The academies bill is divisive and dangerous

By Rebecca Hickman

As I listened to Michael Gove’s flimsy defence of the academies bill on Monday, I realised that this was not the first time over the past few months that I had rather envied the Conservatives their ideology. Ideology has been on extended vacation for the centre-left. It’s a shame. A bit more raw ideology under New Labour and perhaps after thirteen years in power we would have at least been able to say that we had narrowed the gap between rich and poor.

The problem is of course that Conservative (and now apparently Liberal Democrat) ideology is anchored in market, not human, values. Kindness, co-operation, equality and democracy are subjugated to competition, individualism and acquisition, resulting in a civic poverty that gnaws away at the quality of our lives and the fabric of our communities.

Nowhere is this more obvious than the coalition’s flagship education legislation, the academies b ill, passing this week through the commons. Labour would not appear to be on firm ground for indignant opposition. For the architects of academies to oppose their expansion requires a delicate dance around a series of elephant traps. But as the intention and implications of the academies bill have come into focus so too have the principled and consistent grounds for Labour opposition.

New Labour’s academies policy was based on dubious theories of how to improve teaching and learning and had decidedly mixed results. That it would splinter local co-operation and diminish accountability were concerns from the start. But it was not driven by an unquestioning veneration of market mechanisms, so much as a (mistaken) belief that different structures and governance models could raise standards in our most disadvantaged schools.

The academies bill turns this principle on its head. The new idea is that all schools should become academies, funded directly by central government, ‘free’ from local authority control and able to determine, amongst other things, who they admit, the curriculum they offer and staff pay and conditions. The mantra is that parents should have maximum choice and so, in addition, where they are dissatisfied with what is on offer locally they can now simply go ahead and set up their own school – so-called ‘free schools’.

Extra resources that under the previous academies programme had been diverted to struggling schools will now go to fund an ideologically-driven policy experiment in deregulation and marketisation. The coalition say that their approach will raise standards and continue to help struggling schools. But the logic here is flawed, when only outstanding schools can be fast-tracked to academy status. If schools have flourished under existing structures why use the promise of additional resources and ‘freedoms’ to tempt them to put their hard-earned success at risk? Those resources would be better spent on targeted support for schools that most need it.

The USA and Sweden, where similar policies have been tried, give us a glimpse of the future under an academies landscape. Not only is there evidence of falling standards in both countries, recent studies have also pointed to greater racial and socio-economic segregation between schools, as well as greater differentiation in attainment between children from different backgrounds.

Just last month, Swedish education minister Bertil Ostberg, warned the UK against adopting his country’s free schools model, stating:

“We have actually seen a fall in the quality of Swedish schools since the free schools were introduced. The free schools are generally attended by children of better educated and wealthy families, making things even more difficult for children attending ordinary schools in poor areas.”

Earlier this year the University of California published a report entitled ‘Choice without Equity’, which found that charter schools “continue to stratify students by race, class, and possibly language, and are more racially isolated than traditional public schools in virtually every state and large metropolitan area in the country”. Meanwhile, Stanford University published the first national assessment of charter schools and found that “37% deliver learning results that are significantly worse than their students would have realised had they remained in traditional public schools” while nearly half were no different.

So the coalition moves on to arguments about localism and increasing choice and accountability for parents. But who is really empowered by the new arrangements? Sponsors in the form of businesses, faith groups and other private interest groups will negotiate contracts for running schools with a remote government department not with local communities or councillors accountable at the ballot box. Governing bodies will have a central role, but their statutory responsibilities extend primarily to Whitehall and their sponsor, not to parents or the wider community.

In fact, parents are not mentioned once in the academies bill and there is no requirement for schools to consult them before converting. Once a school becomes an academy it actually becomes less accountable to parents. While maintained schools are required to have at least three parent governors, academies must have only one. In fact, academies only have to have three governors in total; hardly a model of accountability to the local community when at the same time the role of the only democratically elected local body has been kicked away at the knees.

Meanwhile, the ability of local authorities to plan for and support fairness and excellence across the board will be gradually whittled away. Vital services provided centrally by education authorities for all local schools and particularly valued by those serving disadvantaged catchments, such as educational welfare, ethnic minority achievement and special educational needs will become unviable as budgets are dispersed.

With campaigns to protect local schools already springing up across the country, it is clear that parents know that the academies bill is a confidence trick. A MORI poll earlier this year found that 95% of the general public were opposed to external organisations running schools. Parents value the existing cooperation and democratic accountability that help all schools in their area to flourish. They know that a free-market in education that sets school against school, by definition means winners and losers, and that the losers may be their children.

Markets have a multiplier effect – that is why they work so well in business and are so ill-suited to the realm of public services. They do not redress the different resources and capabilities that people bring to the table, they amplify them. The superior social capital of the better-off mean that an educational market simply becomes a mechanism for them to bequeath their advantages to the next generation and create a kind of social closure. What is more, parents are forced to behave as consumers rather than citizens, pursuing relative advantage rather than the common good and in the process eroding social cohesion and co-operation.

This take on markets may be rooted in certain principles and, yes, ideals, but it is also firmly supported by the evidence. A report from the Danish Technological Institute which examined a range of international evidence on attainment found that: “More differentiated school systems are associated with higher variance in student performance. Less differentiated, more comprehensive schools systems are more efficient in adjusting for students’ socio-economic background and thus in providing equal learning opportunities for students.”

There is much to be said for giving schools and teachers more freedom and easing the demands of a stifling curriculum. But such reforms can be achieved without forcing schools to compete with each other. Worse, the perennial obsession with structures diverts energy and attention away from the more pressing questions that need to be addressed if we are to transform educational outcomes – how we create conditions in which the full spectrum of children’s talents can be released; how we rediscover education as journey as well as destination.

There is an Abraham Lincoln quote that some 150 years on seems rather apposite to Labour’s current predicament:

“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise – with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”

Thinking anew about how we reinvigorate public services in the name of those they serve, means disenthralling ourselves once and for all with market solutions that reproduce social (dis)advantage and undermine community; and ‘re-enthralling’ ourselves with notions of shared purpose, collective responsibility, democracy and equality, which benefit us all. To this end, we can only hope that governors, parents and communities unite to ensure that academies and free schools are rejected locally, and that this misconceived policy becomes no more than a foot-note in the history of our comprehensive education system.

This was also posted at Compass.