The forced-academies policy gets more bizarre as each week goes by and as it slowly unravels. Rumours of disquiet among Conservative backbench MPs grow, as does the count of Tory MPs - now up to 50 - who are apparently prepared to vote against any forced-academisation Bill when it is presented to the House of Commons for debate.
Appearing before the Commons education select committee last week, Nicky Morgan said there was a quiet groundswell of support for the government’s forced-academy policy. She had, she said, been sent emails saying that she was doing the right thing, and that people had come to her in private to tell her to forge ahead. I invite her to release her emails (anonymised, of course), so that we can see what arguments are being made to force local authority schools to become academies.
I think that this would be a kind and useful act, because, as I survey the education scene, I can see only opposition to forced academisation - from Conservative councillors, backbench MPs, teachers, parents, governors and school leaders (including heads of academy schools who believe in the right to choose, rather than be forced, to become an academy).
Secret supporters
I am sure that many of us want to understand why Nicky Morgan’s shy and secret supporters think a political party committed to choice and freedom should pursue such a Stalinist policy. And I think the secretary of state for education has a duty to disseminate her supporters’ arguments, because she appears to have very few of her own.
Nicky Morgan also conceded to the select committee that there could be 10,000 multi-academy trusts (MATs) running England’s schools. How such a multiplicity of school providers could be overseen in a transparent way is anyone’s guess, and this scenario provokes a whole range of questions, including:
- how would the Department for Education oversee academies’ spending and prevent the misuse of taxpayers’ money by MATs? (This is something that the Education Funding Agency has neither the systems nor the resources to do at present for just over 4,500 academies.)
- how would the government oversee the provision of sufficient pupil places for a growing population when it does not have the power, and nor do local authorities, to require academies and free schools to expand their pupil intake?
Hiding the truth
One of the most pressing issues for Tory backbench MPs, many of whom have rural constituencies, is the fate of small rural schools which would be forced to become part of a MAT. Many rural schools have a very small intake and are very expensive to run. The fear is that MATs would find them uneconomic and close them down.
Education ministers have attempted to assure their concerned colleagues that this is not a course of action MATs would pursue. The new funding formula will be fairer, they say, and will have a sparsity factor.
The fact remains, however, that once a school (of any size or in any location) joins a MAT, it ceases to be a legal entity in its own right. It has no legal independence from the MAT it has joined. It is the MAT which has its own legal existence and is funded by the government for the combined number of pupils on its roll. Individual schools in a MAT, rural or otherwise, can be closed if the MAT decides they are unviable and uneconomic. (Ministers may wish to hide this truth, but they cannot deny it.)
It has been reported that - under siege from its own side, and looking for a way out - the government is preparing some concessions. One that has received particular attention in the press is the plan to allow local authorities to become MATs, in order to provide an acceptable alternative for those many primary-school communities, rural and urban, who wish to retain a local, democratic connection between their school and their community.
Couldn’t make it up
This concession, if it were to be made by the government, would drive a coach and horses through ministerial rhetoric about stopping local authorities “running schools” (something they have not done since local-authority schools got control of their own budgets in 1988). If local authorities were allowed to form MATs, they would regain all the powers they had lost - including managing schools’ budgets, school staffing and the curriculum. In direct contradiction to the government’s intentions, local authorities would be running schools.
Oh, the irony! Oh, the unintended consequences of rushed policymaking! As I so often write, you couldn’t make it up. Only this government is doing just that...
So I offer Nicky Morgan and Nick Gibb a piece of advice: something I have learned through many years of leading and managing large organisations. However good you think your plan is, and however committed you are to it, if you can’t persuade a significant number of your supporters of the rightness of your views, then you would do very well to think very carefully about ploughing on regardless. You may end up on your own, and even if you do win the battle, your injuries may well be fatal. Political careers and reputations have been ruined on much less than this.
Dr Mary Bousted is general secretary of the ATL teaching union. She tweets as @MaryBoustedATL
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