Seeking to marginalise outside voices is a mistake for the academies policy – and for the teaching profession as a whole

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I dipped into a discussion on Facebook this morning, hosted by a local councillor for a town which has seen the academies policy become a live debating issue.

The town is St Neots, in Cambridgeshire, whose only two state secondary schools are run by the same academy trust, Astrea, which is based 100 miles away in Sheffield, and which has generated large amounts of controversy over the past couple of years.

Longsands, the bigger of the two schools, has seen a large exodus of employees over the past 18 months. It lost nine teachers last Christmas, with the National Education Union estimating that a third of its staff departed over a one-year period. Ernulf, the other secondary in the town, has not been immune to controversy, either. Staff unhappiness has sometimes centred on the often highly-standardised teaching and behaviour management approaches mandated by the trust. NEU members at Longsands held two days of strikes in the summer term.

At a pre-election hustings in June, none of the six prospective parliamentary candidates in attendance appeared unequivocally supportive either of the academies system as a whole, or of Astrea’s running of the schools specifically, with plenty of criticism on display. This, presumably, was based on the local knowledge, in the town, of the effects of the trust on the schools.

At Longsands’ inspection in February, nearly nine out of 10 parents who registered their opinion sadly said they would not recommend the school to others. Nearly half of staff who were surveyed by Ofsted said it had got worse since its last inspection, which had rated it “requires improvement”. Yet Ofsted upgraded the school’s rating to “good”.

Today’s Facebook discussion, then, saw the councillor, Stephen Ferguson, hosting debate on all of this, in the context of a community many of whose members seem frustrated with the way the trust is running these schools. Invited on to bring a school leadership perspective was Stuart Lock, the chief executive of another multi-academy trust, who has been supportive of Astrea over the past couple of years, and who has worked with the government’s behaviour adviser, Tom Bennett, whose output Astrea has said has influenced its policies.

Mr Lock was asked if he understood the perspective of parents who felt they were not being listened to. How could, for example, so many parents be concerned about the direction that a school had taken, and yet Ofsted take a completely different view on it? If so many were unhappy, why did it seem like there was nothing they could do to have their perspective taken seriously by those in charge?

Mr Lock sounded emollient and reasonable, in response. He argued that, while the parent perspective was important, parents generally did not have the professional expertise of inspectors. And they were not actually in classrooms, witnessing what happened in terms of teaching interactions.

And, while again it was necessary to note the community perspective – and the academies policy he said does recognise this, by requiring academy trusts to include two elected parents on their boards- again it was important to remember, he suggested, that parents were not the experts, when it came to education.

Meaningful parental input into academy governance. Really?

Mr Lock’s point on parental input into academy governance, which to be fair he was wise enough not to push too hard, came despite Astrea itself not living up to that stipulation, at least according to its official DfE records. These show that all trustees on the 26-school trust’s overarching board were appointed by the board itself or its controlling members*. At the school level, both Longsands’ and Ernulf’s “local governing bodies” saw all members appointed. More broadly, the DfE sought to scrap parental governance entirely within academies in 2016, only backing down as part of a u-turn on academising all schools in the face of a national revolt against that, including from Conservative councillors.

Few people would argue that the academies policy is set up to give meaningful local democratic input to communities, even though some trusts do choose to operate in this way. It is a vehicle to give autonomy to those professionals who sit at the top of the trusts, to run things as they see fit, subject to intervention from Whitehall in certain circumstances.

The bigger and more important point made by Mr Lock was about expertise. The drive to say to communities “we are professionals and we know best how to run our schools; please trust us and leave us alone to do it,” is in some senses understandable.

There is no doubt that some parent campaigns to change the direction of school policy can take a hostile turn on social media, although those I interact with, embracing teachers as well as parents, in my experience are generally civil and reasonable-sounding, if often frustrated. School leadership teams are also, of course, doing a very challenging job for which they have front-line experience which critics of their approaches often lack.

However, parents in particular have an important perspective on the results of schools’ activities: the experiences of their children. Professionals can stress that they have the expertise to determine what works in the classroom. But if families are concerned about the effects of a school’s policies on their young people, they deserve to be heard, and not to be written off as – however gently this might on occasion be put - not knowing what they are talking about, or worse, being deliberately hostile.

An example from an earlier controversy about Astrea is illustrative. Eighteen months ago, a parent group had sprung up at St Ivo academy. This is another large Astrea comprehensive in Cambridgeshire, down the road from St Neots in the town of St Ives. This parent group was concerned about sudden changes to the school’s GCSE provision, with many members of the group also being concerned about the impact of Astrea’s strict behaviour policies, as they saw it, on their children, who had recently emerged from covid lockdowns and yet faced a strong emphasis, for example, on the minutiae of uniform and equipment rules.

The group compiled a document with survey responses from 315 parents and 462 children. Some 57 per cent of parents had concerns about their child’s mental health and/or wellbeing, with 63 per cent saying that Astrea’s policies and the way they were being implemented were having a negative impact on their child’s wellbeing. The document, which ran to 168 pages, included quotes from parents saying that children were being made anxious about inadvertently making a mistake and being punished for it.

Astrea made some concessions on the details of its policies. But there was no engagement with the broader thrust of the complaint. The group then took its concerns to the Department for Education’s regional director, but had to wait almost six months for a response, which effectively said there was nothing he could do, as academy trusts set their own policies.

In relation to Ofsted and “expertise,” inspectors are indeed professionals with experience and detailed training who follow a minutely-specified framework. Yet the inspectorate’s own ability to get things right is the subject of widespread scepticism, while in the case of Longsands, the admission by the trust that 25 extra staff were brought in from other schools or its headquarters while the inspection happened will have added to a sense that this snapshot judgement on the school may not have fully reflected the reality of this institution as experienced day-to-day by its community.

More broadly, what can seem a natural tendency of the teaching profession to want to pull back from troublesome counter-views from parents about decision-making is, I think, accentuated by the academies policy, and also by the way Ofsted currently operates.

On the latter, 20 years ago the inspectorate used to have sections in its reports on schools where it documented in detail what parents thought about the institution, as evidenced by surveys and a public meeting. Inspectors did not, of course, have to agree with those views. But if they disagreed, they would set out why. Now, inspectors can reach a view diametrically opposed to what, as evidenced here, at least a substantial proportion of parents, and staff, think, without having to document this systematically in reports, let alone explain why they took a different view. In an ideal world, that would change.

The academies policy, set up to give decision-making power only to two parties – the academy trust and the Department for Education – also marginalises the perspectives of those not enacting policy, but on the end of its results: the children and their parents. Unlike in the set-up for local authority schools, formally there is no place for the community perspective to be taken into account in a meaningful way. This is evident at all aspects of how the academies system is set up, including that key players in setting academies’ futures – the DfE’s regional directors – never have to appear in front of parents to explain or defend their decision-making.

One can argue about the effectiveness of local accountability in reality within the LA maintained sector – Mr Lock did so in the discussion today – but it is still the case that these schools operate within a framework which is set up at least with the attempt of taking the local perspective seriously. A parent, for example, who is unhappy with their school can go to their local councillor, with locally-elected councils having to answer to families if there is widespread unhappiness**. No such local mechanism exists within the academy set-up.

It seems to me that the institutional remoteness from the community perspective that the academies policy formally enables is encouraging a professional-knows-best – or in reality, an academy-trust-management knows best - perspective which will ultimately prove counter-productive. There are complaints within the profession about conflicts with parents, and about campaigns being overly hostile. But a system which formally marginalises communities can contribute to frustrations building, rather than defusing tensions, it seems to me. At the extreme, families can become so unhappy that they take their children out of school education entirely, as the growth of home education numbers perhaps illustrates.

The current set-up also seems curiously backward-looking. While many people, including myself, have been critical of the way parental choice policies, for example, have worked, they were sold on the notion that the users of school services have an important perspective. For, if they did not like the provision on offer, the idea was that they could vote with their feet. Now, in cases of a town such as St Neots where the academy trust operates the only form of secondary education on offer, even that is made extra difficult for these families.

All of this comes against the backdrop of those who take a critical view of some policies which have come to the fore in recent years, such as strict approaches to behaviour, sometimes being given the message on social media that their perspectives do not count, since they have not run schools in challenging circumstances.

In my view the way forward is not for the profession – including the leadership of academy trusts - to close up and not take seriously the perspective of those affected by school decision-making, principally children and their parents, but rather to give more spaces in which such views can find meaningful expression.  

If it is going to be allowed by ministers to persist as the dominant model of school organisation in England, the academies structure, and the inspection system which is so important to schools, needs to find a way to give formal expression to points of view, which, while often not “professional” or “expert,” nevertheless - as I thought policymakers had understood - are important.

*It is possible, I suppose, for some of these board members to be parents of children at the schools. But they were not categorised as such in the official records, and the records state that they had been appointed by the trust, rather than elected by parents. So the space for a locally-based perspective which might challenge the direction of decision-making by the trust seems limited.

**This may be why many other countries still run state-funded schooling under local municipalities, rather than the national government/semi-private trust hybrid we see in England.