A fully trust-led system?

Posted on 22/11/2022

Government policy intends that by 2030 all state schools in England will have become academies. Patrick Yarker introduces the latest issue of FORUM, in which the failings of the academisation policy are anatomised, and rejects the view that teaching is ‘delivery’.

What’s become of the 2022 Schools White Paper, ‘Opportunity for all: Strong schools with great teachers for your child’? Fanfared in the Spring by Nadhim Zahawi, at that time the Education Secretary, it came under fire from fellow-Tory Robert Halfon, Chair of the Education Select Committee, for not advancing a ‘skills-rich curriculum’ to partner the ‘knowledge-rich’ one. Subsequently mauled in the Lords, not least by Conservative peers, the White Paper was withdrawn pending revision. The little local difficulty experienced by the governing party over the summer seems to have delayed the return of this major piece of legislation which had at its core a commitment to make all state schools in England academies by 2030 and see them safely berthed in high-performing Multi-Academy Trusts.

FORUM’s autumn number takes to task the ideology which informs the White Paper and many of the claims it makes. The assertions, simplifications, fictions and illusions deployed by the authors of current policy serve to advance a merely instrumentalist conception of what education is and is for, and what teachers are there to do. The monochrome vision is expressed in lifeless language. Schools must improve educational outputs. Teachers must deliver a curriculum, one they increasingly do not devise. Meanwhile, as Helen Gunther and Belinda Hughes point out, the pursuit of full academisation hastens the dismantling of the responsive and responsible structures of public education. Other contributors expose the anti-democratic nature of academy governance, and the relative failure of numbers of academies successfully to educate their pupils and students as compared to local authority schools. They criticize the financial scandals that dog academies, and the tendency of academy CEOs to be grossly overpaid while teaching-costs are tamped down hard. They condemn the adoption by academy chains of ‘zero tolerance’ or ‘no excuses’ behaviour policies.

Such policies are part and parcel, Diane Reay warns, of a more general slide to authoritarianism, and endorse a further abnegation of the school’s responsibility to regard pupils and students as human beings and to meet them as such. When Nadhim Zahawi appeared before the Education Select Committee in the Spring, Robert Halfon noted that the ghost of Nick Gibb was even yet walking the corridors of the DfE. The man himself returned in a ministerial role a few months later, but in truth his spirit, and that of his mentor Michael Gove, were never exorcised. In that spirit and outrageously, ministers continue to dictate to teachers how all young children shall be taught to read. No doubt the intention holds to dictate pedagogy in other areas too.

Parts of the 2022 White Paper addressed the quality, planning and ‘delivery’ of the curriculum. Government has recently published the Business Case for making Oak Academy responsible for designing elements of the curriculum and resourcing lessons, thereby saving teachers the trouble. Ministers justify this policy as a way to reduce teachers’ workload. They believe it is pointlessly burdensome for teachers to create a lesson or a series of lessons and generate the materials to resource their own teaching. Doing so is inefficient. It re-invents the wheel. In this, ministers are spectacularly mistaken, for such work is of the essence of teaching. There are elements of workload that practitioners find at best needless and at worst soul-destroying. They lie elsewhere. To teach is, among other things, to nurture a learning relationship over time, whereby what happens in the teaching of one lesson affects how the next comes to be taught. Unconsidered pre-packaged content and off-the-peg plans cannot meet the case. Imagining the lesson unfolding in advance, intuiting who will respond and how and therefore anticipating—and if need be inventing—the materials and activities likely to work with a class while incorporating scope for pupils or students to be agents within the lesson and help shape how it goes, are aspects of pedagogic practice of an order altogether different from anything encompassed by ‘delivery’. Such practice is far more demanding and far more responsible.  So teachers value it, for all the work it entails.

Government advisors are concerned that teachers will see the amplification of the remit of Oak Academy for what it is: a further threat to pedagogic autonomy. Tellingly, this concern comes second among those listed in the Business Case. Government’s first concern is for any adverse impact the policy might make on the commercial market for curriculum resources. Acquiescence is to be fostered among teachers by presenting the lesson-plans and materials on offer as neither mandatory nor endorsed by Ofsted or exam boards, and as if they are entirely the work of fellow-practitioners, developed ‘by the sector, for the sector’. In fact the ‘sector’ is explicitly defined in the Business Case so as to include commercial education suppliers. 

The policy being developed to extend Oak Academy’s remit further entrenches a model of teaching and a way of thinking about mass education in which those who learn are primarily seen as deficient and learning itself understood as principally a species of remembering. Of a piece with this wrong-headedness is the urge to re-configure teachers as technicians who have no meaningful contribution to make to debates about the nature or purpose of their work. How hard is it for policy-makers to understand that teaching is never an act of ‘delivery’?  And how superfluous must the informed and critical continue to find themselves in the halls of the DfE, where Nick Gibb famously responds to a contrary argument by sticking his fingers in his ears.

 

Patrick Yarker, FORUM.