Why is the government seeking to ditch local management of schools?

As the current government continues to push more schools into Multi-Academy Trusts, controversies arising from a more centralised model of control and decision-making continue to emerge, writes education journalist, Warwick Mansell.

Several years ago, in investigating one of the many controversies which have sprung up since the establishment of multi-academy trusts, I heard a very interesting comment from a school governor, who had experience of working in schools.

“It is like the bad old days of top-down local authority control,” he said, surveying a situation in which school governing bodies, within this trust, appeared to have little detailed information about crucial policies affecting their schools, such as finance, let alone the ability to influence them.

Decisions on which company is to provide services such as school meals, which exam board’s version of assessments are to be provided, the nature of the curriculum and even detailed day-to-day choices such as whether a school buys particular textbooks can, under the multi-academy trust model, be taken at central headquarters, rather than by the individual school. In at least one high profile case I can think of, individual school governing bodies have struggled to find out basic facts as to what money has been spent, even in relation to their own institution.

Controversies associated with a more centralised model of decision-making continue to emerge. Last year, I wrote  about how one of England’s largest academy chains, the Academies Enterprise Trust, was charging what appeared to be large amounts for services provided centrally to its schools, which had no choice but to pay for them.

In recent weeks, I have learnt about a case of a former chair of governors at a school within the largest trust, United Learning, who said he lost that position and much of the governing body was disbanded in 2020 after it had sought to question that trust’s decision-making in relation to staff appointments. The trust appears to have had much more control over this school’s governance ever since. United Learning responded by saying what, while it did not comment on individual cases, “it is a strength of the trust model that it is able to remove members of a local governing body behaving inappropriately, causing harm to a school or undermining its leadership”.

But to some people who have been around a while, this does indeed conjure up memories of how education used to be managed. Before the introduction of the 1988 Education Reform Act, under the Conservatives, much decision-making took place away from the school itself, at the local authority level.

The Thatcher-era Conservatives changed that, giving individual school governing bodies control over spending decisions. Governing bodies had to include elected parents and elected staff. The argument was that power should be devolved as much as possible to the level of the school, with individual headteachers, and the local governing bodies which held them to account, deemed to be best-placed to take decisions, since they knew their institutions better than any supervising body.

MATs

In recent years, this thinking has quietly been ditched, with a Conservative government now advocating a system whereby all schools would be grouped into multi-academy trusts (MATs). Decision-making power would thus again be centralised at headquarters level, though with these new bureaucracies not subject to local democratic control, but under the supervision of unelected boards of trustees.

This drive has only been a partial success. It is true that nearly 10,000 schools have left their local authorities to become academies since Michael Gove launched the policy at scale on becoming Education Secretary in 2010. However, the number of schools now in MATs of more than five institutions, at some 6,250, still constitutes less than a third of the nearly 22,000 state-funded schools in England.

In the primary sector, some 61 per cent of schools remain under the auspices of their local authority, nearly 12 years after Gove first gave them the chance to opt to become academies.

In 2016, one of Gove’s successors, Nicky Morgan, sought to compel all schools into academy status, with the notion that there would no longer be any elected parents within academies’ governance structures also put forward. But both elements had to be abandoned in the face of their unpopularity.

Then an attempt last year, by another Gove successor, Gavin Williamson, to promote an all-MAT policy seems to have prompted few academy conversions. Since then, the DfE appears to have been flirting again with something more prescriptive.

A white paper on school system reform is reported to be due for publication next month, with government documents published last week suggesting that ministers expect it to generate a substantial increase in the number of schools becoming academies.

It seems to have had to temper its vision somewhat, however, with reports that, while all schools would be proposed to be in “families of schools”, the implication was that they might not need to be conventional academy trusts. And local authorities, it was reported, could even be allowed to set up their own trusts.

In which case, perhaps, we would be back where we started, with local authorities as well as unelected trust boards having decision-making powers over schools. And for what? Local management of schools, though not without its controversies – it was launched alongside SATs assessments by which institutions were to be ranked, for example – was, on balance, a good reform, in my view. The policy of giving individual heads some autonomy over basic decision-making such as the spending of school budgets, subject to being held to account by a local governing body with some community-facing elements, and oversight by a local authority, was again on balance I think, a positive development.

With a move back to remote headquarters having decision-making power, the government is thus going against its own predecessors’ thinking. This remains a puzzling development, with its eventual success, even on its own terms of achieving an all-trust structure, still up in the air.

Warwick Mansell is a freelance journalist, who founded and writes for the investigative website Education Uncovered.