Our current secretary of state for education has made it clear that she is “agnostic” about school structures and she simply wants the best education for every child.
That stance makes sense: there is no reason why a local authority-maintained school and an academy could not equally deliver brilliant educations for children.
And yet there are those who don’t agree.
Multi-academy trusts and LA schools
For some, academies are akin to the antichrist; so intrinsically linked to Govean ideology that they must be forever cursed.
And for others, local authority (LA) schools are wasteful, isolationist and straitjacketed into mediocrity.
On the first point, I get it. I’m not a fan of that Govean ideology and I have certainly seen enough academies abuse their freedoms rather than use them to benefit their communities.
But I have also seen maintained schools abuse the freedoms they have gained from there not being enough oversight from stretched and bankrupted LAs.
Yes, LA schools can lack the capacity to drive efficiencies and can be restricted in what they can achieve, but there are also some incredibly inefficient trusts. And, as Andrew O’Neill wrote recently, there is much innovation in the LA sector.
Essentially, it is not the structure itself that determines practice, it is the people leading who create the culture and climate.
Across standalone academies, multi-academy trusts, locally maintained schools, diocese schools, alternative provisions and special schools, I have seen amazing practice and I have also observed unethical behaviour.
What drove these behaviours were the values and ethics of the leadership in each setting, not articles of association.
As irrelevant as arguments about school structures should be, though, they are doing much damage because they distract debate from what is important.
The huge SEND problem
We in schools are skint, we are crumbling, we’re both haemorrhaging teachers and failing to recruit new ones; headteachers are retiring early and no one wants to replace them; attendance and behaviour are poor and, not unrelated, provision for children with special educational needs and disabilities is beyond crisis.
With all of that going on, perhaps it’s time to abandon antithetical dugouts and collaborate on some solutions?
Believe it or not, this is possible.
Collaboration between schools
The vast majority of us working in schools collaborate regularly with other professionals, paying no mind at all to phases or structures.
The Headteachers’ Roundtable, of which I am co-chair, comprises those from maintained schools and academies; from early years, primary and secondaries; rural, coastal, suburban and urban; serving both affluent areas and communities that have been under-resourced for generations. We collaborate respectfully, supporting and learning from each other.
And for each of us, we are in many more networks where we choose to collaborate with others to improve education for our young people, not just to further our own schools.
Progress 8 and Ofsted
Collaboration is a wonderfully powerful and uplifting tool for school improvement and professional development, and it happens organically when we are not pitted against each other through league tables, Progress 8 and Ofsted banners and then fighting for pupil numbers and good-quality staff.
So rather than structures, it is those elements that we need to focus on, because when mechanisms to divide us are in place, children miss out.
It doesn’t just take a village to raise a child; it takes the whole country to educate them at the moment - and this is possible through collaboration.
As Sham 69 sang, “If the kids are united then we’ll never be divided” - it’s time for their teachers to do the same.
Keziah Featherstone is currently executive headteacher in The Mercian Trust. She is co-founder and a strategic lead of WomenEd, as well as being co-chair of the Headteachers’ Roundtable. Her first solo book, Punk Leadership, has recently been published by Corwin
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