The number of schools joining multi-academy trusts has grown over the last five years, and it is expected that this growth will continue. The House of Commons Education Committee has, as a result, looked into the performance and role of these trusts. Steven J Courtney, Ruth McGinity, Steven Jones, Robert Hindle, Stephen M Rayner and Belinda Hughes focus on four key aspects of the Committee’s report and argue that broader questions about the government’s policy remain untouched.
The House of Commons Education Committee published its report on multi-academy trusts (MATs) on 28th February. At a time when the health of school budgets is increasingly jeopardised, the report is a timely reminder that the role of the select-committee system is to hold government to account. The report consequently critiques some aspects of the development and administration of multi-academy trusts, whilst largely accepting the overarching policy strategy.
Academisation since 2010 has increased rapidly, leading to new types and configurations of academy. A MAT is the most common way of uniting diverse academies into one legal entity, governed by a single board of trustees. Government policy on MATs reflects an expectation that maintained schools should become academies and that these should join or form a MAT. What is in doubt, and is addressed by this report, is how this policy aim is being operationalised.
In this response to the report, we focus on four key areas: the report’s attitude towards local authorities; how it addresses MATs’ financial sustainability; its distinctive treatment of leadership; and the report’s use of language.
The role of local authorities
One of the most striking features of the report is the marked change in the way in which local authorities are described and positioned. After many years as a target of what Stephen Ball called ‘discourses of derision’, local authorities are now seen as the potential saviours of an incoherent programme of MATification.
Allowing local authorities to set up their own MATs, which has been impossible until now, might entice hitherto reluctant school governors and leaders, particularly in primary schools, to join a MAT, because they would expect to retain valued relationships and support structures. We support the report’s conclusion that the fundamental problem remains, however. A triangle of power-bases – Ofsted, Regional School Commissioners and local authorities – has been established, without clarity about the place of each within what the present Secretary of State calls ‘the schools ecosystem’.
Financial sustainability
The report gives a warm reception to the idea of a ‘growth check’ on MATs and we await the metrics on which such checks will be made. This acknowledges that larger MATs increasingly become monopoly providers, both regionally and nationally. Previous thinking might have suggested that larger-scale organisations benefit from cost-saving economies of scale – important in a tight financial climate – and an Austrian economics view of the power of innovation driven by greater funds. The need for ‘growth checks’ suggests a consideration of the drawbacks of monopoly positions.
Are some MAT leads driven by power rather than quality? In The New Industrial State (1967), JK Galbraith introduced the notion of a small number of larger corporations dominating markets, a ‘technostructure’ of self-interested managers, a system by which ‘predator’ firms govern and which serves to maintain their own power through expansion. The performance of many academy chains to date suggests that the scale of a MAT has at best an inconsistent impact on outcomes. Furthermore, the report’s warning that neither the Department for Education nor the Education Funding Agency may cope with future MAT growth should ring alarm bells.
Leadership
‘Strong leadership’ is the fifth of the six characteristics identified by the Committee as key to MAT success. It is not called leadership, however, but ‘a shared vision’, supporting findings that the former is increasingly reducible to the latter. ‘Leaders’ in this report mean MAT CEOs and the overarching Board of Trustees, which includes sponsor representation.
In fact, there are many more references here to ‘sponsor’ than ‘leader’. This has the effect of diffusing the act of leadership, of partly removing its exercise from a single, perhaps heroic figure in the New Labour mould. If trusts may ‘do leadership’, two questions immediately follow. First, which activities apparently constituting leadership are possible or impossible? Second, how is accountability for the impact of such activities understood and experienced?
The importance of language
Finally, it is worth noting the subtle shifts in language that pervade the report. As well as the now-familiar market-based metaphors (“sponsored” school, “brokered” deals, etc.), we also find new imagery. For example, some MAT-less schools are framed as “untouchables”, presumably because they are deemed financially unviable rather than because they belong to a caste system that regards them as impure. The term seems to follow similar rhetoric used by Warwick Mansell and others when characterising such schools as “orphans”. This image may capture a sense of rejection, but the danger is that in framing schools as in need of benevolent parenting we disguise the truth – that they’ve been forsaken not by misfortune but by an ideology.
In conclusion, this report ostensibly leaves untouched the broader questions concerning the appropriateness of the overarching MAT policy: who the winners and losers are from their very existence, for example, and what this means for public education. However, the extent and radical nature (for these times) of some of its proposals amount to a damning indictment of the direction of travel. For instance, it is highly unorthodox to call for the sort of role for local authorities that it has; to call into question MATs’ financial sustainability and to downplay (relatively) individual leadership. In that spirit, it is seeking to obtain maximum value, effectiveness, and usefulness from a policy constructed as unopposable.
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Steven J Courtney is Lecturer in Management and Leadership at the Manchester Institute of Education, University of Manchester
Ruth McGinity is Lecturer in Educational Leadership and Policy at the Manchester Institute of Education, University of Manchester
Steven Jones is Senior Lecturer at the Manchester Institute of Education, University of Manchester
Robert Hindle is Lecturer in Education at the Manchester Institute of Education, University of Manchester
Stephen M Rayner, Manchester Institute of Education, University of Manchester
Belinda Hughes, Manchester Institute of Education, University of Manchester
The document’s warning that neither the branch of education nor the schooling funding company can also address destiny MAT increase must ring alarm bells.
The document’s warning that neither the branch of education nor the schooling funding company can also address destiny MAT increase must ring alarm bells.
My children’s old school (comprehensive) which is now an academy, is regarded as being a satisfactory school in need of support, without the real organisation to deliver it.
I was only talking to a friend yesterday about the premise of the governments position relating to the idea of failing schools.
I reminded him of our backgrounds, both working class, and those working class friends who all had children that went to university, whilst we did not, nor many of our peers, it was common place among our working class friends children.
So when we talk of the prospects for working class children’s upward mobility through education, against all the odds placed in their way, those children that are deemed to have failed in relative terms actually made it.
My children’s old school (comprehensive) which is now an academy, is regarded as being a satisfactory school in need of support, without the real organisation to deliver it. When I was governor there, we had three years of improved attainment, which a Tory government came in and changed the criteria half way through the academic year and created a good school into a satisfactory school needing intervention.
It really doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out that failure was part of the design by intervening half way through the academic year in order to get the results that this government wanted.
I welcome this report as once again it throws light on direction of travel in which this government is taking us, it has absolutely nothing to do with improving education standards, but is a means of pushing public sector provision into the embrace of private profit.
The problems facing education and the educational institutions is the very social fabric that these Neo-Liberal governments are creating and deliberately destroying.
Nothing that is happening in our society today is happening by accident but has been the long term objectives by government directed and serving the interest of the corporate sector.
Noam Chomsky has spelled out the general direction of travel with this quote and to confirm the top down relationship of what has been happening in education we can see the same deliberate policy impacts in our NHS.
“If you want to privatize something and destroy it, a standard method is first to defund it, so it doesn’t work anymore, people get upset and accept privatization. This is happening in the schools. They are defunded, so they don’t work well”.
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— Noah Chomsky