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Behind closed doors: the secrets about academies

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Behind closed doors: the secrets about academies

Public denied access to key information behind decisions affecting local schools

14th July 2017, 12:00am

How transparent is the system that decides which schools become academies and who runs them?

The government has said that it publishes a “significant amount of information” online about the eight regional schools commissioners (RSCs) and the headteacher boards (HTB) that advise and challenge them.

But when Tes put this claim to the test, it emerged that only 3 per cent of the documentation relating to commissioners’ decisions had actually been published.

During one cycle of meetings in October and November 2016, just 32 pages of minutes were released online. However, HTB members received 1,016 pages of documents to consider, none of which were made public.

They contain a wealth of information and justifications for key decisions that will affect schools for years to come, but remain hidden from the communities affected. And even when Tes obtained the full set of documents using the Freedom of Information Act, they were heavily censored, with most of the information blacked out in almost a third of the pages.

Avoiding scrutiny

Maurice Frankel, director of the Campaign for Freedom of Information, says: “It’s obviously an area where the department does not want great scrutiny.

“It’s probably an area where a lot of things are at stake in terms of demonstrating the success of the policy, so they may not be keen to expose too much of it to scrutiny.”

In making the redactions, the Department for Education relied on rules designed to protect commercial interests and personal information, and avoid “prejudice to the effective conduct of public affairs”.

And even when the government does publish information, such as the register of interests of RSCs and HTB members, it can be almost a year out of date.

Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Lecturers, describes the published minutes as “skimpy” documents, which feel like a “cursory cut-and-paste” exercise.

They list key decisions made, but the “key discussion points” that provide additional information are often restricted to a handful of one-word bullet points.

The lack of transparency is something that the Commons Education Select Committee raised in a report released last year, which called for the government to publish decision-making frameworks for RSCs, so the public could see what they base their decisions on.

But although the DfE has since published a 12-page Regional Schools Commissioners’ Decision-Making Framework (bit.ly/RSCframe), the HTB minutes do not refer to it to give a rationale for each individual decision, as the MPs had hoped.

‘Trappings of democracy’

Barton says: “What I think parents and communities would ask is, ‘How were these criteria applied to my school?’ and I think [the DfE] would make it easier for themselves if they were much more transparent about how these decisions were made, because this is life-changing for teachers and parents and for communities.”

For Russell Hobby, general secretary of the NAHT heads’ union, there is an irony that “the whole premise” of the HTB system was to give legitimacy to decisions about academies and free schools.

He says that HTBs have the “trappings of democracy”, with four of their members elected by other academy leaders in their region, and are designed to harness the knowledge of local professionals.

“I don’t think we have any reason to fear what the decisions are, but you don’t know - and that’s why transparency is important,” Hobby adds. “People don’t know how this is operating, and I think it creates unnecessary doubt.”

Schools ‘left in the dark’

Gillian Allcroft, deputy chief executive of the National Governance Association, is concerned that those running schools are being left “in the dark about why certain decisions were made”.

“It matters because, at the end of the day, these are public institutions, and it’s public money, and this is about the education of our children,” she says. “People need to know that decisions are being made in a rational and sensible way.

“If you don’t know why a decision has been made, you can’t always be sure about that.”

A DfE spokesman says: “Regional schools commissioners, assisted by their HTBs, play a key role in ensuring education professionals have the freedom to improve schools.

“All decisions made by headteacher boards are subject to rigorous oversight and analysis. A significant amount of information is published online and redactions to the minutes of meetings are made in accordance with government guidelines in order to protect commercially sensitive information.”

Transparency elsewhere in the public sector

Headteacher boards may be notable for their lack of transparency, but other bodies that make important decisions about local services show that more openness is possible.

Government regulations require councils to meet in public and give the public access to reports. In 2013, ministers strengthened the rules to give journalists and bloggers the right to film council meetings. Reading Borough Council, for instance, broadcasts meetings of its adult social care, children’s services and education committee online, and the committee agendas set aside time for questions from the public and petitions.

Health is another area where the government has increased openness and transparency. In 2011, the Department of Health introduced rules to ensure that foundation trust boards hold their meetings in public. And in 2012, when the government set up the clinical commissioning groups that plan and commission local health care services, it made it a legal requirement that they meet in public and publish papers considered by their governing bodies.

Russell Hobby, general secretary of the NAHT heads’ union, believes that the health sector is ahead of the education system in public transparency and accountability. “Very often, they do pioneer the way,” he says.

“It’s not to say that difficult decisions don’t have to be made, and sometimes the public will disagree, but the more they know about how and why a decision has been made, the more they engage in it. The old saying says ‘justice has to be seen to be done’.”

Key details redacted or missing: headteacher boards’ lack of transparency

A scant four pages of published minutes record the meeting of the south-east England and south London Headteacher Board on 13 October last year.

But anyone who wanted to know why their school became an academy, how the organisation that would run it was selected or, in some cases, whether the future of their school was being discussed, would instead have to look at the 118 pages of background papers.

The problem is that while the minutes are published, the background papers are not.

To obtain those papers, Tes had to turn to freedom of information laws. The documents that were eventually released, while heavily redacted, show just how much information the published minutes leave out.

For example, the minutes only say that there was “a discussion about potential changes to the governance arrangements at the Hamwic Academy Trust”. But the six pages of board papers show that Hamwic was an “umbrella” trust that oversaw four separate academy trusts, with a total of 15 schools. The trust had to change how it operated after the government encouraged umbrella trusts to become multi-academy trusts, and the papers set out two options for its future.

Both options have been completely redacted by the DfE from the board papers and neither of them are disclosed in the minutes.

The minutes also say that there was a discussion about “the University of Brighton Academy Trust’s proposal to establish a new hub”. But without the three-page briefing note seen by HTB members, the reader would not know that this could have seen Overton Grange in Sutton, a school with 1,200 pupils, giving up its status as a standalone academy and joining the university’s organisation.

The minutes also say that an application for three Portsmouth schools to form a new academy trust was approved, with discussion points including “proximity of the schools” and “links to teaching school alliance”. But lengthy and important details included in the 11-page background paper are missing.

They include the rationale behind the move, the credentials of the key people involved, the financial health of each school, and how much money the new trust would “top slice” from each school’s budget.

The papers also reveal items that appeared on the unpublished agenda, but are not explicitly recorded in the published minutes.

These include the pros and cons of two potential sponsors for Aldershot Primary, which was due to open in September 2018, after the original sponsor, the University of Chichester Academy Trust, dropped out.

Even the seven-page discussion, as released, was redacted, with the some of the pros and all of the cons for both Surrey Heath Education Trust and the Engage, Enrich, Excel Academy Trust blacked out.

The background papers also include a discussion about the future of St Stephen’s Primary in Tonbridge, which was about to be put in special measures, and two potential sponsors, which did not appear in the minutes.

Failure to update register of interests

Lack of transparency and the perception of conflicts of interest have been among the biggest concerns about the system set up to turn schools into academies.

In an effort to address these, the Department for Education publishes a register of the interests of regional schools commissioners and headteacher board members. Last year, in a response to a Commons Education Select Committee report, education minister Lord Nash said the register “is reviewed every six months to ensure that it is up to date”.

However, the most recent online version of the register was not updated for almost a year, and was missing key information, until this was queried by Tes.

When viewed on 21 June, the spreadsheet was dated 20 July 2016, contained no information about two RSCs who had taken up their positions since then, and none about a further 10 members of headteacher boards across the country.

Neil Carmichael, former chair of the Commons Education Select Committee, is “surprised” that the published register of interests had not been kept up-to-date.

“It matters simply to prove that they are going to act in a properly open and transparent and uninfluenced way,” he adds.

Days after Tes raised the issue with the DfE, it uploaded a more recent version of the register, dated 24 May.

However, the new version was still missing information about the interests of one headteacher board member, Dame Yasmin Bevan, who sits on the north-west London and south-central England board.