Tag Archives: academies

Parents not Chains under future Labour?

Posted on by
1

There was quite a contrast between Ed Davey and Tristram Hunt on the BBC’s  Andrew Marr show this morning, and it went beyond just sartorial elegance. Ed Davey turned up in a jacket and tie to match the dress code of the show’s presenter whereas Mr Hunt was fashionably open-necked, with hair that was either an expert coiffure or just dishevelled, depending on your point of view.

Their mastery of the questioning also revealed a Minister who has been in post for a year and a shadow spokesperson with less than a week in the job. Tristram Hunt was tempted by Mr Marr into the higher education debate, despite it presumably not being within his brief. It was difficult to square his enthusiasm for polytechnics with his reluctance to expand higher education provision. How could polytechnics be created by Labour? One way would be to re-brand some existing universities, if they would agree. Another would be to re-grade some colleges of further education as polys. But, that would mean either depriving existing universities of places or increasing the number of degree places available, something Mr Hunt didn’t appear to think a good idea. Clearly, it is work in progress somewhere in the Labour team.

On schools, I welcome his attention to the need for qualified teachers, although he wasn’t pressed on what this might mean, except in the area of national pay where his answer didn’t reveal anything about Labour policy, just that most schools still follow the national norms: would Labour make them do so? Parent led free schools – why don’t we just call them academies and have done with the confusion – seems like a bit of a –U- turn in more ways than one. Brown Labour under Ed Balls favoured sponsored academies, and the formation of chains, so separate schools, but only where there is a need, suggests more primary schools but few secondary schools would be approved under Labour. So how would Mr Hunt get more of the UTC or Studio schools he extolled when talking about the JCB Academy, a school that is supported and named after the company run by the Tory peer. Such schools are unlikely to be founded by parents and, anyway, for the next few years we won’t need many new secondary schools, even if we need more vocational courses. Where local authorities fit into the picture, if indeed they do under Labour, wasn’t mentioned at all.

Primary education didn’t rate a mention either which was a shame given the importance of the sector. Overall, there didn’t seem much of a leftward drift, more a ‘don’t frighten the horses’ approach. The content of the recent OECD Report was batted away, although the subsequent discussion did seem to reveal that 16-18 education might feature in Labour’s thinking. Will they return the FE sector to the education department, or at least full responsibility for 16-19 education and training, now that the participation age has been raised? Both Labour and the Tories seem confused about where this sector of education policy should sit in government, and both might do well to study the Lib Dems detailed policy paper ‘Learning for Life’ http://www.libdems.org.uk/siteFiles/resources/docs/conference/2013%20Autumn/Policy/110%20-%20Learning%20for%20Life.pdf that formed the basis for the conference motion passed in September 2013 at Glasgow.

Overall, the parent run academy approach isn’t startlingly new since Labour re-invented the academy principle of Westminster-funded schools despite having abolished the former Tory created Grant Maintained Schools after the 1997 election. What is new is who will be allowed to run them. Labour at Westminster seems happy to fund ‘private schools on the rates’. Whether it will appeal to the wider Party only time will tell.

Finally, as I have mentioned in a previous blog, this year marks the 50th anniversary of the Report entitled ‘Half our Future’ that dealt with those pupils then largely being educated in secondary modern schools. As a historian Mr Hunt might have gained some kudos for recognising the importance of that report as well as the failure of the Atlee Government to properly implement both the technical schools and ‘county colleges’ of the 1944 Education Act.

Are academies hoarding their cash?

Posted on by
Reply

What’s the use of giving schools money they don’t spend? This has been a theme running through this blog ever since the first entry way back in January. The latest figures for academies and the other esoteric school types funded from Westminster shows that these schools were in some cases no better than their maintained counterparts in using revenue cash to support the learning of their pupils. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/income-and-expenditure-in-academies-in-england-academic-year-2011-to-2012

No doubt the Treasury will eventually ask why school budgets should be protected if the cash handed to them is promptly put in the bank. Mr Clegg might also ask whether schools are really helping in his drive for a million new jobs by sitting on plies of cash.

Anyway a few numbers:

For 2011/12, the median total income (£ Per Pupil) for secondary academies with Key Stage 4 was £6,333, compared with £7,880 in 2010/11. The decline between the two years may indicate exactly how much initial converter academies were funded in excess of what they had previously received as maintained schools.

According to the DfE, the changing composition of secondary academies, with increasing numbers of converters, has narrowed the difference in total income (£ Per Pupil) between academies and maintained schools (secondary with KS4). For 2011/12 the median total income (£ Per Pupil) for academies (secondary with KS4) was £713 higher than maintained schools (secondary with KS4), compared with £2,469 in 2010/11. Many might ask why median total income per pupil in academies is still more than £700 higher than median per pupil income in maintained schools.

For 2011/12, the median total expenditure (£ Per Pupil) for secondary academies with Key Stage 4 was £6,058, compared with £7,405 in 2010/11. For 2011/12 the median total expenditure (£ Per Pupil) for academies (secondary with KS4) was £556 higher than maintained schools (secondary with KS4), compared with £2,052 in 2010/11. Nevertheless, an academy with median income and expenditure per pupil still banked £275 per pupil. For a school of 1,000 pupils that’s £275,000 just over 4% compared with 6% in the previous year. However, as this is the median figure it may not be as helpful as either the mean or modal class would be.

The trends are similar for secondary schools without Key Stage 4 and for primary and special school academies, although the small numbers make comparisons not really sensible.

A quick bit of arithmetic with the raw data suggests that the overall balance in academy bank accounts might be in the order of £175 million including muli-academy trusts where data is available. Around 100 academies may be sitting on cash pies in excess of £1 million each, and this figure is supposed to exclude any reserves held by the schools before they became an academy. However, there are also a large number of academies that appear to have spent more than their incomes.

We will need to see a few more years of data in order to discover whether these initial figures represent a trend. However, we won’t need to wait to discover whether the portion of grant income spend on teaching costs is similar to that in maintained schools. After all, one of the reasons for providing academies with their freedom was to allow them to spend their funding as they see fit to improve the standard of education of their pupils.

Nationalisation of our schools: the latest state of play

Posted on by
Reply

A couple of weeks ago the DfE submitted to parliament the Annual Report on Academies for 2011-12, as required under the 2011 Education Act. The document can be accessed at: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/206382/Academies_Annual_Report_2011-12.pdf

During the year from August 2011 to July 2012 there were 1,151 funding agreements signed, meaning at the latter date there were 1,952 open academies, of which 365 were of the sponsored type created originally by the Labour Government, and 1,587 were of the converter variety invented by the present Secretary of State. By May 2013, the total number of open academies had increased to 2,924. And as at 31 July 2012, 42% of state funded mainstream secondary schools and 3% of state-funded mainstream primary schools were academies, a figure that is no higher although nearly a third of local authorities still had no primary academies within their boundaries.

According to the Annual Report, academies are sponsored by many diverse bodies, so that at the end of the 2011/12 academic year there were 471 different approved academy sponsors. Of these, 161 were academy converters sponsoring other academies; 40 sponsors came from the business sector; 82 from the charitable sector; 40 from dioceses; 65 from the further education sector; 34 from the university sector; 13 were grammar schools, of which 10 are now themselves academies; 13 were independent schools; two were special schools, and 21 were sponsors from other public bodies, including local authorities.

These figures show that the Conservative led coalition is as keen, if not more so than the previous Labour government, at encouraging the creeping ‘nationalisation’ of the school system in England under the guise of providing freedom to individual schools and their sponsors. Local democratic oversight, it was rarely control, is gradually being eradicated from the day to day management of the nation’s schools to be replaced by unelected officials whose political masters are sometimes happy to play fast and loose with planning rules to see their schemes succeed.

In a technical document on attainment between academies and other types of school published in association with the annual report* the DfE identifies the improvement academies have brought to the education scene, although there is no evidence at all as to whether this has been achieved with more or less resources that at other schools.

I hope that local authorities will put together mechanisms for comparing the progress of the academies in their locality against those schools that have not yet been converted or been created as an academy. Not only can such comparison raise questions about what is working, and what is not creating results locally, but it can help develop a local oversight of the whole education system and its Value for Public Money that a fractured system might obfuscate in an unhelpful manner. Even though the national budget for schools is ring-fenced that doesn’t mean it should be squandered in a wasteful manner setting up new schools where they aren’t needed. And just as we have seen responsibility for public health returned to local authorities, there is always the possibility that a future government will return control of schools to local authorities, especially if there are hard budget decisions to make once the ring-fence is finally removed.

*https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/206529/DFE-RR288.pdf