Small changes in closed systems... catastrophic consequences

One of the problems of continued education reform in the country is the gap between the practioners and the policy makers. Since neither talk to each other very often or very efficiently, the feedback loop is broken and mistake is built upon misinterpretation upon overreaction upon error of judgement. Rather than seek to solve problems or improve systems almost all parties and stakeholders seek simply to defend a position.

There was a piece in TES a couple of weeks ago drawing on an interview with the CEO of the RSA academies which suggested that, "Schools should be allowed to leave MATs after five years" and "Creating fixed-term rather than permanent relationships would change the dynamic for all schools working as part of a MAT"

There seems to be a connection between this idea and and Sir David Carter's recent concept of "try before you buy"

Now before I go any further I should declare loudly that both of these pieces may have been taken out of context and if this is the case then I apologise in advance and if challenged with evidence I will review my position but...

WHEN A SCHOOL BECOMES AN ACADEMY IT EFFECTIVELY CEASES TO EXIST AS A LEGAL ENTITY!

An academy is simply a location in an outsourcing contract between government and a limited company with charitable objects. When a school becomes an academy it closes. What replaces it are a complicated set of contractual obligations.

Let's say there is a school called X in location L. School X's governing body decide to become an academy and to join Multi-Academy Trust Y. The government in the person of the Regional Schools Commissioner (acting under authority delegated from the Secretary of State) enters into a contract with Multi Academy Trust Y to provide education to children at location L in perpetuity.

This is a very one sided contract. The government gets to determine what 'education' looks like and what is and isn't good. It gets to determine how much it will pay. And it gets to change the rules whenever it likes at any time by adding additional responsibilities which Multi Academy Trust "Y" cannot refuse.

The only thing that MAT Y can do if it doesn't like the changes in its contract is that it can give the school back to government as long as it provides seven years notice.

The problems with allowing a school to leave the MAT after five years are multiple but the two biggest ones are these.

1. You need to confer legal rights onto entities that don't exist
2. If you confer those rights they can only really be exercised to a negative purpose

So (1), as explained above when a school becomes an academy the responsibility for its money, its staff and its children passes entirely to the MAT. The school, the governing body and the headteacher have no powers other than those that the Trustees of the MAT chose to delegate to them. And just to be clear that means the MAT can take these powers away again.

If the school does not like the MAT and wishes to exercise the opportunity to leave then who has this power and how do you give it to them. Is it the headteacher or the governing body? If either is to have these rights then you need a mechanism in the contract (which is the Supplementary Funding Agreement between the MAT and the Government) to confer these rights and the timings. Which in turn would require primary legislation.

But the bigger problem is (2) even if you get round the problem above you would confer a right that could only be used to undermine an entity that only exists to improve outcomes in schools. If headteachers or local governing bodies can opt out of a MAT then no MAT is ever going to invest in schools.

It is equivalent to a home owner deciding unilaterally to stop paying their mortgage and the bank not having the power to repossess the home against which the loan has been made. 

To be absolutely clear I am not suggesting that MATs should not be held to account for the performance of their schools, they must be. But the mechanism for doing this exists already it is the RSCs and their powers to pursue a MAT for breach of contract and take a school away from them.

To those who would counter this by saying schools can opt out of Local Authority control to become academies why shouldn't they be able to opt out of MATs, I would suggest that you have misunderstood the argument. It is the complex hinterland of the political buzzword 'choice' which is only ever presented as a good thing and a driver of markets. But for there to be a 'choice' there must be someone with the power and the ability to choose and something to choose between. If there is no power to choose or no choice, merely the perception of choice then you get disenfranchisement from the political process and ultimately Brexit, Trump and other forms of self-harm.

So as politely as I can, this is a really really silly idea.

Zero sum game

Behind all the kerfuffle over the weekend about TeachFirst inviting Toby Young to write a blog and then deleting it because it was "wrong" there are some important issues.
Here is Young's piece, "Are there any limits to what schools can achieve" that caused offence.

The upset came in large part because those taking offence detected a whiff of eugenics. Eugenics is the idea that some people are born stronger, smarter, and easier on the eye and we should aim to have more people like that and fewer weaker, stupider, uglier people. The methods used to achieve this “improvement” of the gene pool in recent history have included economic and political disenfranchisement, forced sterilisation and ethnic cleansing or genocide. This is why the debate got heated.

Eugenics was not limited to the Nazis nor can we glibly claim that it is entirely discredited as some of Francis Galton's hypotheses are now being supported by research evidence. [1]But before we get too hot under the collar, what did Young actually suggest? He pointed to a reasonable amount of research that children's life chances are more likely to be influenced by their social and genetic inheritance than their schooling.

Whilst I may not agree with all of Young's argument or conclusions [3], the idea that a child's parents and their overall social capital (money, level of education, network of connections etc.) have the greatest influence on any child's likelihood of life success is well established and evidenced [2]. Give a moron several hundred million dollars, a sense of entitlement and an address book and he can become leader of the free world... 

Equally established is the construct that schools should do their best to counter the unfair disadvantage of those children who are born without. Less clear is what schools can actually do about it. If money were no object then you could spend significantly more on disadvantaged children and help them catch up. This is the highly creditable idea behind pupil premium funding.

The difficulty is that there is not enough money in the system (and never will be) to give all state educated children a chance to catch up with those whose parents pay to educate them privately. And don't even think about listening to those who say it can be, because the The average fee for top boarding schools now exceeds £30,000 a year whilst the average funding for state primary education is less than £25 a day (or £4,670 per year).

This leads us, painfully, to the realisation that the only way to achieve greater equality is to hold those more fortunate back. And this is not a palatable idea - which in turn is one of the reasons that successive Labour governments have discussed, but ultimately pulled back from, abolishing private education. It is also the only intellectually robust defence of Grammar schools [3], "We don't have enough money to give every child a great education. But we only need 15% or fewer of them to be really well educated to keep the country running. So let's select the best and brightest and spend more on them." The moral difficulty with this position is how do you decide which children get the better education and at which cut-off point(s) do you decide.

The debate becomes even messier once we add in innate differences between children. I think one of the difficulties Young brought upon himself is using the term IQ as the measure of intelligence. Although an IQ score is understood as a measure of intelligence it is as susceptible to coaching as an 11 plus exam. Moreover, IQ is a limited set of attributes that could be explained as 'intelligence'. 

Whether one goes broader and accepts Howard Gardner's model of nine different Multiple Intelligence(s) or narrower to the 'g' model (a measure of general cognitive ability) we are setting ourselves up to fail by drawing the line in the wrong place. And that is before we consider the risks associated with labelling children, in that the children become the labels they are given whether the labels are accurate or not.

I hope that the debate now seems fuzzy, treacherous and probably destined to be unfair.
The discussion should be about how we provide the greatest possible equity of opportunity for all children for the money that society is prepared to pay. But not to pretend that this is excellence and certainly not for all...

....the best we can, given what we have and who we are. We should  aim for transparency about what is and is not possible and that will involve telling some difficult truths both to power and to the people.

 

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[1] The podcast library of In Our Time and The Infinite Monkey Cage are as good a place to start as any
[2] See the Rowntree Foundation, Hutton Trust and UNESCO research into the educational impact of child deprivation
[3] My personal view is that singling out people for 'special treatment' in education is as sinister as it sounds; whether it is via Grammar Schools, Free Schools or North Korean reeducation camps