Allowing private control of schools means controversial resources can be developed and used with little or no external challenge
Investigation of developments at Future Academies continues to raise concerns
History subject experts were aghast at what they were reading. How could a textbook, the centrepiece of teaching for primary school pupils, have so many weaknesses: from factual errors to myths-presented-as-reality, to central aspects of the subject ignored or glossed over, to peoples of the UK treated “patronisingly”?
The verdicts of five history educationists, when shown the 241-page “British history” resource for a piece for my website Education Uncovered (£) last week, were uniformly scathing.
Many of their comments seemed to boil down to a criticism that this text – Great Events and People from British History – was simply “bad history”, or “one of the worst things I’ve read,” as one experienced professional put it.
This text is currently in use at three London primary schools controlled by Future Academies – the 10-school trust set up by the Conservative former academies minister Lord John Nash and his wife, Lady Caroline Nash. It forms the centrepiece of more than three hours’ teaching of the subject per week for key stage 2 pupils. The trust has told me that the textbook contributes to giving pupils a detailed “critical appreciation” of British history, delivered by expert teachers.
Yet problems within it include myths being presented as fact: the story of King Alfred and the Cakes, for example, though widely viewed as of questionable veracity, is reported as reality, with questions asking pupils when it happened, alongside when Alfred became King. Readers are told a tale about Augustine seeing “some slave boys with beautiful blond hair and angelic faces” in Rome, being upset they were not Christians and therefore being determined to visit England to convert its populace. But its provenance – it is widely attributed to Bede, writing a century later – is not disclosed.
We read that “the French had watched the American Revolution with interest. Back in France, writers such as Voltaire and Jean Jaques [sic] Rousseau began to apply the Enlightenment way of thinking to the society they saw around them…”
Yet Rousseau’s The Social Contract, and Voltaire’s writings, pre-dated the American Revolution, one expert arguing that the mistake was part of this text’s attempt to present the Enlightenment, a European movement, as a phenomenon of the English-speaking world.
Shakespeare did not write Henry V “almost three centuries” after the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, as the textbook states, having died in 1616. An image of the anti-slavery campaigner Olaudah Equiano, used in the textbook, is said not to be of him.
The textbook’s inability to apply scepticism of its own to source reliability, and its failure to present this as important to pupils, was selling its own subject short while being potentially dangerous, in an era of “fake news”, it was argued.
Several historians criticised the framing of the text as “British history”, when it was an overwhelmingly English account, with “Welsh, Scottish and Irish voices absent”, according to one expert, and treated in a “patronising” tone, according to another.
The text describes the 19th century Tory party as “the party of empire, patriotism and monarch”, among five mentions of it overall, while failing to namecheck Labour. Somehow, a chronology at the end mentions Churchill’s 1940-45 and 1951-55 governments, but not Labour’s Attlee government in between.
Perhaps this in part a product of its neglect of social history, with our experts again criticising the text for its top-down view of the past through the lens of “great person” (mainly “great men”) political leaders, with social movements largely ignored.
There were concerns that the textbook’s treatment of slavery downplays its significance – the subject is portrayed mainly as a tale of white British abolitionists - while its coverage of Empire lacks detail on impacts which might be of relevance to the children of largely ethnic minority families being educated in Future’s schools.
Finally, essay questions set as part of this resource, such as “Individual personalities matter more than anything else in history. Discuss,” were clearly pitched at a level not appropriate to seven- to – 11-year-olds, it was felt, leading to concerns about spoon-feeding from teachers.
Three months ago, I also revealed (£) how ancient history textbooks developed and used by this chain included exercises in which, three times, children were encouraged to imagine themselves as historical figures about to kill themselves. These passages were crossed out following parental outrage.
Whatever your perspective about whether the detail above makes these appropriate teaching resources, one aspect has stood out in this investigation.
These are texts which were developed more or less in private by Future’s in-house “Curriculum Centre”, used in these schools with little or no public scrutiny, and retained, I understand, despite teachers familiar with them expressing serious concerns. There has been, then, no public-facing quality control.
Future Academies is effectively a privately-controlled organisation, despite being overwhelmingly publicly-funded. Set up by Lord and Lady Nash in 2008, its latest accounts list them as two of its five controlling “members” with other members being associates of Lord Nash. Lord Nash is chair of the chain’s trustees. Multiple sources describe the couple as in complete charge of the schools.
Lady Nash, a history graduate, is also listed on Future’s website as “the leading force in curriculum development across the trust”. A Future school brochure lists the chain’s primary curriculum as having been “written by Lady Nash and [Future’s] Curriculum Centre”. No teaching qualifications are listed against Lady Nash’s name on Future’s website, which describes her as “a stockbroker by training”.
Sources within this trust seem entirely justified, then, in questioning on what basis the Nashes should be in any position to be taking decisions over what goes on in these state schools, which are staffed of course by teaching professionals, for all that Future’s accounts disclose a gift of £2 million by Lord Nash to the trust in 2009-10. If, legally, this trust’s set-up as allowed by ministers under the academies policy gives the couple a contractual basis for such over-riding influence, morally where is the legitimacy for their positions? Is it right that a financial contribution leads to decision-making over what happens in what are still almost exclusively taxpayer-funded schools being handed over to the donors wholesale?
Two teaching sources told me that complaints about the textbooks from staff within the past two years had “gone nowhere” with management, with some teachers feeling so disillusioned about the curriculum that they have left. It seems unlikely that Ofsted will dig into these issues, either: an admiring inspection of one of the schools in December 2019, though stating it had done a “deep dive” on history, managed to say nothing about any resources used.
Textbooks offered for sale to schools more widely do at least, I understand, go through detailed – if inevitably not infallible - quality assurance checks in advance, with publishers knowing also that criticism from teachers would need to be defended in public. No such worries, it seems, within this trust.
And up to now – before investigations on my website and a very public row about developments at Future’s flagship secondary school, Pimlico Academy - there has been no open debate about the curriculum and resources within this chain.
Arguably, the government-friendly characterisation of such approaches as “traditionalist” or “knowledge-rich” may add to the protection these resources might receive from today’s policymakers, and even, it seems reasonable at least to wonder, from the inspectorate.
However, in reality the absence of any contextualising information around the narratives on which these resources centre suggest this is a “knowledge-light”, rather than a “knowledge-rich” approach. They seem a terrible advert for traditionalist teaching approaches, when scrutinised closely.
A new “secret garden”?
Before the advent of the national curriculum in 1988, it was sometimes said that the curriculum was a “secret garden” in England, with the teaching profession left to develop what was studied, away from public scrutiny. Investigating developments such as this, the thought occurs that curriculum development may be a new secret garden, though with wealthy non-professionals, rather than teachers, in charge as academy “sponsors”. Indeed, a sense of amateurism seems an underlying concern about these resources.
Is to highlight this one case unfair to the many academy trusts not set up and controlled as Future Academies is? Well, from the start the academies policy handed over a largely unquestioned amount of influence to such “sponsors”, who were often given effective control of a trust’s entire board of governors, and with many of the larger trusts still subject to extreme centralisations of power (£). It surprises me, therefore, that those within the academies movement itself do not start speaking out about what are demonstrable weaknesses in the policy, for anyone concerned about public accountability, with a view to improving it.
As it is, the only hope for teachers and parents within trusts such as this, wanting to bring outside attention to these matters, is to go to the media. This is wrong, within what are meant to be public organisations. The basis on which wealthy individuals have been given control of state-funded schools needs to be questioned, and challenged. Pupils, who the experts with whom I consulted were united in thinking could be provided with far superior teaching resources than this, deserve so much better.
-You can read the full investigation at www.educationuncovered.co.uk