Education and Adoption Bill

Some thoughts about schools, their future and the Education and Adoption Bill:

•  This Bill indicates that the power to intervene in the leadership and management of schools and academies will be increasingly centralised;
• This Bill requires that primary schools will need to achieve 85% of pupils achieving a certain level of progress and attainment in reading, writing and maths (the current baseline is 65%) to avoid being termed ‘coasting’, but there are currently no national standards from which to judge the required level because the new SATs will not be taken until 2016. This means schools do not know what they are working towards and cannot direct their resources accordingly, which impacts on their ability to avoid being termed ‘coasting’ or failing;
• This Bill requires that secondary schools will need to achieve 60% of students achieving appropriate levels of progress in Progress 8 subjects (the current baseline is 50%). The secondary curriculum has already been significantly impacted by the EBacc and, although the Progress 8 measure allows for a broader collection of curriculum subjects to be taken into account, in practice, many schools are sticking tightly to the EBacc subjects. As an RE teacher and adviser, I feel quite strongly about this, as doing many of my colleagues who teach art and design, drama, music, and so on. This focus on the EBacc, even in Progress 8, impacts on the ability of students who may not thrive in academic areas to achieve the required baseline in Progress 8 and thus on the school’s ability to avoid being termed ‘coasting’ or failing;
• The Bill makes no provision for infant or middle schools;
• The Bill takes no account of context (e.g. rural schools entering under ten pupils for KS2 SATS, where 50% of these pupils have additional needs, schools with exceptional Value Added, but lower levels of academic achievement, schools with high proportions of students with English as an Additional Language, or with a high turnover of staff or student population….);
• The process of conversion to academy status will be overseen by Regional Schools Commissioners – a group of people whose job title is to “work with school leaders to promote and monitor academies and free schools” (https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/schools-commissioners-group) and whose performance is judged, at least in part, on the number of schools that are converted to academy status on their watch. This would suggest that they have a vested interest in as many schools as possible being designated as either ‘coasting’ or failing;
• Governing bodies of schools with a religious character have a conflict of interest, insofar as they can be compelled to facilitate conversion to academy status under clauses 4(A1) and 4(1)(b) of the Bill, but may be prevented from doing so as trustees of the charitable trust under which the school was founded, particularly where there may be issues around preserving the religious character of the school after conversion. Similarly, the trustees of the land upon which the school is built may be in a position to object to conversion, even where the governing body of the school can be compelled by the Secretary of State to facilitate conversion. This could lead to protracted negotiations, with a direct impact on the pupils at the school.

In addition to this, recent financial pressures are likely to have a real impact on schools’ ability to avoid being judged to be ‘coasting’ under the new definitions in the Education and Adoption Bill:

• The fixing of school budgets at the current level will lead to an up to 12% cut over the next five years;
• The National Living Wage will require that any staff currently receiving minimum wage (e.g. lunchtime supervisors) will need to be paid £9 per hour by 2020 – this will also apply to any companies with which schools do business (e.g. site management, food preparation, etc.) and may have an impact on costs they currently charge;
• Recruitment of teachers is currently a huge challenge at all levels, but especially at leadership levels;

Nobody – me included – wants their child to be let down by their school; everyone wants the children in our country to receive the best possible education. But context matters. I taught in a large comprehensive school in north London, but it was not until I moved to Lincolnshire and started working alongside small rural primary schools that I realised how utterly London (or perhaps city)-centric educational policy is. In many cases, the requirements – and this is true of the Education and Adoption Bill – are just not workable in these very small schools. Moreover, in the course of my work, both as a teacher and as an educational consultant, I have never come across a head teacher, teacher, teaching assistant or anyone else who works in our schools who thinks that it’s ok to just ‘wing it’ in relation to pupils’ progress and achievement. I have never met or worked alongside a lazy teacher who doesn’t care about their pupils’ future. In other words, I have never met any educational professional who ‘coasts’. I have met hundreds of consummate professionals, who are doing the best they possibly can in the context in which they work to provide the best possible future for their pupils and, in many cases, their pupils’ families. I have more admiration for their patience and commitment – not simply with their pupils, but with the Department for Education – than I can possibly say.

Dear Nicky Morgan, please, please think very carefully about this Bill and its implications – if only for the fact that, in centralising responsibility for ‘coasting’ and failing schools, you are making the person who is the most accountable for the success or failure of our country’s education system the Secretary of State for Education. Do you have the time, resources or expertise to be held accountable? Do the various academy sponsors who will be needed to intervene to support ‘coasting’ and failing schools have sufficient time, resources and expertise to manage what may amount to many hundreds of conversion orders the moment the Bill is enacted? If not, then what?

If the intention is to merely compel a selection of ‘coasting’ or failing schools to convert to academies (given that you have reserved yourself the right to choose when to use your new powers in relation to ‘coasting’ schools) in order to evidence that the Bill, and thus government policy, is working what, then, is the long-term purpose of the Bill? It would be a truly terrible thing if this Bill, which represents the quite frightening diminishment of autonomy and local influence, is merely a political tool with short-term aims. Given that your Government is currently devolving large amounts of power to local regions, it seems particularly interesting that this moment has been chosen to state that local regions are not capable of taking charge of education. Transport, apprenticeships, housing, yes; education, no.

On the description of your ministerial role, it states that you have responsibility for “school improvement” and “the establishment of academies and free schools” (https://www.gov.uk/government/ministers/secretary-of-state-for-education). I feel like the crux of the matter here is which of these responsibilities the Education and Adoption Bill is aimed at…