Governance revisited...

I have complained before about the guff written about governance despite also being guitly of contributing to it [1]. But the debate is so clouded by the conflation of arguments that I feel compelled to revisit. Emma Knight's recent blog from the NGA is a prime example of an argument that purports to be about governance but is essentially an attack on academy trusts and ignores the only element of governance that matters. 

The function of governance is to ask one question, "Is it working?" This can be qualified by supplementary questions such as, "Is it getting better quickly enough?". But ultimately the first question is the one that matters. 

The trouble with the arguments presented in the NGA blog is one of framing. The blog seeks to question the effectiveness of academy governance by contrasting it with the governance of maintained schools and asserting that 'localness' is the thing that is missing.

First and foremost, the governance of local authority maintained schools is not the yardstick. Local does not equate to good and central does not automatically equate to bad. Whether you support or oppose academies [2], maintained school governance is average at best and in the main absent. Its weakness was why academy reforms were implemented in the first place. 

When a school is good, or even better, the source of its success is more often the school leader than the governing body. The DfE has known this for years but doesn't say it publicly. Because it doesn't want to piss off all the good people who volunteer to be school governors and because the DfE knows that it lacks the capacity to actually govern the schools itself. Indeed many schools are good despite their governing bodies; whilst most schools that are weak are so because of their governing bodies. 

For clarity I am not claiming that Academy Governance is any better, only that it tends to be more centralised. 

When a school is not working and is not getting better quickly enough it is often the governing body that is resisting the need to improve either by rejecting the need or by excusing the progress. Whilst academy 'freedoms' were largely bullshit peddled to get new and vigorous 'business people' involved in bringing efficient 'corporate governance' to schools, the one freedom that academy trusts do have is the freedom to dismiss ineffective local governors.

Emma's assertion that, "The evidence tells us local governance is here to stay" is perhaps the most dangerous in her blog. First she cites no evidence. She alludes only to opinion and preference. But the question to be asked by and of governance is, "Is it working?" not, "Is it local?". The things we should be examining are which models of governance work, not which ones we like or affiliate with politically.

Now before you think I am lobbying for centralised control, I should point out that I am a card carrying fan of subsidiarity. I firmly believe that decisions should be made as close to the people that they impact as the capacity of the people making the decision allows. But that does not mean that local is automatically best. I would not expect a Teaching Assistant to set the budget for a school any more than I should be allowed to design the curriculum for a school which I might visit no more than once as year. The decisions should be made where the knowledge of the people impacted is balanced by the professional expertise required to make the decision. 

And doing that does not automatically require local governing bodies. What it does require is better stakeholder engagement in all schools.

There are two practical things we could do to encourage this change. 

First government could require that MATs consult children, parents and stakeholders regularly for their views and publish their responses in their annual reports.We poll our staff and parents every half term and publish their opinions twice a year.

Second, and I have been suggesting this for years, Ofsted could decouple its leadership judgement from its governance judgement. It would very quickly become apparent which schools have governing bodies and SLTs woking together in alignment and which have school leaders furiously coaching their governors the night before inspection.

[1] Here is one of my previous attempts to simplify the subject

[2] I am on the record as stating that the manner in which this government and its predecessors have implemented academy reforms is nothing short of cultural vandalism

Bloody grammar schools again

I have written before about the trouble with grammar schools. This post from six years ago still stands up. It is depressing that despite all the evidence, it is such a persistent idea in this country's politics. 

I was on a zoom call today where colleagues mused that given the recent ministerial appointments made to the DfE, which are as much a metaphorical middle finger to the profession as the actual middle finger given by Andrea Jenkyns to protestors outside Downing Street earlier this year, a policy adjustment to expand selection at age 11 is almost inevitable.

There were some rational people on the call, who reasoned that rather than ignore this policy as a distraction from our core purpose, we should at least engage with it to attempt to mitigate it with a least worst option.

But something inside me snapped.

This is as far as I can go...

You can have your expansion of grammar schools but only if you:

• Publicly drop the "levelling up" policy and admit that it was a lie
• Explain that the reason for expanding selection is that you want to spend less on state education whilst pretending to support a meritocracy and also state that it is your policy ambition for many schools in the areas affected to be worse than they are today
• Require all new grammar schools to accept only 50% by academic selection with the balance being allocated by lottery regardless of ability
• Force all MPs that support the policy to send their children to secondary modern schools regardless of ability

People who win rigged lotteries tend to support lotteries. They are also disinclined to examine the extent to which they were rigged.

Power is nothing without control

I first met Sam Freedman in the winter of 2011/12 at the DfE when Caroline Whalley and I and a small bunch of volunteers were setting up the Elliot Foundation. Over the years since I have sat opposite him at multiple think tanks and education events and occasionally exchanged tweets. But Twitter is not really my thing in the way that it is his. I have found him to be an interesting and deep thinker about education. I have been surprised by how often I have agreed with him and even when I don’t, how much I respect his approach. 

Last month he published a paper through the Institute for Government entitled, "Gove reforms a decade on: what worked. what didn't, what next?". I know there are much more important things going on but if we want to make the world a less stupid, selfish and dangerous place, then education policy is important. It is particularly important now as there is a government white paper about to be published and almost all eyes are looking elsewhere.

General background points

The founding idea of school trusts was to create organisations (charities), liberated from stifling bureaucracy and ineffective local government, with the single purpose of improving education for all. My concern about Sam's recommendations in their entirety is that they appear to recommend the reattachment of multiple levels of bureaucracy and the reconnection to local government, which is more ineffective now than when academies were originally conceived. 

If you want to improve the education system you have to rebuild capacity, coherence and clarity. Organisational groupings of schools (LAs and MATs) have to become legally equivalent and operationally compatible. To be more explicit 250-500 school operating organisations regulated by a single entity split into 10-15 regions would make the role of each regional regulator possible. I have long argued that LAs should be allowed to run MATs before they lose any more of their system knowledge and capacity.

But the difficulty of this proposed end state is that it would cost a significant amount to achieve. And we have spent most of our school improvement budget on the transaction costs of transferring 50% of schools to academy status. This is the equivalent of spending your entire system improvement budget on a new name for the project.

Premises on which we agree

The education sector is not in an ideal state. The impact of fragmentation was entirely predicted. I have written elsewhere on the challenges of incoherent, overlapping and occasionally contradictory regulation (Education System Design: Foundations, Policy Options and Consequences, Nov 2020). There has been marginal improvement in both the academy and LA maintained sector but nothing significant. There are good MATs and good LAs but equally there are poor MATs and poor LAs. However, the overall incidence of schools requiring improvement or worse has not moved outside the 13-15% bracket for the last decade.

Premises on which we disagree

Sam seems to feel that there is insufficient clarity around educational expectations, a lack of authority holding trusts to account and powers missing to intervene where necessary. On this we disagree. There is no shortage of authority. School Trusts are amongst the most regulated parts of the public sector. The problem is not the absence of power it is the absence of coherence and intelligence in the system to use its abundant powers with discretion.

The ESFA and RSCs between them have the power to take schools away from trusts and close trusts entirely in the event of contractual breach. If a school trust fails to improve outcomes across its schools as a whole, then it is failing to meet its core purpose. By definition this is a failure of governance. The statutory powers to intervene already exist they are just not being used very well. The reason for this is the gearing ratio between RSCs and the level below them. There are simply too many organisations, all of whom will plead special circumstances when challenged, for the RSCs or the ESFA to act confidently. RSCs have less than ½ a day per year for each organisation over which they have oversight.

In the 1990's Pirelli ran a print ad of American Olympic sprinter Carl Lewis in red high heels with the strap line, "Power is nothing without control". Legislators legislate and this is our danger. Adding more powers into a fragmented system will only cause more damage as they will be used without insight. You don't put a jet engine on a wonky bicycle and then act surprised when you're picking up teeth from the road.

Central recommendations from,"Gove reforms a decade on" with annotations

I have taken the 15 recommendations from the IFG paper and sorted them into three categories with rationales for each.

Support	Discuss further	Challenge
2. "Establish a single arm’s length regulator for academy trusts, merging the academies  responsibilities of regional schools commissioners and the Education and Skills  Funding Agency"  Completely agree! Create clarity and consistency. But separate out the Funding Agency from the Regulator to avoid perverse incentives and conflicts of interest. And most importantly ensure the regulator has the capacity to to perform its functions with discretion.	1. "Create a proper statutory basis for academies, MATs and academy regulation."   We don't need more statutory powers. We just need the clarity of structure and purpose for the powers that already exist to become useful.	4. "Publish a high-level framework setting expectations for MATs against which they  can be assessed by the regulator. All assessments should be transparent. " You don't need a new framework to exercise power with discretion. The success or failure of a school operating organisation is directly inferred from the performance of its schools in their contexts. An ‘angels on a pinhead’ league table would be a waste of time and money on which no one would agree. Why create independent organisations whose sole reason for existence is to improve outcomes for children and then tell them how to do it?
5. "Give local authorities the power to ask the regulator to direct academies to increase or reduce their published admissions number (PAN), if they can make a case that  they will not otherwise be able to meet their sufficiency duty effectively." Provided that this power was reciprocated and MATs could ask the regulator to adjust their own PANs up and down in the face of LA intransigence (which is as common as the MAT awkwardness implied by this recommendation)	3. "Give the new regulator powers to intervene to close or merge MATs for both  financial/compliance failures and failure to provide adequate educational support." I would argue this is not needed as it already exists. They already have the power to intervene on educational underperformance through their powers on failure of governance. They also have significant coercive powers. There is danger of creating an accountability revolving door here.	7. "Give local authorities control over all schools’ admissions policy to ensure fairness." I'm beginning to suspect that Sam has been captured by the LGA lobby. LA control does not necessarily equate to fairness. This would also set quite a lot of hares running with faith schools...
8.  "Give local authorities the right of access to MAT data, including attendance records."  I see no problem in this. We are public bodies funded by public money. We should be transparent and connected to local government.	6. "Give MATs a duty to set out their forward plans for expansion and to discuss these  with local authorities. "  MATs already have a duty in company and charity law to set out and publish their plans. Just make us write better annual reports	9. "Consider if further powers for local authorities are necessary in light of the ongoing  DfE review of SEND provision." Absolutely not! They don't need more power. They need more money. Otherwise they will simply transfer the problem to schools and blame them for failure in the same way that central government currently does to them. The challenge here is where in the overall education settlement we find this money for SEND as the treasury will not support otherwise. See earlier blog on SEND funding.
11.” Set a strong expectation that all schools will join a MAT. Use incentives and clear  messaging to encourage the shift to a single system rather than forcing schools  to comply. “ Yes absolutely.	10. "Create an additional package of legal powers for local authorities to be triggered  when all their schools are academies, including the right to hold public hearings  of MATs and a limited right to insist academies co-operate with integration of local  children’s services" I think this is dangerous. Yes, we need to incentivise a move towards a coherent system. But I suspect this would incentivise the wrong behaviours. Some LAs would kick all their schools out and then judge them in what looks like a kangaroo court. You would simply have a revolving door of suppliers overcharging and getting fired for not improving anything.	14. "Create a mechanism whereby an individual school can make a request to the regulator to move to a different MAT, if they can make a strong case that they would  benefit educationally. " This is the most dangerous idea of the lot. All you have to do is ask yourself how will people behave if this happens? First it allows schools to opt out of school improvement if they don't like their MAT. Second it requires legal contortions to apportion rights to a body that no longer exists. Third it will incentivise charities to act against their charitable purposes and give oil to squeaky wheels. And most importantly fourth it will create the situation where rather than act to improve outcomes for children, MATs will use public money to promote and market themselves to their school leaders, as it is much cheaper to get people to like you than to improve a system. All to address a problem which doesn't exist, to whit the false notion that regulators lack the power to take schools away from MATs that are failing them.
	12. "Inject significantly more capacity-building funding into high-performing small MATs  and provide funding to new strategic and high-potential MATs. This should include  organisations spun out of local authorities, many of which already exist to provide  support services." Maybe talk to some of the larger MATs who have done this already amongst the chaos of the last decade and could help. Giving money to small MATs who don't know about growth risk and organisational design is dangerous. And please don't ask the DfE about this as they do not know.	15. "This would require legislation to give a group of representatives associated with  each school a legal status independent of the MAT so that a body existed that could  make the request."  This is just an additional point which tacitly recognised the silliness of point 14 and creates a process so bureaucratic as to negate its own purpose.
	13. "Empower the new regulator to create regional MATs to take on schools that cannot find another MAT to work with. It may be necessary to create several of these with different functions (for example, to cover small rural schools). " This has already been partially done and isn't exactly flying as an idea. It also completely subverts the whole idea of school trusts. If the regulator you propose conceives, commissions, directs, manages and dissolves, then it is not a regulator. You have just subsumed the entire school system back into direct administration by the DfE, which I have already shown lacks the tacit knowledge or capacity to perform this role.

Summary

We should not legislate on the basis that we haven't done so for a while. And before we do, we should ask the question, if we create these new rules, how would different agents in the system behave? 

A bang and a whimper

On the day that Russia invaded Ukraine, it seems important to put down some contemporaneous thoughts. I am no expert and my opinions deserve no more attention than they merit. I am entirely prepared to listen to and even concede to other people's opinions, particulary when they are more informed than mine.

I am deeply saddened and not at all optimistic about how this will play out. To mangle a metaphor, these are chickens coming home to roost, whose antecedents stretch back many years in many directions. Yet we seem to have little regard for how we got here. The internet is full of people screaming certainties at each other with little regard for nuance or the contradictory and multiple truths. The first casualty of war is the truth but we’ve been killing the truth for some time now.

Before you assume that, given my time spent in Russia in the 1990s, this is an apology for Putin, it is not. Putin is a grubbly little narcissist [1]. But he is significantly more intelligent than Johnson or Macron. Like all narcissists, rather than confront his own shortcomings, he attempts to reshape the entire world to fit his view of himself. Unfortunately, he may be clever enough, his opponents naive and fickle enough, and his timing fortuitous enough to benefit significantly. I suspect much will depend on how far China sees this as an opportunity to advance its own position.

First to the idiots like UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, who yesterday said, "we'll kick Putin's backside", like the Scots Guards did in the Crimea in 1853. It's charming that Ben was literate enough to read his regimental history when he served in the Scots Guards. But I suspect he struggles with any real history or his own departmental papers. The relative strengths of the British and Russian armed forces in 1853 bear no relation to today. You probably only need primary education to understand the differences. This is the empty bluster of English exceptionalism. We are not a first rank world military power anymore, we are barely a first rank economic power. Although it is an established principle of international law that might is not right, we should have had that argument when Russia invaded the Crimea much more recently in 2014. 

Second to those on the left including the Corbyn and the Stop The War Coalition, who blame NATO and Western aggression for provoking Putin. If you oppose imperialism you need to be consistent in your opposition because Putin seeks nothing more or less than the restoration of a lost empire, as George Monbiot commendably pointed out earlier today.

Third to those on the right screaming 'imperialist aggression' at Putin, check your own recent history before proceding. The second Iraq war was almost certainly imperialist and economically, opportunistically aggressive. Likewise Putin has at least as much, if not more, claim to sovereignty over Ukraine as the UK has to the Falkland Islands or Gibraltar. Unless you want to stand on the principle of self-determination.

Fourth, to the libertarian little Englanders on twitter who claim we have no role in this crisis and that Putin is entitled to invade Ukraine; equating its relationship with Russia as being that of the Isle of Wight to the UK.  If the Isle of Wight or the Falkland Islands or Scotland, Wales or Northern Island for that matter wished to secede from the United Kingdon as independent states, then they can. 

It would appear that the majority of the 44 million Ukranians do not wish to be reattached to the Russian yoke. The Ukranian identity reaches back to the 9th century at least and its relationship with Russia and the Rus is fractious, complex and equally long. If you do not know what the Holodomor is, look it up. Surely there is a moral obligation to defend another sovereign country's right to self-determination? That is after all what most of the people holding this view used as their justification for supporting Brexit.

Fifth, to those who cry moral outrage, nothing can justify this aggression. What did you say when the World Bank and IMF made Russia grovel at the end of the Cold War? Russia was humiliated by the West. Instead of taking the farsighted nation building of the post WWII Marshall Plan (arguably one of America's greatest contributions to world peace) we effectively bankrupted Russia and destroyed its burgeoning and outward looking middle class twice. The parallels between the vindictiveness at the Paris Peace Conference and the subsequent rise of National Socialism are alarming. And I use the term National Socialism deliberately as Hitler's appeal was to nationalism, unreasonable poverty and unjustified shame.

Sixth, we have no place making moral arguments when we have been money launderers in chief to the Russian kleptocracy for the last 25 years. We have no place making moral arguments when our own Prime Minister is a moral vacuum.

But where does that leave us. If we are not strong enough to challenge the idea that might is right on behalf of the vulnerable. If we have no right to cast a stone against imperialist aggression when we are amonst the most aggresive imperialists of all. If we have no moral place to stand because we have no morals...

The only path is a multilateral one. However difficult or slow or painful. And to take it we must accept our share of blame for letting this happen. We must allow multiple conflicting and contradictory views to co-exist rather than rushing to oversimplify or blame.

As has been said many times in the Northern Ireland peace process, there is no hierarchy of suffering, there is no difference in a mother's tears.

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[1] Johnson and Macron are probably the ranking narcissists of the current UN Security Council after Putin but I breathe a huge sigh of relief that Trump is a former rather than current President of the USA. This relief is immediately tempered by the dread realisation that Johnson is perhaps the least suited or capable of British Prime Minsters of the last hundred years to deal with this crisis, with the possible exception of Anthony Eden.