Editor’s note: In this column we encourage our readers to have their say. This week occasional contributor John Howlett expresses his own very personal view of the malady affecting not just Rye Academy but our education system as a whole. It is an important subject and we welcome other readers views and comments
I respond to the report on Rye Academy (Kenneth Bird, Rye News, October 12) with a broader question asking what is happening to the failed neo-liberal free market capitalism of the last forty years.
I echo Kenneth’s appreciation of what has been done to rescue Rye Academy and congratulate Tim Hulme on his seemingly successful mission; though I would question why the article concerns itself almost entirely with finance and governance and not with students or teaching; and I would insist (as does Nigel Jennings in his Comment) that our unfortunate schools should never have been faced with these choices in the first place.
At the very moment when the neo-liberal conceit and deceit so blatantly progressed by Thatcher, Major, Blair and Brown has been finally exposed (not just by Corbyn and McDonnell but also by the IMF), education has already slipped after health, social care, utilities and housing down the slide into that black hole of deregulation and private initiative – otherwise known to its many and various victims as the world of private wealth and public squalor. Where, for example, the water industry (it used to be called a public service) is mostly owned by private equity or foreign sovereign funds. Our 19th century infrastructure of water mains and sewage crumbles while the companies pay dividends to shareholders and large executive salaries to themselves – companies mostly outside the UK who pay no tax within the British Isles. Are you really surprised the British public, finally becoming aware of such iniquity in most public services, are in in favour of taking the right of fresh water and efficient waste disposal back into public ownership? Along with gas & electricity, the post office and our ragged railway network.
In the meantime we arrive at the absurdity of a school or group of schools being administered and judged as though they were commercial organisations. And this week we read that schools have lost £2.8 billion in budget and service cuts since 2015. We are talking about the education of our children and grandchildren, education that was for us, fifty, sixty years ago, well-administered, free even into college and university, where it was only, rightly, subject to a means test.
The UK has ended up with the most chaotic education infrastructure in the whole of the western world. We encourage divisive religious schools; we encourage parents to start up their own establishments under various titles and fund them irresponsibly from a budget whose criteria are understood by no one, especially those unfortunate DFE civil servants who are meant to run it. We wave a magic wand turning schools into academies, ‘liberating’ them from LEA audit and control – but failing to create any other credible licensing agency or support in their place, and creating instead a wholly unnecessary level of expensive ‘executive administration’ for every individual academy trust, sometimes for every individual school – administration and financial control formerly carried out by a school manager working cooperatively with the LEA.
The old LEAs (Local Education Authorities – usually City Boroughs or County Councils) clearly differed in their efficiency and their philosophies (I remember as a school governor in Kent during the early 1980s realizing that East Sussex pupils just one mile across the border had £180 more spent on their secondary education each year than our Kent children – a mighty sum in those days when multiplied by the numbers of a large comprehensive).
But even so those LEAs, good and not so good, still supplied mostly excellent advisory services (subject specialists, teacher training, child psychologists, music tuition and orchestras, finance and legal staff to name but a few). Now, in these free market days, most of these services have to be purchased by individual schools from private companies whose only statutory interest in the transaction is profit (whatever their professional experience and expertise – many of these companies turn out be based in the USA and thus do not even pay tax in the UK).
Making untaxed profit out of my grandchildren’s education? Take me to the barricades!
The buck apparently stops now at the Department For Education. And of course with Ofsted. And equally with the Corbyn shadow-government who have to figure out how to unravel this mess and restore structure and stability.
The DFE (the old Ministry of Education) was never intended, staffed or trained to have direct detailed control over schools. They are not fit for purpose because this is not their purpose.
Nor are Ofsted, for all their scurrying clipboard-box-ticking work. They are in no way a match for the old HMIs (Her Majesty’s Inspectors) whose careful assessments of schools avoided ridiculous labels and often meaningless but damaging punitive measures. The worst elements of managerialism now triumph in the name but never the spirit or achievement of efficiency. The net result is systemic anarchy and organisations that only hang together through the dedication of underpaid and overworked school staff who are quite literally having to make it up as they go along.
Our Rye Academy will flourish not with convoluted first-aid loans, but when sufficient funds, together with a unified and egalitarian infrastructure are restored to all of Education, to all our young, and all the gallant staff who dedicate their lives to them.
I fully endorse your sentiments John.
Great article. I despair of the people who still believe the hype and lies promoted by this government and their powerful friends: the systematic theft of services and infrastructure paid for by decades of taxes and hard work to make riches for the few is a disaster and moral disgrace.
Endorse what John has said. The so called ‘free’ schools and their funding siphon off money which should be spent on main stream schools. So when the Govt., in its various manifestations claim that more money is being spent on education, they mean these schools which are paid for out of our taxes but without any local accountability.
It is just another example of creating systems to divert public money into private hands.
I am writing to comment on the statement by Tim Hulme, CEO of our local Rye Academy Trust, published on October 12, that “Trusts of our size are almost unsustainable without wider collaboration”.
They are unsustainable largely because of the extra costs foisted upon them when they became academy trusts, costs that they did not incur when they were managed by the local authority
Take the Rye Community Primary School, for example. Before it became an academy, RCPS was in good fettle with significant reserves, its finances being under the close control of the business manager, Head and finance committee and under the watchful eye of East Sussex. It was a “good” school in Ofsted terms, although there was a realisation that it needed to do better. The governors were encouraged to get to know pupils and parents.
Then came government pressure to become an academy and therefore a limited company. This was new territory. Statutory accounts would have to be prepared with the associated costs of accountants, auditors and accounting software. Either the Head would become a Chief Executive with the added title of “Accounting Officer” or in a multi- academy, a new highly paid person would be recruited with these titles. The governors’ responsibilities as trustees and directors of the company would increase. This was a frightening prospect to staff who were recruited as teachers and to governors who were focused on improving teaching and learning.
It is no wonder that RCPS got into bed with the Studio School and Rye College, particularly when a seamless transition from nursery to sixth form was attractive and their governors had already experienced the transition to an academy trust. The positive overtures made by the COE and the Heads of the schools and the glowing report from Ofsted on the Studio School added to the attraction.
Unbeknown to the governors of RCPS, however, both the School and College were making substantial deficits and Ofsted later changed its mind about the performance of the Studio School.
Strong financial management was absent with inevitable consequences to which Hulme has referred.
An examination of the accounts of other trusts on the Companies House web-site and reports in the press reveal that this is far from an isolated experience. In fact, you would be hard put to find an academy trust that is not in deficit.
Then there are the bad eggs that we have read about. The Wakefield City Academies Trust is the latest to raise concerns about financial management and control. The substantial reserves that individual schools in Yorkshire had built up seem to have been lost, a fate that I trust will not be shared by RCPS on the transfer of its reserves to the Rye Academy Trust in 2015.
In conclusion, I agree with Messrs Howlett, Jennings and others that the model of academy trusts is flawed and the gap between the education in private schools and the schools under this new regime will widen.
Class sizes are too big; teaching assistants who play a vital role are paid far too little; extra-curricula activities in comparison with the private sector are minimal. Necessary building improvements are put on hold.
The idea that all will be well in the future with fewer but larger Trusts is fanciful, particularly if government funding per pupil remains largely at its present level.
An excellent article