There appears to be a consensus around the ‘middle tier debate’. Everyone says yes, we need a middle tier, and nearly everyone says yes, it should provide the same roles – school improvement, accountability, ensuring school places and fair access to them.
However, the Association of Teachers and Lecturers says everyone is missing the point. In our contribution to Labour’s policy consultation, published this week, we say the middle tier debate is characterised by simple but profound misapprehensions.
First, it is taken for granted that most of England’s 21,000 schools are about to become academies. Newspapers routinely declare that half are already. This is wrong. Department for education figures for June show that just 10.49 per cent of England’s maintained schools, are, or have applied to become, academies.
Now we know that Michael Gove wishes the spin to become reality but the only way the remaining 89.51 per cent will become academies is for the government to step up its ‘forced-to-be-free’ approach.
The financial advantage of conversion disappears next year when the new schools funding system kicks in – research shows this has been the number one motive to convert. And the academy ideal is highly unattractive to the large majority of primary schools; most are just too small to be viable independent organisations. So nine out of 10 schools still look to their local authorities or diocesan boards for support.
Second, the idea that these free-standing schools are controlled by Michael Gove is risible. There are too many and they are too far from London. No, the problem is they are out of control, with no genuine accountability. I refer you to the Lincoln polo grounds and porn on the school credit card. Yet schools will always need external support, for improvement and for services like HR, legal, and PR. So money-people chase around the country trying to hoover schools into their chains, many in the hope that soon they will be able to profit from running the schools as well as providing services.
Third, and crucially, education is not a consumer good and pupils cannot thrive when it is treated as such. If your cornflakes taste like cardboard you can try another brand next time, but you can’t try a different school each term and expect to get results.
Accepting market solutions as the main driver for school improvement – as in, you fail, you close – means we accept writing off cohorts of pupils as a school goes downhill.
So, finally, to the most substantial gap in the ‘middle tier debate’. Education is a public good, not a consumer good. It is a major public service to local communities, and must be run for local communities which means: sufficient place planning to give local pupils access to a local school; a fair and transparent admissions process which reflects the make-up of the local community; an ethos and a curriculum which are supported by the local community; and allowing teachers ownership of what is taught, how it is taught and how is it assessed in order to get the best from children.
We do not have to wait for the market to come up with a solution. We already have bodies to do this. They currently have over 200 statutory functions. They have, or until recently had, the capacity to undertake all the roles of a middle tier, including place planning and fair access which only a public body can take responsibility for. We do not need democratic local authorities to provide all services to schools, but they must be responsible to the community for the quality of those services and the spending of public money.
To ATL, this is completely obvious. The idea of replacing them is either ideological claptrap or a necessary stepping stone to running our schools for profit. And we now know for sure two things: selling off our schools is Michael Gove’s intention and this is profoundly unpopular with the majority of schools, parents and communities.
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Martin Johnson is deputy general secretary of the ATL education union
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Read also …
Ralph Berry on why we should reinstate local government as the middle tier
Josh MacAlister on why we should back school commissioners
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