“Our head’s not around much these days. He’s in charge of the local academy partnership but we’ve no idea where he is or what he actually does each week.”

I have heard many similar stories of mysteriously disappearing heads from friends near and far - tales of our time in which a good headteacher gets drawn away from doing what he or she does best in order to take responsibility for some academy “cluster” or other. (Cue applause here for the many other good heads who have chosen to decline all such offers.) 

The one thing we do know about these absent, redeployed heads is that they are paid even more than they were before. Meanwhile, the school they leave behind has to find and pay for another person to act as its headteacher  - at further cost to education and with no discernible gain for children’s learning.

It’s a familiar story but it seems no less outrageous with the passage of time.

We also hear increasingly of retiring heads collecting hefty consultancy salaries from their former academy chain, making a further hole in the nation’s educational budget for very little gain.   

In the face of the widespread protest over spending cuts, government ministers have been keen on repeating the mantra that “spending on education has been at record levels”. It’s been their favourite stand-by statement, but isn’t it pretty damning, even if it’s true?

If spending on education really is at “record levels” and yet state schools across the land have been cutting and recutting hundreds of thousands of pounds from their budgets, what must this say about the efficiency of the academies and free school infrastructure-cum-charabanc that our ministers have put in place?

‘A financially-insatiable, multi-headed beast’

What kind of financially-insatiable, multi-headed beast have they created?

Apart from it being undemocratic, the destruction of the local education authorities system was bound to create a natural financial drain. 

Replacing them with academy chains was certain to soak up a huge extra slice of the educational budget. The policy not only meant losing economies of scale but it also redefined the administrative role entirely. No more was it to be a public service. It was now a business proposition.

For example, Sir Peter Newsam (former head of the Inner London Education Authority) recently quoted me some of the salaries of members of his former team at the ILEA.

His team of 20 public servants was effectively responsible for many more schools than in a multi-academy trust and yet, in real terms, they were paid a paltry amount compared with the leader of a small MAT. (Less than £50,000 a year in real terms.) 

Sir Peter (and my late father, a chief education officer in Kent) predicted all of the folly of academisation decades ago.

Apart from its anti-democratic nature, it was inevitably going to cost more, even if we ignore the more extreme tales of greed and corruption that have inevitably come with such a policy.

Meanwhile, schools that are now supposedly “free to run their own affairs” each have to pay a huge salary to a finance director and for various other legal and administrative jobs that once never existed in schools and could be absorbed more cheaply in the cost of running a local education authority.

So spending in education could indeed be at “record levels”. One thing is beyond doubt - self-delusion is. 

Stephen Petty is head of humanities at Lord Williams’s School in Thame, Oxfordshire. For more from Stephen, see his back catalogue

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