fighting conversion to MAT - help?

[Jumpingshipquick]

My children's school is pushing for conversion to MAT. It's a school considered 'good' with a governing body considered 'effective' by OFSTED, within a local authority that performs well. It's a single form entry school, and has no good reason to convert - it won't give them anything they can't already do. I have my suspicions why, but the argument so far is that it is better to lead rather than be forced. Whilst I don't doubt the good intentions of the people currently running the school, I have serious concerns about the implications of the change of structure. I would really appreciate someone looking over my points to see whether I am right for now.

• My school will legally cease to exist.
• Funding will go to the MAT, not individual schools within the MAT and the Board of Directors is required to make spending decisions based on the MAT priorities, not individual (ex)school priorities.
• The Board of Directors of the MAT can be paid for their roles.
• Teachers are employed by the MAT, not the individual schools (and can therefore be deployed anywhere within the MAT)
• There is no legal requirement to keep the individual school’s board of governors, and as it will have no power beyond what the Board happen to devolve, it will only be a talking shop anyway.
• The MAT will be run by a board of governors, akin to the board of directors in a business. This board will consist purely of co-opted members, no requirement for parent governors, no teachers, not necessary local people. Appointments are neither required to be advertised, nor elected and members can only be removed by the Secretary of State, from London.
• The only form of public scrutiny is the published accounts.
• The only way parents can hold the MAT board to account is via the Regional Schools Commissioner. (There are going to be 8 for the whole country) The RSC will be appointed by the Secretary of State.
• The Secretary of State retains the right to remove, or force schools/ MATs to join other MATs.

Thanks

This was an article written at the time (there are others, this was the first one I found):
Telegraph article 2012

A couple of thins struck me as interesting - one was that at that time 2,388 schools had less than 100 pupils, and secondly that at that point extra funding for small schools was discretionary by councils - prh, is it now mandatory and guaranteed to continue under academisation? (Apologies for using you as the fount of accurate knowledge!)

Someone has mentioned Learning Trusts, that a LA can set up and operate academy schools.

I've not heard of these before. What are they?

prh, is it now mandatory and guaranteed to continue under academisation

I missed a word in my post for which I apologise. I should have said they "generally" get additional funding through a sparsity factor. Sparsity is an optional factor in the funding formula but most (possibly all) LAs with rural schools use it. It provides up to £100k additional funding to qualifying schools (in exceptional cases up to £150k).

Currently the LA's funding formula is used to determine how academies are funded. In essence they get the funding they would have received as a non-academy plus some additional funding to cover the services no longer provided by the LA, while the LA retains the funding for the services it must provide. The LA remains responsible for determining the funding formula in consultation with the local schools forum. There don't appear to be any plans to change this at the moment.

It is possible that a future government will change things in such a way that small schools cease to be viable, but that could happen at any time even if there were no academies. Personally I doubt that will happen as the political cost would be too high.

There certainly is an issue with small schools, especially when the DfE define a small school as less than 85. In my LA this is half of our schools. I have personal knowledge of small schools asking to be part of academy chains, only to be turned down. This has been due to the finances in running a school but also in future building costs, such as remedial work to old school buildings. The LA have, in my case funded massive works which an academy chain wouldn't take on preventing any conversion.

The difference between being an LA school and being part of an academy chain is the geographic. In a rural county there can be miles and between schools. This would make working with other schools nearly impossible given that local schools may be split across academy chains. Not so in an LA where all local schools could share staff, join with school to school support, all being part of the same LA. . Added to this is the conversion of church schools, making them not part of the same academy chain as other schools locally. .

The LA have supported small schools with more than just sparsity funding, covering SLT costs and other support from school improvement money. They don't stand on their own two feet but require added support. This is about providing a service to a community not about a business model.

Children local to me travel for half an hour to get to their local small school, can you imagine the journey if this is closed.

There is a Catholic Church School in Islington called Mount Carmel. A secondary, single sex, girls school, supported by the Local Authority (Islington) Despite being a good school, it has been suffering a decline in numbers as the demand for single sex, Catholic schooling in the area is falling. The Archdiocese have decided it is no longer financially viable.

There is, however an increasing demand for co educational non denominational secondary school places. The obvious solution was for Islington to take it on as a Community Secondary School, but, needless to say this is no longer permitted. The School if it ceases to be supported by the Catholic Church must be an Academy.

Islington asked to sponsor it. They were refused.

Islington have now found a body willing to take on the school and run it as an academy, and indications are that this will be agreed. The body in question?

The City of London Corporation.

PrH

How does this relate to the Fairer Funding Formula Consultation?

There certainly is an issue with small schools, especially when the DfE define a small school as less than 85

According to the DSG Operational Guidance a primary school qualifies for sparsity funding if it has less than 21.4 pupils per year, which works out as less than 150 pupils in total.

The LA have supported small schools with more than just sparsity funding, covering SLT costs and other support from school improvement money

Most LAs have delegated school improvement funding to schools. Small schools are, like any other school, supposed to operate within their budget based on the LA's funding formula. It sounds like your LA is being somewhat liberal with its interpretation of the rules.

How does this relate to the Fairer Funding Formula Consultation

Thank you for reminding me of this. I had a nagging feeling that I was forgetting something as I was typing my last answer.

There is much that is not clear in the consultation, possibly because the government plans a stage 2 consultation before firming up its plans. However, they currently intend to keep the sparsity factor and apply it to all eligible schools regardless of whether or not the LA currently uses it. So it will become mandatory and guaranteed to continue for the foreseeable future once transition to the new system (which will take years) is complete.

"So it will become mandatory and guaranteed to continue for the foreseeable future once transition to the new system (which will take years) is complete."

So some rural schools in poorly-funded counties may potentially benefit twice - once from mandatory sparsity factor, once from an uplift in the per-pupil funding, while others may lose out if they already get sparsity funding but are in currently very well-funded areas?

Yes, maybe liberal with the rules around funding but also working to organise networking opportunities and school to school support. Yes, we do have 'shared' HT's and in some cases staff, to survive, yes the LA supports its rural schools as they have a legal duty to provide enough school places across an area and support in planning for the long term for the future of schools in a locality.
They do this to support schools in rural locations who provide a service to the community. Exactly my point. A business model which academies are based on isn't going to provide this service. As I said I already have personal experience of the 'cherry picking' of viable schools.

This is why county councillors, (even conservative ones), in some authorities are voicing concerns about the suitability of the academy system across all communities, realising that the villages they represent are going to be without their village school. Schools are at the centre of village life and will certainly be threatened.

Learning Trusts - see
www.gov.uk/government/publications/educational-excellence-everywhere

5.31. Using expertise of LA staff

So some rural schools in poorly-funded counties may potentially benefit twice - once from mandatory sparsity factor, once from an uplift in the per-pupil funding, while others may lose out if they already get sparsity funding but are in currently very well-funded areas?

There will be transitional arrangements in place to ensure that any loss of income is gradual. But inevitably when funding arrangements are changed there will be winners and losers unless the government is willing to pump a lot more money into the system. The current government has been increasing school funding but I doubt it has been going up enough to mean there will be no losers.

A business model which academies are based on isn't going to provide this service

Academies are charities, not businesses. I am sure some won't want to take on small schools. But small schools are financially viable today so I struggle to see why they should not continue to be financially viable in future. There are already a number of small primary schools that have become academies - Browney Academy in County Durham which has 85 pupils, for example.

Milly, but the reference that you have given refers to staff from LAs LEAVING to join or set up MATs. It doesn't give any indication that a group of schools - even a county worth - could decide that they were perfectly happy with the service that the LA provides and thus create a county-wide MAT with the existing LA staff?

but the reference that you have given refers to staff from LAs LEAVING to join or set up MATs. It doesn't give any indication that a group of schools - even a county worth - could decide that they were perfectly happy with the service that the LA provides and thus create a county-wide MAT with the existing LA staff?

There was a reference on another thread to two LAs that turned their Education & Children's Services departments into a joint social enterprise company, wholly owned by the two LAs. The company, using the "ex-LA" staff has set up academies with local partners and now it is helping academies to join together into MATs and move towards absorbing maintained primaries. The academy trusts they're setting up all have "ex-LA" staff on the board.

It's not exactly a "county-wide MAT" but it's along the same lines - local academy clusters with ex-LA staff representation, and they buy in their services from the ex-LA social enterprise.

Thanks for additional information dlacey. Teacherwith2kids, if the suggested academisation of all schools goes ahead and LA's have their current responsibility for school improvement removed, this model using so called 'ex LA staff' is the closest we will have and in my locality we would be maintaining the already good standards that exist through LA support.

Seems barmy financially though, make redundant LA staff, incurring large costs. The 'same' now ex LA staff would become a 'company'. Schools pay up to £25,000 in legal costs to become an academy, the LA incur an estimated £12,000 per school to do whatever they need to do as each school becomes an academy. The 'ex' LA carry on as before, improving schools to the good standard they already were! Seems a very expensive way for it all to remain the same😉

Milly, to be clear, in that example the LA staff weren't "made redundant", just transferred into a social enterprise. It's like outsourcing but the company they transferred to was owned by the LA.

From a link someone posted up thread it sounds like Camden are planning something similar.

The 'ex' LA carry on as before, improving schools to the good standard they already were! Seems a very expensive way for it all to remain the same

They don't stay the same over the system as a whole because only the "good" LAs will be approved to do it. The government's rationale is presumably that the short term costs are worth the long term gains for the country's education system. There's no published business case providing evidence for that though. If you're an elected government you don't necessarily need one - just enough power to make it happen.

An added concern other than 'no takers' for my small schools ( recent personal experience) was the quality of support that would have been offered by the MAT. Locally this is a very secondary led model, with all MATs being led by secondary school experienced staff.

Having sat through more than one 'presentation' by secondary MATs and the DfE (something akin to sitting through a double glazing salesmans advert!) it was surprising how little the lead staff knew and understood about primary school children and their education, school improvement and the school they were dealing with. The sales pitch told us how good the secondary school were at being a secondary school but didn't talk about our primary, mentioning it twice in a 90 minute presentation and couldn't answer any questions about what it would need to do to support the school to improve further.

The finances of schools in the future is something that at this present moment is very much up in the air.
Until the 2nd consultation paper on the new national funding formula comes out, some time this next term, we will not know what changes are being made on detail. So as an example there will be a fixed sum for each school as now. The average across English LAs for this factor is something like £115K per school. Changing that to say £150K would significantly benefit small schools, however given the previous utterings of the government I suspect it may well be going the other way, which will make many small schools unworkable in their present format. The sparsity factor is for schools below 150 pupils in primary schools but the DfE definition of sparsity is somewhat baffling and you get many urban schools who somehow qualify, so again any change to definition could have all sorts of consequences.
I believe that schools are now entering a phase where budgets are under considerable pressure. Any school managers who honestly believe that the new national funding formula is going to resolve all their issues is taking a massive gamble, which is likely to backfire. Schools need to be looking to their 2017-18 and 2018-19 budget predictions assuming no increase in funding but increases in salaries etc and work out now what cost cutting they need to make. and start to do it. It is time that the education sector as whole realised that they need to accept that what the rest of the UK has gone through over the last 5 years does actually also apply to them. It has just taken rather longer to materialise.

"They don't stay the same over the system as a whole because only the "good" LAs will be approved to do it. "

But who are these 'good' LAs? As I posted above, a large number of LAs haven't been inspected by Ofsted for their School Improvement arrangements, and none have been inspected for their general administration of schools because that isn't something Ofsted inspects.

Even for those that HAVE been inspected, the measure of which were inspected (those thought to be 'bad at school improvement') were selected purely for the proportion of less-than-good schools (and as I posted above, the factors that make a school less-than-good are often way, way out of a LA's ability to influence). The process of the inspection of the LA seemed to consist of a) inspecting some schools and b) telephoning other schools to conduct a survey of what they thought of the LA. No direct inspection of the LA itself, and no account taken of budget or demographics of the area served.

So how do we identify which of the uninspected LAs are good??

So how do we identify which of the uninspected LAs are good??

Well "we" can't. The Secretary of State and her delegates (the RSCs) will make that decision in the same way they decide whether to approve other MAT arrangements - there will be published criteria to be met, and of course maybe a pinch of political (with a small 'p') favouritism thrown in too.

Given that Nicky Morgan is wanting to increase the number of schools with a good and outstanding judgement, LA's with high proportions of these I would assume will be ok.

LA's are inspected and again personal experience in supporting both an LA inspection and a peer review, LA by another LA proved the rigour of this.

Milly, where are those inspections published? I couldn't find a full set for all LAs on the Ofsted website - none for any of my local counties, who weren't in the 'let's check out ones with many less than good schools' sweep - so are they done by someone else?

Milly, where are those inspections published

They should all be on the Ofsted website. They have reports on 152 local authorities. As there are 152 LEAs in the country they should have the complete set. If you need help finding one let me know which LA you want and I'll see if I can find it for you.

Does anybody keep track of how much of a school's budget gets spent on children in classrooms? Is there any data on whether MATs really are more efficient than LAs?