New schools whitepaper could cause chaotic reorganisation of schools

Responding to the Government’s schools whitepaper ‘Educational excellence everywhere’ Jonathan Clifton, Associate Director for Public Services at IPPR, said:

“There is a risk that this whitepaper could usher in a chaotic reorganisation of schools, which neither central government nor school leaders have the capacity to deal with.

“But there is lots of detail still to be agreed – and lots still to play for. If the government takes bold decisions around teacher retention, school admissions, place planning, allowing the best local authorities to set up their own academy chains, and improving the system of legal ‘contracts’ that academies sign – then this whitepaper could contain the seeds of a stronger school system.

“The change of tone from Michael Gove’s era as education secretary is striking. The government have clearly accepted that it needs to proactively boost capacity and support schools to flourish – rather than leaving it up to the market and hoping that ‘a thousand flowers will bloom’”.

Local authority capacity: The whitepaper acknowledges that the government needs to boost capacity in the school system and expand the number of high quality sponsors who are able to run academy schools. But with 16,000 primary schools needing to become academies in the next five years, the scale of the challenge will be immense. Over the last five years the government found it difficult to secure enough quality sponsors to take on just 5,000 academies. There is already a source of capacity in the system in the form of high performing local authorities. Local authorities like Hackney, Barnett and Haringey perform just as a well as the top academy chains like Ark and Harris. These authorities should be allowed to set up their own ‘arms length trusts’ to help support the move to a fully academised system. The whitepaper hints that this could be possible but stops short of actually recommending it, stating instead that: ‘we expect that some individuals working in local authority teams will set up new trusts or join existing ones’ (p83).
IPPR recommends that high performing local authorities should be allowed to set up their own arms-length academy trusts to ensure their expertise and capacity is not lost.

Admissions: There is no need for individual schools to be responsible for administering pupil admissions. This just adds to school workload and carries the risk of schools ‘gaming the system’ to try and attract pupils who will be easier to teach. There is evidence that some academies have manipulated school admissions in the past. The whitepaper suggests that it will partially address this problem by taking away the ability for schools to determine ‘in year admissions’. However this only tackles a very small part of the issue. IPPR recommends that all school admissions are administered by local authorities. This would be consistent with the whitepaper’s call for local authorities to champion the needs of pupils and parents. It would ensure that admissions are administered in a fair way and remove considerable bureaucracy from schools.

Place planning: Rising population numbers are putting a huge pressure on school places in some parts of the country – but academies are able to resist any efforts to make them expand. The whitepaper does nothing to address this problem and there is a danger that some parents will struggle to find a school place as a result.

Academy contracts: The whitepaper remains surprisingly vague about the legal framework for academies. It simply says that ‘we will engage with the…sector to ensure that the legal framework for academies is fit for purpose for the long term’. Academies currently sign ‘contracts’ with the Secretary of State, but this system has a number of flaws which will need to be addressed as the system expands. Does this mean the government are planning to scrap academy ‘contracts’ altogether? Or will it reform the contracts that schools have already signed? There could be a big battle ahead with the major academy trusts, who will resist any such move. But the prize for government could be very big if it is able to place more conditions on academies – for example by requiring them to assist local authorities with place planning, or ensuring they meet curriculum aims such as teaching sex and relationships education.
IPPR recommends reforming the system of academy contracts and setting our more of the rules that govern academies through legislation.

Sofie Jenkinson, s.jenkinson@ippr.org, 07981023031

Jonathan Clifton, IPPR’s Associate Director for Public Services, is available for media comment.

IPPR has published a number of reports on the future of the academies system including: