Labour should seek to establish more academies
By Mike Ion
—In 2003 I wrote a piece for the Times Educational Supplement making the case for academies and suggesting that, eventually, the Labour left that still dominated the party’s education forums and thinktanks may well learn to love these independent state schools. I can still remember the letters page of the following week’s edition – I was accused of ‘selling my soul’ to the Blairites and of ‘betraying the comprehensive ideal’.
Twelve years since the first sponsored academy opened its doors the data provides us with a simple, empirical truth: academies work. A brief analysis of the 2012 results indicates that the proportion of pupils gaining five or more GCSEs at grades A*- C in academies, including in English and mathematics, has increased by almost twice the national average.
At Mossbourne academy in Hackney, where the current Ofsted chief inspector Michael Wilshaw was the founding headteacher, a staggering 84 per cent of pupils gained five or more A*- C grades including English and mathematics. When I was deputy national director for school improvement with the Department for Education’s National Strategies I visited Mossbourne on several occasions. I was struck by the fact that the school served the same community as its predecessor school and faced the same challenges in terms of the limited social, economic or academic capital many of the pupils started with. Yet the outcomes were radically different. Wilshaw and his colleagues had not simply improved a school, they had transformed a community. Academies are fast becoming the true engines of social mobility in modern Britain and the more of them a future Labour government establishes in our nation the better.
Yet despite the many undoubted academy success stories over the past 12 years, it is still the case that the very notion of academies as ‘independent state schools’ is too much for many Labour party members and supporters to stomach. Time and time again I hear fellow members denigrate the achievements of sponsored academies, accusing sponsors of only being in it for the money, of creaming off the best pupils and privatising state education via the back door. The reality is that all of these tired and rather feeble accusations are completely unfounded. Sponsored academies are success stories and should be celebrated as such. As the party contemplates its policies and commitments for the next general election it must explicitly commit to making the education of all of our young people both transformational and inspirational. This will mean embracing not only the existing drive towards more primary academies but also the concept of free schools.
Labour must be willing to offer a compelling narrative as to why an accelerated sponsored academy programme for failing schools can provide the best means to truly make a difference to the life chances of the young people they serve. The last Labour government deserves huge credit for making the case for setting up so many of the first academies in areas of significant social and economic deprivation. The truth is that for numerous, often working-class, communities trapped in a cycle of educational failure and under-achievement, Labour’s academy programme provided new energy, new purpose and new opportunities for thousands of young people who deserved better.
However, the past 50 years of school reform shows us that the road to securing better educational opportunities for all is paved with good intentions. Almost all of the postwar restructuring of the secondary school system in England – grammar schools; city technology colleges; grant maintained schools and even specialist schools – mainly benefitted the middle classes and not the urban poor. This is primarily because the advantaged and educated have always known how to ensure that their children attend the establishments that will help them become advantaged too. Academies are showing signs of reversing this trend. For example, in 2010 out of the thousands of post-16 students attending the London borough of Newham’s various schools and colleges, only 70 students gained places at the UK’s most selective universities. In 2011, 74 students gained places at these universities from Mossbourne alone, and this was the academy’s first year of A-level results.
So 10 years after I first wrote in defence of academies and argued that they were part of a progressive, egalitarian programme for change and improvement in England’s schools the evidence is that they are now providing life-changing opportunities for thousands of some of the most disadvantaged young people in our nation.
Labour should be proud of what the sponsored academy programme has achieved and make clear its commitment to accelerate the number of sponsored academies when it returns to office.
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Mike Ion is a councillor on Telford and Wrekin council and is a former deputy national director for school improvement with the Department for Education National Strategies
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What about Mossbourne Academy? Instead of attacking Mike Ion, focus on the actual issue.
Mossbourne is a truly great school. However there is a flaw in the logic: “Mossbourne is a great school. Mossbourne is an academy. Therefore academies are great.” No other academy does as well as Mossbourne and overall the data indicates academies do no better than non-academies: check out http://bit.ly/ybiGmJ & http://bit.ly/V9Bt78.
We know from the London Challenge what actually works to improve schools. Instead Mr Gove has overspent a billion pounds on chasing the Academy chimera & what happened to those academies that converted? In 2012 their GCSE results, on average, fell after conversion.
Exactly – an inverse conclusion could be drawn from Richard Rose Central Academy in Carlisle which has just gone into special measures for the second time in its short life. Academies CAN get great results but so can state comprehensives, and there just is too much room for failure due to the ability to opt out of all the improvements that Labour put in to drive up standards in the state sector (eg national curriculum)
There is of course some truth in all of this. Generally under Tony Blair GCSE and A Level results improved steadily over the years and this meant a lot more children from working/lower middle class origins got into the expanding universities. Presently these achievements are threatened by an end to A level resits, an end to AS levels and a return to a 1960s elitist model which will strongly favour – you guessed it , middle class kids in posh schools. However that said , we have been far too relaxed about the GCSE ‘gulf’ between the south and the north and lower working class and suburban middle class schools. This ‘gulf’ has been exposed by none other than the FT which has campaigned tirelessly for more to be done especially in the northern towns where pass rates are the lowest in the country and where working class pupils have little chance of any social mobility.
Maybe the new Academies can get things moving and instil a sense of rising expectations among school management and staff. Maybe Labour was too easy with the low expectations culture in our towns. Maybe (and its partly inevitable) as a party we have been too close to the teaching profession. Certainly England & Wales has a system which heavily ‘reproduces’ the class system and radical even uncomfortable approaches are required. This would also apply to F.E. colleges whose A Level pass rates in many cases are quite appalling.
However we also have to ensure the academies do not become fiefdoms for heads who are independent of checks and balances from parents, staff and local communities. Teacher contracts / conditions must be reasonable, staff must be treated as the professionals they are and local authorities must have some roles in ensuring heads or their ‘independent’ state schools do not commit the errors we have seen in many organisations where regulation has been weak. The professionalism, economic costs and governance of independent academies need independent
checks more than just the odd inspection.
Paragraph 2 should read ‘some academies work’ and then go on to add that some do not. Schools are free go down this route if they wish. Schools do not deserve the small army of brokers and other snakeoil salesmen badgering them and offering financial inducements to other parts of the educational establishment to go down this route. There is none of Michael Gove’s much vaunted ‘freedom’ in that