A dangerous education bill: Stripping schools of freedom will not improve outcomes
It may be a controversial statement, but under the Conservatives, schools improved. While debates persist over the economy, inequality, the NHS, environment policy, and the rest – a debate for another day – in both real and relative terms, the education system has improved in the last 20 years.
Ideas of academisation, free schools, and a “knowledge rich curriculum” first gained prominence under New Labour, turbocharged by Michael Gove as Secretary of State, and Sir Nick Gibb as Schools Minister after 2010. Between 2009 and 2022, England jumped from 21st to 7th in the OECD for maths, from 19th to 9th for Reading and 11th to 9th for science according to Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests of 15-year-olds worldwide. It is worth noting that this trend is the opposite of Scotland and Wales where they rank 25th and 28th for reading and 9th and 2nd for maths respectively.
Free schools have come under fire, particularly from the teaching unions, for high teacher turnover, lack of oversight, and closures
Free Schools, a kind of academy set up by charities, parents, companies, or religious organisations, were also first piloted during this time. These schools receive their money directly from the Department for Education instead of local governments and have freedom to set their own teacher pay, create their own curriculum, and adapt other elements of schooling such as approaches to co-curriculars or a longer school day.
These reforms have been successful. The secondary school in which children make the most progress is a free school; the sixth-form college that gets the best A-level results in England is a free school; and The Sunday Times London comprehensive of the year last year was also a free school. A higher percentage of free schools are rated as ‘Outstanding’ by Ofsted (25%), more than any other kind of state school and well above the state school average overall. For Key Stage 4 students, free schools have an average Progress 8 score of 0.21 compared to an average for all state schools of -0.03.
Free schools have come under fire, particularly from the teaching unions, for high teacher turnover, lack of oversight, and closures (which often cost the government significant amounts). They have also been accused of driving inequality.
Let us briefly take each of these in turn: high turnover is perhaps an issue, but this is because innovative schools often attract ambitious teachers who seek quick promotion and progression and avoid stagnating in roles. Free schools have just the same Ofsted oversight as other schools (and are often examined by other bodies also). The accusation of closures is often more nuanced than reported – a relatively limited number of secondary free schools have closed although a few in extraordinary circumstances which tends to garner media attention. Finally, these excellent schools are more likely to be set up in deprived areas than other schools and studies of similar schools in Sweden have shown that they actually increase attainment in nearby local authority funded schools.
The government has decided to gradually reduce the wages of the teachers in over 500 schools nationally relative to those in locally maintained schools
However, the government seems insistent on stripping away the freedoms which created a number of great schools in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill . Perhaps the most important of these is curricular freedom. Free Schools and Academies have the ability to decide their own programme of study. This allows schools to tailor their programme of study to the needs of their students. To give just one example, ARK Academies have developed a new curriculum for study which is so successful that over 1000 other schools have taken it on board.
Providing a variety of curriculum options builds on the advantages of school choice – where parents can shop between schools to find the best place for their child. While many will still consider proximity, this gives options for parents to select based on curricular excellence also. It allows schools to try new things, to innovate and to revert if changes are not beneficial. Schools collaborate and share best practices, learning from the improvements of others. By forcing all schools to teach a new national curriculum will place them in an unnecessary straitjacket which will damage the development of pioneering pedagogy and hurt students’ education in the long run.
Pay freedoms, where academies can choose to pay teachers more are also being taken away as salaries are brought into line with national levels. Yes, you read that right – the government is stopping schools paying teachers more. Some schools offer higher base rates of pay (the earlier mentioned ARK pays teachers 2.5% above national pay guidelines), others offer flexibility over pension contributions and salary – a brilliant innovation, and others can offer performance bonuses to effective teachers. This allows schools to recruit and retain excellent teachers.
However, the government has decided to gradually reduce the wages of the teachers in over 500 schools nationally relative to those in locally maintained schools. This will likely see even more teachers leaving the state sector to the private sector (which tends to pay more) and abroad (my old secondary school has seen staff leave to Dubai, Australia, Canada and others).
This change from the government will make it even harder for schools to recruit new staff at a time when it is most necessary
This is at a time when hiring is already under huge pressure. In 2023 only three secondary subjects met their recruitment targets – History, Classics and Physical Education. On average targets for secondary schools were missed by 50%. Physics departments were only able to hire 17% of the staff they wanted.
To make this worse, freedoms over recruiting teachers will also be taken away from academies. Under previous laws, such schools were able to hire anyone as a teacher regardless of previous training. This may sound weird and dangerous, but in fact, it helps headteachers and governors recruit driven and effective staff who may have teaching experience abroad or in the independent sector or who perhaps are seeking a career change later in life (some of my best teachers entered the profession via this route).
This change from the government will make it even harder for schools to recruit new staff at a time when it is most necessary. And yet the government is proposing cutting 13,600 teachers out of the workforce (or retraining them for a cost of £54-£127 million to the Treasury). A simple understanding of the position of schools currently is all that should be necessary to realise that it is a foolish and damaging policy.
Our Education Secretary has her priorities all wrong. The Education system is not perfect, but the problem is not academies and free schools. If she wants to confront the real issues at hand, she should increase support for SEND students, commission a review into increasing non-attendance, or try to find a solution to the recruitment and retention crisis in schools.
Instead she has declared war on some of the most successful state schools in the country. Why? The only answer I can see is that she and her team are motivated by a visceral instinct to attack what has gone before instead of following the evidence. This threatens the education of children throughout the country and should be opposed.
Comments (1)
I suppose the primary issue with education over the last 20 years is not that averages aren’t improving – you’ve provided great statistics to show otherwise. But rather that inequalities within education in the country are actually getting worse – that is, it is worse in absolute terms to be in the most deprived 20% of the country now than it was in 2005. A child from one of our poorest areas is now 27 times more likely to attend a school rated ‘inadequate’ than a child in one of our wealthiest areas. And only 12.3% of the most disadvantaged pupils in England access full-time higher education by the age of 19.
And so it may well be that free schools are providing enterprising brilliance for parents to choose. It may well be that the return of choice to the national curriculum and the bypassing of local government (paradoxically seen as the option with ‘greater flexibility’, as though Whitehall knows what Barnsley needs better than local councillors do) leads to some children having better school careers than they otherwise would have. But meanwhile, the plight of the poorest in our society continue to suffer disproportionately more than the rest of us do. That’s what I’d like to see Phillipson focus on.