BRIEFING ON ACADEMIES

October 2010

S:\Academies Bill\ACADEMIES BRIEFING - October 2010.docx 1

WHAT IS AN ACADEMY?

  1. An Academy is an independent school funded by the Secretary of State for Education on terms set out in its Funding Agreement.
  1. An Academy cannot charge fees.
  1. It has to comply with: the Independent School Standards and it’s Funding Agreement

(which both the Secretary of State and the Academy Trust must sign).

  1. Many of the requirements on Academies are the same as those that apply to a maintained school with voluntary or Foundation status, i.e. in relation to:
  • Children with special educational needs;
  • Pupil admissions;
  • Pupil exclusions;
  • Looked after children; and
  • Teacher qualifications.
  1. Academies do have a number of so-called “freedoms” however including:
  2. Independence from the local authority;
  3. Ability to set their own pay and conditions for staff;
  4. Freedom from the national curriculum (although the curriculum must be “broad and balanced”; and
  5. Ability to change the length of terms and length of the school day.

The Academies Act 2010

  1. The Con Dem Government’s new Academies Act was introduced in the House of Lords on 26 May 2010 and gained Royal Assent on 27 July 2010 after just four days debate in the House of Commons.
  1. The Government justified the haste with which is pushed the Act through Parliament saying the legislation was urgent because so many schools were anxious to acquire Academy status from September 2010.
  1. In the House of Commons debate on the Queen’s Speech on 2 June 2010, the Secretary of State said: “I have been overwhelmed by the response. In less than one week, more than 1,100 schools have applied for academy freedoms.”
  1. This is now known to be untrue. The 1,100 figures in fact referred to so-called “expressions of interest” by schools merely seeking further information on the Government’s proposals, not actual applications for academy status.
  1. On 29 July 2010, the DfE published a list of those schools which had formally applied for Academy status. This showed there were 153 such schools.
  1. Just 32 of these new Gove-style Academies opened at the beginning of the autumn term, with others opening over the following few weeks to bring the current total to 57 new-style Academies since 1st September 2010.
  1. In addition a further 64 ”traditional Academies” (old-style labour Academies) have opened this term bring the total number of open Academies to 324 (this is approximately 1.4% of all schools).
  1. Applications from schools wishing to open as Academies in January 2011 closed on 8th October.

Main Provisions of the Act

  1. The Academies Act enables the Secretary of State to make Academy Arrangements with anyone wishing to establish an academy who is deemed acceptable.
  1. It allows all schools to apply for Academy status, including all primary and special school.
  1. When a school becomes an Academy the Academy Trust (or its sponsor) takes over all aspects of the school, controlling its admissions, governing body, curriculum, land and assets, length of the school day and teachers’ pay and conditions. All Academies must have a ‘specialism’ in one or more area and as specialist schools, Academies are allowed to select up to ten per cent of their pupils on the basis of their ‘aptitude’ for the specialism concerned. Selective schools that convert to Academies can continue with their selective arrangements but all other Academies will be non selective.
  1. The Act also makes provision for the introduction of “additional schools” – what we know as “Free Schools”.
  1. New Academies will be “exempt charities” and therefore no longer required to submit their annual accounts and other financial information to the Charity Commission.
  1. In one piece of good news, the new Academies will be subject to Freedom of Information legislation.
  1. The Act makes provision for schools to become Academies if they are ‘eligible for intervention’. Previous statements suggest that schools that have been in special measures for over a year could be taken over by other organisations or forced to adopt Academy status. The Government is also planning to introduce Technical Academies.
  1. The Secretary of State has given pre-approval for ‘outstanding’ schools so that they can become Academies as quickly as possible.

Amendments and Concessions to the Act

Amendments and concessions achieved in the Lords and by MPs mean that:

  • There are now some limited requirements regarding consultation
  • The Secretary of State is duty bound to take account of the impact on other schools in the area when considering an application to set up a Free School
  • Local authorities retain responsibility for SEN assessment and control of the money for services that children with extra support needs require
  • The Secretary of State can direct an academy to comply with any obligations contained in the SEN annex to the Funding Agreement.
  • Academies must have a designated teacher with responsibility for looked after children
  • At least 51% of the pupils in an Academy must be local (drawn “wholly or mainly from the local area”).
  • Academy governing bodies must have at least two parent governors
  • Academies will be required to promote community cohesion; and
  • The Secretary of State must publish an annual report detailing funding agreements that have been entered into for Academies and the performance of Academies (both new and pre-existing Academies). The first report will follow the 2010-2011 academic year.

WHY THE NUT OPPOSES ACADEMIES

1.Fragmentation

Academies are independent of the local authority and outside the LA family of schools. Local authorities play a key role in the strategic planning and management of education provision across a wide area and can have an overview of changing education needs and how best to plan and deliver for this.

The Academies Act will further fragment education, making it harder to plan and deliver resources to schools and communities in a strategic and equitable manner.

2. Centralisation

Academies are funded directly by the Department for Education. The Act by-passes local authorities and brings about direct Government control of schools either directly, by the Secretary of State for Education, or indirectly through a newly expanded and strengthened quango, the Young People’s Learning Agency.

3.Lack of Accountability

Unlike other schools, Academies are not subject to democratic accountability. As a report by consultants Price Waterhouse Coopers noted:

“Academies as independent schools are not scrutinised or held accountable to their local education and children’s services or democratically elected members.”

(Price Waterhouse Coopers, Academies Evaluation Fifth Annual Report, November 2008)

4.Isolation

Removing ‘outstanding’ schools from the local family of schools will have a detrimental impact on all schools. Instead of supporting and working in partnership with each other and their local authority, Academy status could result in schools becoming stand alone institutions, working in isolation from one other, remote and unaccountable to their communities.

5.Widening Inequalities

Academics analysed the school level characteristics of those schools which had “expressed an interest” in becoming a Gove Academy and their analysis showed that such schools were verydifferent to Labour’s Academies.

In existing Academies, the percentage of pupils with special educational needs, those who were entitled to free schools meals, and those from ethnic minority backgrounds were much higher than in all secondary maintained schools.

In contrast these same groups have much lower representation in those schools which had expressed an interest in Academy status under the new arrangements compared with those that had not. The researchers concluded:

“In conclusion, the existing Academy schools and their pupils are more disadvantaged (in a number of ways) than the schools which have recently expressed an Academy interest. If it chooses to follow the expression of interest route, the new coalition governments’ policy on Academy Schools is, not like the previous government's policy, targeted at schools with more disadvantaged pupils. The serious worry that follows is that this will exacerbate already existing educational inequalities.”

Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics, July 2010) (CEP Briefing

- A Note on Academy School Policy, Stephen Machin and James Vernoit

6.Transfer ofAssets

When a community maintained school or Foundation school becomes an Academy its assets, including all its land, building and contents transfer from the local authority to the sponsor or Academy Trust under a leasehold arrangement - usually 125 years.

If a school has a surplus at the time that it becomes an Academy, the local authority must pay the surplus to the Academy Trust.

This represents a major transfer of public assets out of democratically accountable control by the local authority.

7.Lack of Proper Consultation

Under the Academies Act, a school can make a decision to apply for Academy status through a simple majority vote on the governing body. An Amendment to the Act means that the governing body must consult “such persons as they think appropriate” but the Government refused amendments specifying who such persons might be or how they would be consulted.

The consultation must occur before Academy Arrangements are finalised (when the Funding Agreement is signed) but can take place before or after an Academy Order is made. So while some schools may choose to consult before making an application for an Academy order, others may not do so until after an application for Academy status has been submitted or even until after the Academy order has been granted. This is not consultation in any meaningful and genuine sense of the word.

There is no longer any requirement to obtain the consent of the local authority as previously was the case. And the children at the school have no say over the future of their school, despite the fact that under Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, pupils have a right to be consulted in all matters affecting them.

Schools are at the centre of their local communities. The lack of adequate consultation potentially drives a wedge between schools and their communities.

8.Governance

The NUT is also concerned about the undemocratic governance arrangements for Academies which differ substantially from those of local authority schools.

In a maintained school there is a balance of places for key “stakeholders”, particularly elected parents, who make up a third of the governing body, staff governors, and representatives of the local community and the local authority.

In an Academy, the external sponsor or Academy Trust appoints the majority of governors. Academies are only obliged to have two parent governors (who, unlike the other governors, are elected) and there is no requirement for a teacher or staff governor (although the Trust can appoint staff governors if it so chooses, provided any academy employees on the governing body do not exceed more than a third of the total number of governors).

These factors appear to contradict the Government’s stated belief in the “Big Society” and increasing volunteering and the involvement of people in their services at a local level.

9.Academies and Attainment

There is no evidence to sustain the view that the Academies model has resulted in higher levels of pupil attainment. Of course, with the fast-tracking of “outstanding” schools to academy status, this is certain to change.

Among existing Academies, the evidence to date is that, as with schools as a whole, some Academies are doing well while others are struggling.

An evaluation of the Academies Programme commissioned by the Government and conducted by consultants Price Waterhouse Coopers found that there was no evidence to suggest that overall academies were producing the promised improvements in education, with results and experiences varying widely. There was also evidence that where academies were improving, they were doing so by changing their intake rather than doing better with the same pupils.

The report concluded that:

“There is insufficient evidence to make a definitive judgement about Academies as a model for school improvement”.

(PricewaterhouseCoopers, Academies Evaluation Fifth Annual Report, November 2008)

GCSE results for 2009 show that 31.2 per cent of children in Academies gained five A*-C including English and maths compared with 51.57 per cent of children in all secondary schools.

An NAO Report (10/9/10) suggests that the rate of increase in Academy GCSE results maybe faster than in comparator schools. However the NUT is concerned that there is strong circumstantial evidence that Academies may be directing students into taking less academically rigorous qualifications to boost their headline GCSE results.

In 2009, 58 per cent of students in all maintained schools obtained an A*-C GCSE in a modern foreign language, but just 14.2 per cent of students in Academies did so.

A study by the Historical Association found that only six per cent of Academies surveyed taught history as a standalone subject.

10.SEN Provision

Removing Academy funding from local authorities could damage the well being and education of children with Special Educational Needs (SEN).

Local authorities have a key role in identifying need and coordinating provision which ensures equitable access to SEN services.

Councils also directly provide a wide range of services and specialist support in respect of children with SEN. These include, for example, support and advice on SEN statementing, safeguarding issues, education psychology services and specialist support teams in areas such as teaching of the deaf, autism, dyslexia and so on. There is also direct support to special schools in areas such as building maintenance, transport, modification, personnel, training, in-service Autism inclusion serviceandschool meals.

Local authorities also handle appeals in respect of admissions and against exclusions.

Families in schools that convert to Academy status will no longer have the safety net of the local authority to turn to if they are dissatisfied with the provision their child is receiving. Academies could find themselves facing legal action from disgruntled families.

In addition, there will be less funding for SEN provision in schools that remain within the local authority where the authority’s budget has been depleted by Academy conversions in other schools, increasing the chances that families with children with SEN will face a postcode lottery and that disadvantaged children will not receive the same quality of education.

A failure to provide early intervention and develop prevention mechanisms will have cost and other implications in the longer termand hurt the education of children with SEN. There is a danger that some families may simply fall though the net in terms of having their needs identified and met which could have huge ramifications for children with SEN.

11.Academies and Exclusions

The NUT is deeply concerned about the high exclusion rates in Academies which raises concerns over whether Academies are discriminating against some disadvantaged groups of children and whether some Academies are using exclusion to remove young people who might depress the exam results at those institutions.

Permanent exclusion rates in Academies last year were almost three times higher than those in schools as a whole and almost double the rate for local authority maintained secondaries. (Department for Education figures for 2008/09 - published July 2010)

Pupils with SEN are over eight times more likely to be permanently excluded from an Academy than those pupils with no SEN; children who are eligible for free school meals are around three times more likely to receive either a permanent or fixed period exclusion than children who are not eligible for free school meals.

12.Local AuthorityFunding

Removing Academy funding from a local authority’s budget will mean it has less to spend on other schools. In a worst case scenario a local academy which loses a large number of schools to Academy status could find they do no have sufficient resources remaining to offer central services to any schools.

The Government has stated that Academies will be funded at the same level as maintained schools but the funding formula as it currently stands means this may not be the case.

An NUT analysis of the proposed funding formula identified the problem in the way the calculation is made by the Young People’s Learning Agency (YPLA) – the body responsible for Academy funding.

The YPLAs methodology for calculating the Local Authority Central Spend Equivalent Grant (LACSEG) for Academies includes a number of types of expenditure which do not go directly to schools, such as the strategic management and running costs of the whole children’s services directorate. It also included the Academy’s “share” of the local authority’s central spending on school improvement. However this is spent mostly on schools which need additional support, not on those designated as outstanding.