Pre-election school tests

Today, David Cameron will promise that the government’s flagship academies programme will be expanded post 2015. Currently, the government can only force schools that have been judged ‘inadequate’ by Ofsted to convert to academy status. But if they win the election the Conservatives want to extend this to schools that ‘require improvement’ to convert. Regional Schools Commissioners, recently created to act as regional representatives of the Department for Education, would force conversion if they lacked confidence in a headteacher’s plans. They would also be able to pass struggling schools already in an academy chain to a new one. The announcement is in part pre-election messaging. But it reveals three important things. First, that the academies ‘brand’ that was built up first by Labour schools minister Andrew Adonis and then by Michael Gove is still seen as a vote-winner. Second, it shows that politicians feel less and less able to offer spend money on reform. Third, it shows a growing recognition that big questions remain about the role of government in schools oversight. The enduring success of the academies programme is fascinating – partly because successful branding of public sector reform initiatives is quite rare but in particular because the brand has been used successfully for two fundamentally different reform processes. Under Labour, the academies programme was a way of reviving the fortunes of the very poorest schools, including a significant injection of money. Under the Conservatives, the programme is far, far broader. It essentially involves giving as many schools as possible freedom from local authority and, to a lesser degree, central oversight – and encouraging academy chains to become the motor of improvement in the school system, competing with each other to take over schools and drive up standards. The fact that David Cameron is talking about compelling more schools to convert is significant. Under Labour, there were vast rewards for converting to academy status. Under the initial Conservative drive to encourage schools to convert, the financial inducements were more obscure and smaller – but were still there. But this announcement suggests that there will be less carrot and even more stick, reflecting no doubt the state of public finances. It will be interesting to see whether or not it leads to increased resistance – as many successful policies of the past were the result of careful attempts to minimise or marginalise potential blockers of reform. Chris Cook at the BBC notes that Labour’s policy on university tuition fees – which also threatens rather than rewards – carries similar risks. The recognition of weaknesses in the system of school accountability and oversight is arguably the most important thing in today’s announcement, however. The Institute for Government’s 2013 research on the academies programme highlighted the problem of ‘coasting’ schools which will be referred to by Cameron today. And publicly acknowledging that the system does relatively little to change schools until they have already hit severe difficulties is to be welcomed. We have asked wider questions about school accountability, however, and these still need to be addressed. In particular, we must answer the question of how academy chains are to be held properly accountable for their performance. Chains are expected to drive improvements and are paid by taxpayers to do so. However, they are not inspected by Ofsted and when schools they oversee fail or decline, they bear few financial liabilities. While reputation is important to chains, it is also not clear that government’s main response to underperformance – taking away failing schools (and in future schools ‘requiring improvement’) – is really a sanction. In business terms, it is in fact likely to be the equivalent of punishing a company by taking away its loss-making business units. Conversely, however, it is not clear that chains are rewarded for success in the current system, except through improved reputation – unless, of course, they are exploiting various loopholes that might allow them to profit indirectly. There are already signs that the Department for Education is struggling to find sponsors for some recently failed schools so the lack of incentives may create difficulties if Cameron is re-elected and tries to deliver on his promise of increasing academy numbers. But it also creates a knotty problem that any 2015 government must grapple with. The accountability of sponsors needs to be tightened but how will chains react if their lives are made less and less comfortable? Will they simply absorb the pressure, their desire to improve education being sufficiently strong to compensate for very public criticism and occasional humiliation. Or might they start to either resist increased government pressure and intervention (as they may often be able to under the terms of their long-term funding agreements) or ask for greater rewards in return for their troubles? Cameron has recognised today that something needs to be done to strengthen school accountability and address the issue of coasting schools. But the announcement still leaves big questions unanswered.