Gove's proposals for academy schools: parents and community will have no say at all!

[policywonk]

In the proposed Academies Act, which will be one of the first pieces of legislation the coalition government brings forward, the rules will be changed so that governors alone will be able to decide whether or not to turn their school into an academy. Parents and the wider community are explicitly excluded from the decision-making process.

Academy schools could be run by profit-making businesses and religious groups as well as by groups of parents. The sponsors are given the school land and buildings, and can decide which subjects are taught, and how. And once a school has become an academy, there's no clear way back into local authority control.

38 Degrees has set up an online action in which you can email your MP to ask him/her to oppose this move and sign an Early Day Motion against it.

I've been a governor at an independent school and I think it was very well run without the LEA.
Simialarly, my DCs prep school is well run by the HT and governing body.

Why do we assume state school HTs and GBs can't do equally as well?

I don't understand why if a school becomes an acedemy it will have so much more money.

Surely the 10% or whatever of the budget that is currently being kept back by local authorities will still need to be spent on the same things - eg legal advice, recrutiment etc. And if a school had to pay for things like that themselves, surely it would be more expensive on an individual level?

What happens when the roof falls in or a parent sues for a playground injury?

On rewarding middle-class schools:

Outstanding schools tend, as I'm sure you know, to be in areas which are prosperous, without extremes of poverty. A recent analysis found 40% fewer poor pupils in outstanding schools than the national average.

Under Labour, academies had to be comprehensive. Now grammars can become academies, and they are vastly more likely to contain a majority of middle-class children - the number of children taking free school meals is (can't find exact figs and rushing) estimated at 1-3% against a national average of 15.4%.

Is it thAt the 10% can be spend by the authority on any school, or on educational costs that are 'trans-school' in it's area, and isn't ring-fenced to a particualr school? In other words, under the existing system it could go towards the difficultied faced by less-well-performing schools and now it will stay with the high-performing school that opts out? So will entrench a two-teir performance level?

Litchick - that's what I've been wondering.

It could be the equality ideology - the fear that some HT and governors do a better than others.

Could be after 3 labour terms people have lost confidence in anyone but the state to run things.

Maybe people just don't like change (or Tories ).

IMO - Some HT's will be glad to be free of a layer of bureacracy - others may prefer to keep the LA support. No doubt some LA's have been very supportive of schools and others less so.

it's its
difficultied difficulties
teir tier

What I mean is, was the 10% notionally tied to a particular school but in fact spent at will by the LA according to educational need in the area. And now it will stay with the 'elite' outstanding academy school which will therefore be richer? I don't know if that is the case. Does anyone?

Yes Eleison there is a ring-fenced 'free-moving' set-aside of (I think) 10% which the LA uses to target specific problems in specific schools - in practice, to combat poverty.

So the 10% held back from a high-performing school can under the current system be used to meet the needs of a different school, but will now be guaranteed to the high-performing opted-out school?

Not good.

Indeedy.

WRT to the principle of parent power, big society blah, academies tend to have fewer parent governors than the national average.

Education reform seems to be spiralling away into nonsense. Vide: "0.2 Brains" David Willett's gem this morning about studying for a given university's degree remotely at your local further ed institution.

Michael Gove: "I am a Conservative, I do not have an ideological objection to businesses being involved but the professionals should make that decision...My view is that school improvement will be driven by professionals not profitmakers."

But once that decision has been made...no way back? Schools have become businesses with the same imperatives as all businesses - maximum return for minimum investment.

"If you're going to tell a lie, make it a Big Society one"

exactly, is big private sector, not big society

Big Private Sector less cuddly, innit. Gah.

Onebatmother - That is just preserving the status quo. And note which way round it is. Grammar schools can become academies. Academies cannot become grammar schools. It is true that outstanding schools are being fast tracked but other schools will be able to convert to academy status later if they wish. The outstanding schools that become academies are required, as part of the process, to sign up to the principle of supporting another school in order to help raise standards at that school.

Notsureatall - LA's currently hold back between 10% and 20% of the budget for schools. The view of many within education is that LAs waste a significant proportion of that money on things that schools don't need or could do more cheaply themselves. It will still be open to LAs to offer these services to academies. It will be up to the LA to offer services that schools want at a price the schools are willing to pay. And grouping together doesn't always save money. Look at the ridiculous price some parts of government pay for paper clips and pencils!

1footinfront and others - By and large the new academies won't have sponsors. Unlike previous academies they are not required to have an external sponsor.

Violetqueen - There will be funding agreements with these new academies.

Land - There seems to be some misunderstanding here. When an academy ceases to be an academy or wants to sell of part of its land the government has the power to transfer the land back into public ownership. That provision previously applied to land transferred to the academy from the LA. The new bill extends it to cover publicly funded land which was held by someone other than the LA.

I posted further up about a school (or rather the school's head) that seems hellbent on becoming an academy. If they do this, plans to turn an existing boys school into a co-ed (something the boys school and the local community have wanted for years) will be scuppered. Of the other two single sex schools in the city, one is grant maintained.

It seems at present that the would be academy's plans could be blocked on this score but I'm still not convinced that this will happen.

To cut a long story short, how on earth are LAs (or anyone else for that matter) meant to plan for the future, and ensure balanced provision, if schools are allowed to opt out and do their own thing, regardless of the needs (let alone wants) of the community?

Does this concern anyone else?

Ok I've been off looking for real facts and figures.

This report on school funding is very interesting.

Worth noting that the last government significantly changed school funding allocation.

"The bottom line is that reforms to the system of state school funding have largely ?hollowed out? local authorities, with powers being both transferred up to central government and transferred down to schools."

And

"On average, pupils who are eligible for free school meals (i.e. pupils from low-income families) attract over 70% more funding to their school than those who are not eligible."

But

"Local authorities only allocate around 40?50% of the extra funding they receive for pupils who are eligible for free school meals towards the schools these pupils attend. In other words, local authorities seem to spread the funding targeted at low-income pupils more widely
(i.e. ?flatten? it). If local authorities did not flatten extra income in this way, the additional money following a low-income pupil would be roughly 50% higher in secondary schools and more than doubled in primary schools."

Interesting - no?

On the matter of opting out of LEA support - the goods and services provided by contractors might seem cheap at the start, but what happens when the firms providing these start ramping up their prices? Are there any guarantees as to their quality? Are schools really skilled in negotiating contracts? Despite what you read in the papers, there are some brilliant commercial types in the public sector who have taken many years getting to where they are. OTOH there are some real horror stories regarding schools paying silly money for photocopiers etc - which suggest to me that having more control over their budgets might not be so wise.

I think that LAs will still be allowed to provide services to academies, if that's what the academies want. But what happens if, having tried private sector suppliers, they find that the LA offered the best deal? And then the LA declines to provide those services? And what happens if these private suppliers decide that supplying academies isn't profitable and quit?

JSB - I don't think the 10 per cent that I mentioned forms part of the FSM pupils funding - it's in addition to that.

Sorry OBM - that wasn't aimed specifically at you. I was making the point that LA appear to 'redistribute' their FSM funding across all their schools rather than (as I'm sure the government intended) pass it on to the school attended by the FSM pupil. To me that seems wrong.

I haven't come across a figure for the 'admin hold back' and how that compares to the size of the FSM 'redistribution'. But then I haven't had time to read the whole funding report.

Yes JSB, it's all v serpentine isn't it. I agree that LA hold-back of funds which are supposed to follow FSM pupils doesn't sound great (although no justification for govt's alternative imo).

Shout if you find a Dumbarse's guide to education funding, anyone!

Actually, Eleison, you do probably know a bit about a higher education q I have.

David Willets today announced (pretty much) hike in fees. Bolstered this by implying that unis not sufficiently focused on educating their actual students:

''The system doesn't contain strong incentives for universities to focus on teaching and the student experience, as opposed to research."

These two things - teaching and reserach -are not opposed, are they? V interested to know how this works in practice.

I was talking to DH about this this morning. The two are opposed, but only because student numbers increase, with inadequate resources, at the same time as the RAE exercise places strong obligations on academics to produce a lot of publications. There simply isnt the time to teach well and fulfill research obligations. It isn't a lack of incentives. It is a lack of resources. 'Incentives' is an out-of-place concept -- probalby driven by the market categories in which Willetts presumably thinks.

DH's own view is that the pretence of quality research and quality teaching in the same institutions perhaps ought to be abandoned. That perhaps we should have undergraduate teaching universities, and distinct universities for graduate teaching and research. This whole movement towards mass university education began with converting the polytechnics to universities, but I wonder whether they might have been a valuable tool now.

(I don't really know much about it, though, as only have experience through DH. Perhaps Habbibu or some other wanker?)

Theboy - you make it sound like rocket science. It's not that complex. All private schools do it.
Why do you assume state schools won't be able to?