Get a grip...

The Public Accounts Committee has waded into the education debate according to a SchoolsWeek article last week that claimed the DfE now tops the PAC's list of concern. This may be the right conclusion but for entirely the wrong reasons. 

Apparently the Committee Chair, Meg Hillier, criticised the lack of accountability and transparency and highlighted the DfE's 'lack of grip'. She then went on at length about Bright Tribe in that classic politician manner of extrapolating from outliers to create an absurd straw man.

It is depressing that almost total ignorance of the complexity of a situation no longer precludes people from strongly held opinions. Absurd oversimplification appears to be a prerequisite for high office in politics. I'm afraid the committee has got the situation completely arse about face.

The problem with the education system at present is that there is too much grip from too many agencies without any actual control. All of which stifles the system and prevents teachers and school leaders from acting in the interests of children.

Allow me to reproduce a briefing note that I prepared for a civil servant the other day:

Current status of the education system

• Massively fragmented school system 152 LAs, 740 MATs, 1,651 stand alone academies
• Stuck with a multi-provider system where the biggest MAT is smaller than the smallest LA
• Average size of primaries not in MATs is 279 (VA-VC average 189) which is basically non-viable in long term

Impact of problem

• MATs aren’t big enough to survive and LAs are left with the least viable schools so will get even weaker
• RSCs have an impossible job to manage an average of 90 MATs and 200 stand alone academies each, whilst working with roughly 20 LAs
• Most LAs have almost no school improvement capacity left
• Overly defensive approach (to avoid PR disasters) leads to overlapping and contradictory regulation that bleeds what little capacity remains in the system 
• Just because top line indicators are not going South now does not mean this is not happening. The system is basically being held together by hyper-productive individuals in small organisations who do not have the time or often the inclination to succession plan. When they leave or trip up inadvertently through overstretch their organisations fail behind them
• RSCs do not know this because they do not have the capacity to ‘know’ the system they run. We have lost much of our tacit knowledge.

Possible solutions

• Raise the average number of pupils per organisation to something like 20,000 by any means possible (creating LA MATs, merging MATs, merging MATs with LAs) to reduce the management pressure on RSC and other points of failure
• Separate funding from oversight. If you want a self improving system we want to encourage self-reporting and at present this is disincentivized by lack of trust in system (ESFA cannot be funder and regulator)
• Change the legal status of Academy Trusts so that regulation can be simplified, cheapened and made more effective 
• Schools as companies and charities just leads to extra work that the sector does not have the skills or funding to address 
• You could let framework contracts for audit for each RSC region which would build relationships between audit providers and RSCs thus growing tacit knowledge and reduce cost of audit 

The main issue in the education system isn't the odd stupid, corrupt or venal senior manager getting caught with their fingers in the till. This has always happened and there is no more of it now than before. Indeed my primary school headteacher went to prison 40 odd years ago for fiddling his expenses. We're just better at catching people as we have much more transparency about the management and funding of schools than we have ever had. The example the PAC Chair gives is one of success not failure.

It also shows a misunderstanding of regulation as a process. Regulators are NOT responsible for failure in a system they are responsible for highlighting failure and prosecuting it where appropriate. The knowledge that if you break the rules you are likely to be caught and punished is what keeps those who are actually responsible for failure on their toes. The regulator cannot and must not manage; separation of powers 101. Unfortunately this is something that many regulators do not understand [1].

The problem is elsewhere and much much bigger. It is that the system is so fragmented and fractured that it is on the verge of breaking point. And nobody is talking about it. The issue isn't school budgets although that is where it breaks through to the public consciousness. It is that we no longer pay for the system costs of education. Or indeed think about it as a system.

We are stuck with a multi-provider system for the time being because no party has a joined up plan. Labour's National Education Service will fail spectacularly and expensively because there is no longer the capacity to run schools through their reimagined LAs nor the money to roll the academy project back. The Conservative approach appears to be the spouting of platitudes and ensuring that someone else is to blame for failure i.e. not having a plan at all because they know they haven't got enough money to pay for it.

Frankly it is time to take the education system away from politicians. They can't be trusted with it because they don't think things through thoroughly enough.

____________________________
[1] I exclude Ofsted from this criticism as my experience of them is as an agency who are very aware of their role and very reflective and self critical