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

Who exactly would these expert be?

In any profession there are experts, enthusiasts and high energy individuals who make this stuff look easy in principle. The question is, whether there are enough of them in teaching to successfully turn all schools into academies by 2020. A common theme across many Government reforms, including this one, is that they assume the "ideal" can easily be replicated and multiplied across the whole system. But generally it can't, because we're flawed humans rather than robots, and that is why even some advocates of academies are speaking out against the idea of moving too quickly towards a whole-academy system.

However if, as the Education Secretary said, there is "no reverse gear", and carrots and sticks are going to be employed to make it happen, individual schools will have to decide whether to "go with the flow" or dig in their heels in the hope of riding out the storm. Church schools are likely to follow the advice of their diocese and, provided the diocesan authorities can negotiate sufficient independence I expect that most will convert. Many LA schools are likely to follow the advice of their LAs - so that will be more patchy. In my area they will convert because that's what the LA wants, though they will be well supported by the LA throughout the process. I know some Conservative LAs are speaking out against the plan, but they may well be "whipped" into touch, or else given sufficient carrots to win them over.

Planning is not just planning, it is planning for the children in the room, and must take into account prior learning, SEND, target levels etc and be suitably differentiated. It is not possible for a outside "expert" to adequately plan a series of lessons.

So the fact that Nicky Morgan has said there is "no reverse gear" (ffs, who writes their speeches? It's embarrassing) means that even if the whole thing goes tits up, there will be no discussion about stopping the march towards all schools becoming academies.

So probably the biggest change in our education system ever, and the government will refuse to rectify it if it goes wrong. Totally sounds like a child-centred policy to me.

urbanfox1337 Thu 31-Mar-16 23:20:16 Are you implying there are no expert teachers? Are you implying that expert teachers are not teachers?

Can't quite get my head around your suggestion that the experts do the easy stuff (like planning apparently) and the non experts do the hard stuff.

dlacey,

But the point is that REALLY expert teachers are doing exactly what they should be doing - teaching their own class (or classes, depending on the age range) in their own school, planning for those individuals, taking into account their own context and specific difficulties, maximising the progress of those children to meet increasingly unrealistic targets.

And that, by itself, is a hugely time-consuming and difficult job, but hugely satisfying because you actually see those children making progress (which is why I love my job).

Could someone explain why those teachers should instead spend time away from their own class or classes, preparing generic 'advice' or 'plans' for children they don't know and don't know the needs of? And also what is in that a) for the teachers - who IME actually want to teach, not do more bureaucratic stuff away from their own classroom - and b) for their home school, whether it be an academy or not, who desperately need those brilliant teachers to be teaching their own pupils to achieve the results needed to keep Ofsted off their backs...not to mention cost of cover etc.

(I have recently encountered a variety of 'expert teachers' in specific areas. In general, they have been relatively inexperienced but highly ambitious, and have left their audiences (usually of much more experienced, and better, teachers) wishing that they had spent the time wasted with 'expert teachers' actually teaching their own class or preparing resources and plans for speciofic children who have been struggling)

Urbanfox:

"why not have experts doing the lesson plans and let teachers do the hard stuff, the actual teaching"?

I presume that you are not a teacher. I work in a several form entry primary, and we are lucky enough that the class teachers in each year group have joint PPA time, so we share planning. Thus for most lessons there will be a 'year group plan' planned by one of us for the new curriculum last year, and modified for this year in light of how it went last year.

So far, so 'uniform'. But each of us will take that plan and will tweak it for our own classes, because despite the classes being parallel, every class is made up of different individuals, with different needs. and every child will have responded slightly differently to the previous lesson, and - this being primary, with marking between every lesson being the expectation and norm - the next steps in each classroom will be slightly different. So we will each adapt the plan and resources for the lesson to meet the needs of our class.

Tbh, writing the overall year group lesson plan is - comparatively - very speedy, and very easy. Not really work for an 'expert', who presumably would get extra money and kudos for doing it. The time consuming, difficult bit is the tweaking, the adjusting, the deciding how to deliver, the marking and responding to the messages from the marking and the replanning, the making of differentiated resources, the changing of the plan to suit particular children or the nature of specific classes - and then the rewriting of the year group plan to improve it for the following year - which we can only do because we both wrote it and taught it.

To suggest a split between 'planning' and 'teaching' reflects a total misunderstanding of what the process of teaching involves.

I suppose someone, somewhere could write a generic lesson plan for my class, which would save me some time.
I would then have to spend time adapting it to meet the needs of my mixed age class-so it would need to cater for year 5 and year 6 objectives. Then I would need to adapt it to take account of the boy-genius in my class who is working at year 7/8 level. Then there are the needs of the child who has a full time statement and is working at year 2 level. after that I could look at catering for the needs of my three EAL children-who are all at different stages of language development, then perhaps adapt it to suit my child with dyslexia, oh-and the one with processing difficulties who needs step by step guidance. Then there are the two children with additional needs who need specific support with visual strategies being helpful, the two "bright but lazy" girls who will do the minimum unless pushed and the one with ADHD who has a very short attention span and needs activities broken down into 5 minute bursts.
Thankfully I only have 15 children to adapt my generic lesson for!

I have recently encountered a variety of 'expert teachers' in specific areas ...

Were they from the LA or were they external consultants? Some of the teachers I know who prefer to work for a (good) MAT rather than an LA cite similar experiences as one of the reasons they jumped ship. We can presumably all agree there's no point in being spoon-fed advice if it's bad advice.

REALLY expert teachers are doing exactly what they should be doing - teaching their own class

If there were enough for every class in the country to have their own expert teacher I might agree, but we're a long way from that situation and for the profession to flourish it's important for teachers to share good practice. Even those who do consider themselves to be experts need to network with other experts to make sure they continue to develop their practice.

dlacey,

Expert teachers were mainly from specifically-funded projects, neither external consultants nor from LA.

"Even those who do consider themselves to be experts"

IME, the teachers who 'consider themselves' to be experts are not, and many teachers who would say 'I just do my job' are genuinely experts.

"and for the profession to flourish it's important for teachers to share good practice"

Some - not many - years ago, when LAs were still pretty universal, most had either physical or dispersed 'training centres' where exactly this happened, and where some excellent CPD was provided - workshops run by experts in specific fields, or specific in-school mentoring under national umbrella schemes (Every Child a Writer was particularly well-delivered in my area at the time).

They also provided excellent resources that might only be used for a short time in any given school - artefacts for RE or history, links to groups of volunteers to come to schools or provide workshops in paticular places of interest.

As LA funding has dropped as schools have become academies, much of this excellent practice has had to disappear, and the training centres to close. Saying that all schools have to academise in order for less-efficient, less effective and much smaller-scale unproven CPD to occur (so if training happens within a MAT, or each MAT of a few schools has to identify its own prefrred 'experts' on the basis of ?CV? - ignores the fact that large-scale, high quality, economical because of the scale CPD was happening under the LA system before it started to be dismantled.

Absolutely. We had a local authority run excellent training centre, staffed by highly professional experienced teachers who were seconded for 12 months at a time as experts who ran excellent cpd events for schools in the local area. We now have to source our own training from a plethora of advertising leaflets that land on the doorstep every day!

much of this excellent practice has had to disappear [from LAs]

Yes, agree, though in my experience that is what a good MAT will provide. As I said earlier, some of the trustees in my school's MAT are ex-LA and have brought what they considered to be the best of LA practice with them.

You can lament the fact that all would have been rosy if LAs had remained the same, but unfortunately they haven't, and in any case some of them weren't doing such a great job as yours.

Some MATs may not do a great job either, but at least they won't have a geographical monopoly, and if their schools deteriorate below certain thresholds they can be transferred to an alternative trust instead. At least that's the logic - as discussed previously the jury is out on whether it will work across the system as a whole, and there will need to be sufficient "good" MATs in the system for it to have any chance of working.

dlacey - they won't have a geographical monopoly, on what basis can this assumption be made?

dlacey and if their schools deteriorate below certain thresholds they can be transferred to an alternative trust instead will other trusts be forced to take them on or are you assuming there will be trusts willingly to take failing schools on?

dl;acey,

How many 'good' MATs are there at them moment, would you say?

Virtually all the big chains have question marks over them, is my understanding - how many good 'local' MATs are there?

"at least they won't have a geographical monopoly"

Again, how many of the 'national' MATs are performing well (and showing high levels of financial probity)? I know a lot of stand-alone academies are doing fine - because they were convertors, and were good / outstanding schools before. how many schools IN NATIONAL / LARGE SCALE MATs are doing better than they were before?

Locally, 3 state secondaries - 1 selective - are convertor academies. 1 is a faith academy, 1 is a Foundation school, whatever that means. Locally only 1 school - and that in some difficulties - is part of a larger MAT. Do you think it more likely that

• All the schools will form a single large MAT?
• Each will form a smaller MAT with its main feeder primary schools and squabble about who gets the (very few) poorer schools, and compete to get other schools to join them?

I suspect the former is much more likely, and that will result in a geographical monopoly exactly equivalent to the LA, but without the economies of scale nor overall view of the 'area's good'.

The only ones that might stand aside are a) the faith school, which might form a faith MAT with faith primaries + potentially other faith secondaries (but a non-faith school may well not have the choice to join such a MAT) and b) the selective school, which perhaps may remain stand alone or may link itself with other selective academies in the county. I can't see it taking on its local primaries, which are amongst the weakest in the area, though i suppose it might 'cherry pick' the most academic of the primaries aiming for form an 'elite MAT'?

Performance of academies by Ofsted

Based on inspections during 2012/13:

. Primary academies rated outstanding were more likely to retain that rating than LA schools.
. Primary academies rated good were more likely to subsequently be rated as outstanding than LA schools and were also less likely to achieve a lower rating.
. Primary academies rated satisfactory were more likely to improve that rating than LA schools.
. Secondary academies rated outstanding were marginally more likely to retain that rating than LA schools.
. Secondary academies rated good were more likely to subsequently be rated as outstanding than LA schools and were also less likely to achieve a lower rating.
. Secondary academies rated satisfactory were more likely to improve that rating than LA schools.

Can you separate that out by convertor vs large-scale MAT, please?

Only those schools rated 'satisfactory' seem at all likely to be in MATs - the others would have been stand-alone convertors.

Also, as said above, you need to compare

• academies who have the SAME head and the SAME amount of money vs LA schools in the same position
• academies with different head + significant cash injection from sponsor vs LA schools with a different head + more cash [ps. there aren't any of these....]

At the end of July 2015 there were 846 multi academy trusts in England.
The number of approved sponsors was 739
MATs with:
1 academy = 212
2-5 academies =517
6-10 academies = 78
11-15 academies = 20
16-20 academies = 7
21+ academies = 12(13)

teacherwith2kids sorry I can't, just copy and pasting. I did include the link to the report.

My point is that academy success needs to be teased out a little more. Are academies successful

• Because they were already very good schools and have remained so. As such schools tend to be in naice areas, it may well be that they have been able to retain more of their money because their LA levy was in fact subsidising the higher SEN etc levels in other schools in the area.

• Because many academies, until VERY recently, had very substantial extra money, either as a bribe to convert or from sponsors.

• Because they have had a change of leadership (it would be interesting to compare Ofsted results for LA schools before and after change of leadership).

• Because their admissions criteria - and covert selection criteria such as much more elaborate and expensive uniform - have changed.

• Because of the DIRECT result of having greater freedom over curriculum (this may lead to e.g. an increase in 'high GCSE equivalent non-GCSEs', rather than GCSEs, for example)

• Because of their partnerships within a MAT?

Virtually all the big chains have question marks over them, is my understanding

7 large MATS have question marks over them - www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/506718/HMCI__advice__note_MAT_inspections____10_March_2016.pdf

[The Government is extremely unlikely to supply this analysis, of course - because Isuspect it shows very little direct benefit of academisation per se)

And just 3 of those 7 are responsible for 137 schools between them......

teacherwith2kids where is the evidence that until VERY recently, academies had very substantial extra money, either as a bribe to convert or from sponsors? And how much was this?

Why does the change of leadership need to be separated? Is the change of leadership not as a consequence of conversion and thus one of the benefits of it?

Where is the evidence that academies have changed their admissions any more than LA schools have?

Where is the evidence that a significant number of children have stopped going to academies because they have introduced uniform policies?

Where is the evidence that academies have introduced more GCSE equivalents? I would be very surprised if that was the case.