Reinventing the secondary modern?

By Jim Sweetman / @Jimbo9848

The coalition is moving fast on education with an Academies Bill and an Education Bill in the first session of the new parliament. It appears to have found a workable agenda based on sustaining two commitments: the Conservative entitlement for schools to become self-governing academies and the Liberal Democrat ‘pupil premium’ to support disadvantaged pupils. The belief in Westminster is that schools will flock to adopt this new status, thereby showing an instant impact on the system. And, of course, the pupil premium funding can keep class sizes low in this new sector. It has all come together very nicely.

So, what is the deal? Any school which has been rated outstanding by OFSTED in its last inspection (around 25% of schools) can automatically become an Academy, theoretically by September 2010. It will be funded directly, probably on a simple headcount by the Department for Education, and it is likely to have considerable power not only over its budget but also over what is taught in a new slimmer curriculum (a Liberal Democrat commitment) and the pay and conditions which are agreed for the teaching staff. Primary schools and special schools as well as secondary schools will be eligible and other schools with specialist status or with a history of favourable OFSTED comment will follow along behind.

There are some juicy carrots. The schools are being offered funding for a minimum of seven years and if they currently select their intakes in any way they can continue to do so. Also, the local authority will not be consulted about the change of status and if the schools currently have a financial surplus they can keep it rather than see it revert to the local authority. There is a commitment that they will be funded at a comparative level to maintained schools plus their additional share of what the local authority will be deemed to have spent on their behalf. In other words, they get more money.

In some ways, the proposals mirror the freedoms given to the grant-maintained schools by the Conservative government in the 1990s. These schools were allowed to opt out of local authority control and they were given additional funding in the form of generous set up grants and a fixed sum per pupil for several years, which was greater than they would have received under local authority administration. However, after a brief spat, they were – broadly speaking – required to follow national pay and conditions agreements for teachers and were required to teach the national curriculum. The more radical headteachers of the schools complained long and hard about these requirements but the outcome was that the typical grant-maintained school was just a neighbourhood comprehensive with preferential funding and status. Bizarrely, school transport, free school meals and the accommodation of pupils with special educational needs were always left to the local authority to organise and deliver.

Some schools did very well out of the deal. What is now the Thomas Telford School was allowed to keep the profits from its ICT division which developed a suite of software for schools and now sponsors three academies in a burgeoning empire. A school in Wiltshire managed to sell one of its twin sites to a developer for £2.9 million in the brief heyday where schools could keep windfalls like these and it built a new school with the profits.

When Labour came to power in 1997, the grant-maintained schools sector was reabsorbed into the new specialist schools sector, supported by a trust but basically taken back into local authority control. There was surprisingly little opposition. The local authorities were accommodating and the schools which had enjoyed their freedom at the start began to see some of the pitfalls. Long-term strategic planning and investment was difficult, school administration was costly, staff training and professional development was difficult to organise and the peripheral costs of independence were beginning to bite.

This is not going to be an exact repeat of what happened in the 1990s. The coalition is going beyond the GM offer and giving the new schools much greater freedom over curriculum and pay and conditions. Previously, the teacher unions have been able to assert the right to maintaining teacher pay and conditions agreements nationally and locally. However, given the background of savage cuts in public spending and a freeze on recruitment it will be much harder for these agreements to be maintained. If a new Academy says that all of its staff must reapply for their jobs and be re-graded and paid less and if the teaching and ancillary staffs then complain, the industrial dispute is simply within the school and it will be harder to support national action and opposition. Popular support will also be less at a time when unemployment is increasing and pay elsewhere is frozen. There is, incidentally, no suggestion that school staffs should have an influence over the decision to become an Academy.

The big losers will be the local authorities. In terms of education, they are effective because they operate on a large-scale. So, some Conservative local authorities, faced with the defection of their best schools, may be inclined to take the easy route of encouraging all of their primary and secondary schools to become self-governing academies. That will enable them to deliver the cost-cutting required by central government but it will have a savage impact on central staffing. Others will attempt to sell services to the new academies but, in most areas, this kind of approach is doomed to failure because private enterprise will be able to undercut them by paying less and cutting overheads.

Inevitably, there is going to be significant contraction everywhere, but the worst option will be to be left with the rump of underachieving schools in deprived areas. It is likely that their preferential funding through programmes like National Challenge which provided considerable additional funding for schools at risk of failing will come to an end. It is a simple fact that the schools which OFSTED deems as outstanding are not found in areas of social deprivation so it is those which will be left behind. They may not be called secondary moderns but in terms of where they are situated, their funding, their ability to recruit good teachers and the problems which they face they might as well be.