas and bits of information in this article)

# posted by TomU @ 8:08 PM