Do Academies and Free Schools cause more problems than they solve?

Creating academies and free schools is unlikely to transform educational achievement in the way the coalition government hopes, a senior academic says.

Far from improving outcomes for schools and pupils, the constant changes in school organisation over the past 20 years cause problems for many parents and society in general, Professor Ron Glatter told the British Educational Leadership, Management and Administration Society’s annual conference in Reading.

“The assumption is that each of the new or distinct school types will change education for the better – that changes in governance produce improvement.  I recently reviewed research studies looking at the effects of grant-maintained, specialist and faith schools and academies.  In every case it was clear that the status of the schools did not in itself contribute to any improvements.

“Where there were improvements these were due to extraneous factors such as intake differences or extra funding.  However there is evidence of the disbenefits of this approach, in terms of increased complexity of the system creating challenges for less educated parents in particular and greater social segregation.”

"Continual restructuring" 

Professor Glatter, Emeritus Professor of Educational Administration and Management at the Open University, argued  that there was “a national cultural predisposition towards continual restructuring” and that structural diversity in the school system is officially celebrated “in spite of the absence of any strong evidence of a demand for this feature from parents or other stakeholders.”

This, he argued, has been driven by factors including micro-management of schools and an aspiration to emulate the independent sector. But system-wide changes are necessary to tackle micromanagement, whilst British independent schools have “a far more privileged position than private schools hold elsewhere.

“For example class sizes in our private secondary schools average around half those in our state schools, even though the state schools are very close to the OECD class size average for both state and private schools.  This is a unique situation internationally and it is sometimes assumed that there is a distinctive independent school ethos that state schools should try to absorb. 

Professor Glatter is concerned about the implications of giving some schools -- such as academies -- more autonomy and funding than others. “The dangers with the conferment of this kind of privileged status are evident in that academic and social divisions and false hierarchies are likely to multiply.

Political "favourite"

“The rationale for differences in levels of autonomy over for example admissions and the curriculum between different publicly-funded schools is far from clear.  There is a strong case in terms of equity for proposing that, for schools funded from the public purse, variations in autonomy between different categories of schools should be kept to an absolute minimum and a strong and convincing rationale should be provided for any such differences,” he said, adding that this should not include schools being a current political “favourite” whose success must be engineered.

He is also concerned that not enough attention has been paid to the wider context surrounding the world’s highest-achieving school systems. Sweden, for instance, home of free schools, is second out of 30 comparable countries for income equality, whereas the UK is in 24^th position. “The risks of promoting a school structure with the potential to exacerbate social segregation are much greater here than in Sweden,” said Professor Glatter. International evidence reveals that the countries which are best for school quality and fairness, such as Finland, Canada and Japan, do not indulge in “English-style heavy duty restructuring but rely much more on sustaining comprehensive, integrated schooling systems.” Nor is there any definitive international evidence for the effects of school competition.

He concluded: “I have argued for the need to be very sceptical about the predicted benefits of structural change.  There will be occasions when it is appropriate and necessary, for example in adapting to the consequences of contraction, which is likely to be a common experience in the years ahead, but even then the full costs and benefits need to be taken into account.

“It will be of the utmost importance in the coming period of intense challenge that professionals and the public are persuaded through opinion mobilisation that changes are necessary and justified.  We should not strive to mimic inappropriate models such as those of private schooling, but instead take a system-wide rather than a narrow institutional view.”