Acadamies - what went wrong?

[Mechanoid]

After sending my last child off to school and her getting settled and doing really well, I decided to get back into the world of work and considered being a TA. I volunteered at my daughter's school and found that I loved it. After a while, I signed up with an agency and have been in paid work ever since. I love it.

I'm a graduate and had considered Teaching initially, but I actually prefer being a TA - I'm very good at it and love what I do. So imagine my disappointment then, when I started applying for jobs as a TA and being told (always by academies!) that "TA's are Teachers these days!".

Interestingly, they seem happy with unqualified people Teaching, but not with paying qualified rates...how odd!

In a state school, TA are just that: TA's! But academies aren't schools and I would NEVER send my child to one. Any views?

Do most of the secondary pupils live outside the community?

mrz Do most of the secondary pupils live outside the community? Why do you ask?

well if local voters are made up primarily of OAPs (with no grandchildren living locally) and childless couples the parents and families of the secondary pupils must live somewhere else?

mrz well if local voters are made up primarily I didn't say primarily. There doesn't need to be a whole lot in it to win the majority vote. A lot will also depend on the opposition candidates. Non of the parties put education at the front of their campaigns. In fact non of them included it at all. It would have been interesting to see who would have one if one of them had.

There doesn't need to be a whole lot in it to win the majority vote unless you upset local voters and they decide to make a point at the next poll

mrz unless you upset local voters and they decide to make a point at the next poll. It will if the opposition candidates are an even less appealing option.

faced with voter appathy I guess they can do what they want

Sorry to post and then not come back.

I work in a small LA and returned to the area a year ago after a 3 year absence from the area. The school I now work at is an academy and was the worst school in the country 5 years ago (think GCSE's in single digits) and now is the best in the LA (68% A*-C including Eng & Maths last year).

One other secondary school was forced into academisation last year and if the rumours are true there will be another 3 opening in September. This is after lots of OFSTED activitiy this year. Schools have gone from satisfactory to requiring improvement and GCSE grades have been continually slipping as has VA (which has kept the secondary schools safe as pupils come from KS2 with very low achievement)

The LA has been heavily criticised in its own monitoring reports and the only secondary that was outstanding is now good (after very recent OFSTED). As a lowly teacher (and only ever getting as high as head of department) I am not informed of the what goes on behind the scenes. All I know is that having worked in the LA for 10 years any assistance requested was poor, and even working in the "outstanding" school the HT was constantly fighting them. We often sought training for new initiatives from outside the authority and paid for it.

I am not so up on the primaries, I know of one conversion last year and two conversions from September.

There are HUGE recruitment issues. High cost of living (being in the south) and especially housing does not help.Also the whole "inner city" culture makes it a tough old place to work. I do sometimes wonder if life would not be easier in a leafy suburb of grammar.....

That's interesting, kscience. Do you have any views on what has enabled the school you are at to improve its results so much? Is it a new headteacher; better qualified staff (in which case, how did the school attract them?); better support from an academy chain than was received from the LA; extra funding from somewhere; freedom from the national curriculum? If part of a chain, how much does the academy chain impose its will on the school and how much is the HT allowed to do his/her own thing, so far as you can tell? Also, how quickly did it improve its results and were all improvements post-academisation, or had it already started along that path post-Ofsted pressure?

Apologise again for not being regular poster.
The school was definitely not on the way to improvement when taken over. The results in single figures were the first year of academisation but have very slowly improved over 5 years.
IMO The biggest change in the school has been the behaviour management and expectations of senior management. I used to live opposite the school (and have been friends with staff that worked there), and it was DIRE. the first year or 2 the staff were incredibly tough on behaviour (and still are in many ways) but it meant that teachers could get down to teaching and the expectation that pupils have to be in class and working and not just a presence/ that school is a social occasion was a key factor.
Being an academy and having more freedom with cash has meant MUCH smaller classes (and not just lower sets) and a longer school day (6x 1 hour lessons) with MUCH more emphasis on English and Maths especially at KS3.
Freedom with cash has also been targeted. It is an area of massive social deprivation and lots of support is given to kids who do not have an "ideal" home life. e.g. we have a car and minibus that go pick up those who are not sent to school (some regulars who's parents can't/won't do it), we have some pupils who change into uniform at school each day (uniform washed by school), we have space for homework support and all free school meals kids get breakfast, lunch (good quality cooked on site with salad bar and fruit bar every day) and can get snacks at the end of the day.

There is a lot of corporate academy stuff, but the head teacher is a bit rebellious and if she cant see the purpose/ advantage won't play ball.
Of course not everything is perfect but there is a sense from the staff of "being in it for the kids" and being very proud of where they have come from.

It is down to management, not just the system. Any good management team can play the system for the benefit of the pupils (I have seen good management in comprehensive too). I am very lucky to have found some jolly good head teachers that treat their staff like people not robots, but have high expectations from staff and pupils alike.

Not RTT but the number of unqualified teachers in state schools has been falling since 2005 - here

www.theguardian.com/education/2014/apr/10/rise-number-unqualified-teachers-state-funded-schools-england

That's great, kscience - it sounds like you've got an excellent HT who has built up a good leadership team around her and has the respect of her staff.

Can maintained schools not opt for smaller class sizes, then? Was this achieved by making the whole school smaller? I'm guessing lengthening the school day is something only an academy school can do?

You describe the school as being in an area of massive deprivation, which must mean it gets a lot of extra funding from the pupil premium. What happened before 2011, when the pupil premium was introduced? Would the school have been considerably less well off than it is, now (I believe the pupil premium attracts nearly £1,000 per secondary school pupil premium child extra in funding from the government, which can amount to quite a lot if there is a high proportion of pupil premium children at the school)? Or would it have been receiving as much government money, but under a different scheme?

Can maintained schools not opt for smaller class sizes, then

Not as easily as academies. The LA sets PAN for maintained schools whereas an academy sets its own PAN, so the LA can usually force a maintained school to take more pupils regardless of the views of the staff and governors. Of course, if an academy sets a low PAN it can lead to more successful appeals on the grounds that the school can clearly cope with more pupils. It is also the case that many academies have found they can get the services they used to get from the LA at lower cost than the amount the LA used to top slice from their budget, giving them more money to spend on staff. The freedom to set staff salaries is also relevant although less so in the short term as the salaries of existing staff are protected under TUPE.

I'm guessing lengthening the school day is something only an academy school can do

Correct.

State maintained schools can alter the length of the school day after consultation with parents and governors with LEA permission we did it a few years ago

Sorry. For some reason I was thinking school holidays rather than school days. It is slightly easier for an academy to change the length of the school day but yes, any school can do it.

I knew maintained schools could alter their hours by a bit, because my dss' school talked about doing this, but wasn't sure whether they could, eg, decide to increase the school day by several hours. I guess with LA, parent and governor permission, though, they ought to be able to!

The school hours/holidays thing highlights how very different different groups of peoples' needs and expectations are, though. I would not at all welcome an increase in my children's school hours, because they do activities outside of school which the school does not offer and which would clash with school if school went on until later in the day. Even if the school did offer those activities, or people came into school to offer them on school premises, I would rather they had time to do things outside of the school environment, with their family or with another provider. However, I can see that what is flexibility and freedom for one person is just lack of provision and/or inconvenience for others. Changing school holidays wouldn't suit me, either, at the moment - outside school activities tend to fit more or less around traditional term times, not individual schools all doing something different!...

Oh, and with relatives living abroad and having children whose term times are different from ours, that is already enough of a nightmare in terms of meeting up with friends and family...

Surely the fact the LA charge more for the same services that acadamies get (presumably from other providers) means that the La are wasting money?

www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-22571711
www.educationbusinessuk.net/index.php/features/6--sp-806/3156-academies-financial-practice-under-scrutiny

etc ....

the La are wasting money

Both public and private sectors waste money. No matter what we do some of our taxes will always be wasted. More specifically considering academies, some LAs were providing services that academies have, rightly or wrongly, decided they don't need. Some LAs are more efficient than others, i.e. they provide the same services and the same quality of service at lower cost. And some LAs are now providing academies with the same services they used to provide to schools but at lower cost, which does rather suggest that those LAs were not being as efficient as they could have been in the past.