This is why academization is a scandal ....

[Mischance]

Extract from a letter to The Guardian ........

Take my home town of York as an example: where once the 63 state schools were maintained by a director of children’s services on circa £110,000 and an assistant director of education on circa £80,000, we now have six Mats whose focus is increasingly drawn outside the city boundaries. Together they now employ six CEOs on salaries ranging from at least £130,000 to more than £160,000, six CFOs and several executive heads, and sport a combined wage bill for “key management personnel” that exceeds £7m – money the former education authority could only dream of. Meanwhile, more than a third of the city’s schools remain under the local authority.

With school attendance tanking, young people’s wellbeing in the doldrums and a special education needs system in crisis, public money that should be going into the classroom is instead going on duplicated roles and high individual salaries. This, and the lack of any meaningful local accountability, is the real scandal that needs addressing if we are to resolve the financial perils of an education sector that is no longer fit for purpose.

And how often do trusts get replaced I wonder? It might be a theoretical possibility but does it actually happen? And by the time that process had been gone through, hundreds of children will have gone through the school, and many many unhappy staff been working under unacceptable conditions.

We absolutely need to get back to local accountability and management; to responsive and caring management of schools. And to stop treating staff as part of a sliding block puzzle rather than human beings, and schools as theoretical problems rather living caring communities with their own characters and needs.

We have lost so much.

"And how often do trusts get replaced I wonder?"

Under current rules it happens whenever a school gets an "inadequate" judgement. Labour's Schools Bill will make it discretionary, (though I think the motivation for that is to have the discretion to keep an inadequate school under LA control).

It also sometimes happens voluntarily when a school is struggling financially. For example, it is common for single academy trusts to hand schools over to MATs to achieve economies of scale.

There have been some switches in my LA - one for inadequacy (school now Good) and at least two for financial reasons.

The economies of scale are a myth. We looked into this in some detail when we were investigating the whole issue for our school. The MATs were forced to admit that this was the case. Even where there were some small savings, they certainly did not justify the massive disruption and loss of autonomy of joining a MAT.

You only looked at it for one scenario - your school joining one specific MAT. The business case will be different for other MATs and other schools.

Nope ... we explored whole range of MATs. All had the same shortcomings.

In which case, don't academise. But if other schools do it is either because the business case to move was solid, or because there were other benefits of switching, or because the move was forced on them through inadequacy.

In my area, the LA supported schools that wanted to move to academisation and also supported schools that didn't. The split was broadly along secondary / primary lines. The LA still provides some services to the secondary academies, as well as to the primaries.

Nope .... they joined the MATs because they were underfunded and running scared. They felt they had no choice. They were happy well run schools overburdened with unfunded SEND children with assessed needs that they could not get fully funded. LA support has dwindled ... government policy. They had them by the balls.

In which case the business case did stack up. This keeps coming back to the politics though. As an individual you can't change who runs the country, but you can do the best for your school. If you set politics aside and considered the most pragmatic option for the school then it was the right decision. You can choose whether to continue to be involved or not.

At some point, the excellent people who run our school may retire or move on, and maybe our small MAT will be broken up or subsumed into a larger MAT. At that point I will probably move on too. But having witnessed the pre-academy educational landscape, which was at the mercy of local politicians with their own agendas, I'm pragmatic about that. Change is inevitable.

Indeed - and we did the best for our school by staying well away from the MATs. Those who got sucked in are regretting it and envy our freedom to retain which staff we wish, to respond to the needs of the pupils and staff, and to retain our place in the local community to the benefit of everyone. We have a consistent and loyal staff who provide continuity and security for pupils and parents.

It is not about politics - indeed it was a Labour government that brought in academies in the first place as secondary schools that would take on a role of helping struggling schools - how far we have come from that ideal! We are now in a situation where large unwieldy MATs with their glossy image and expensive executives really would rather not have anything to do with failing schools that might tarnish their image.

I think you need to separate your own experience from the big picture to acknowledge that many schools are having a positive experience of academisation. People will have more sympathy and respect for your views if you cut out the hyperbole. Obviously the title of your thread will attract like-minded posters that will help you to feel validated, but that just creates an echo chamber.

The lack of transparency in the finances of MATs is highlighted in the schools week article below.
As schools already receive funding based on pupil characteristics, then the MAT should leave each school with the appropriate amount of funding intended by the government.
The public need to see exactly how much top slice the MATs are taking from each individual school. When things are more transparent, I believe that we will see that schools are better served by a local body such as the LEA in terms of economies of scale and local decision-making around SEN provision etc. I think we will see too.much money is being spent on CEOs, executive heads etc.

schoolsweek.co.uk/schools-have-28-of-budgets-shaved-off-by-academy-trust-gag-pooling/

No hyperbole. I am simply describing our experience and the feedback from many other people around the region and further afield In many different schools and MATS. Indeed my own GC are in a school where a MAT has caused a great deal of trouble... teachers randomly moved about and children confused and upset.

It is not an echo chamber on this thread ... it is people with serious concerns expressing them on this forum. This is as it should be.

A local secondary trust was in great trouble ... financial irregularity, bullying of staff ... it took years to sort it out and good staff were lost to the detriment of the pupils.

This is no hyperbole ... it is a factual description.

It is a model that has been found wanting and children are being sold short ... not just because of the wastage of funds but because staff morale is compromised wth a knock on effect for the pupils.

One thing that will have to be faced in future years is how closure of schools in different MATs is managed in response to falling rolls.

Locally, there are two primaries that are less than half full and shrinking, serving the same area. However, they belong to separate MATs, and the rest of the schools in each MAT do not have capacity to accommodate all the pupils if ‘their’ school closes.

If they were LA schools, the two half full schools would merge to form one serving the area and one would close. But neither MAT can pro-actively close their school to donate their pupils to the other - so both struggle along, a huge net financial drain on their MATs and with very limited likelihood of improvement.

This will, I suspect, be repeated nationwide, first in primaries and then in secondaries over coming years.

It is indeed a flawed model. MAT against MAT, school against school.

Realistically, though, there is not a financially and practically viable route back to full LA control.

So what we need to do is put in safeguards / processes to reduce the downsides of the model:

• Standard payscales for all central MAT staff based on size of MAT (like the leadership pay scales for different headships)
• Streamlined processes for compulsory opening of new schools (especially special schools), closing non-viable schools and moving schools from poorly-performing MATs, all based on strategic local / regional planning.
• Close scrutiny of distribution if spending between individual schools and central MAT functions, as part of a regular (annual for finance, safeguarding and provision for SEN, every 3 years for other performance measures) deep-diving Ofsted inspection of all MATs, with full transparency.

You are right that better rules, better scrutiny and safeguards are needed. But this is just tinkering round the edges. When there were concerns about all those things re LA schools, rather than take these actions in relation to LA, a radical solution was created that has been found wanting.
LA control was blasted out of the water ...... there is no reason it could not be brought back again. The process of academization has been found wanting and once again a radical solution is needed.

It has been done once ... in one direction... and failed. It is time for a rethink.
There is a news item today that illustrates some of the problems. Parents are disturbed by some hew rules in a group of schools with instant detentions for tiny things like forgetfulness, and their children are being turned off education. Telling amongst this report is the fact that these are blanket rules all across a very large MAT. There is an assumption that what is right for one school in the group is right for all with no attempt to look at the different needs of different schools of different sizes in different areas with different carchments.

My son’s school is a mat and I agree the amount of bosses is unreal. In my sons primary school alone there is 2 deputy heads, 2 heads, and an exec deputy head and an exec head. All full time roles not job shares, yet they reduce all the TA’s to three hours a day , so there’s classes of 30 often with 4/5 Sen kids and for over half the day there is one teacher. The senco and pastoral lead spend a lot of time covering the teachers Ppa time .

Could you link to the news story please @Mischance ?

https://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/25128619.sam-rushworth-mp-criticises-advance-learning-partnership-school-trust/