Education, Education, Education: Now in Education...Our First Academy Giles Secondary School

Wednesday, 6 October 2010

A taste of Now in Education

This September has seen our local secondary school, the Giles School in Old Leake, open its doors for the first time as the Giles Academy. The school is one of the 142 to take advantage of new legislation which gives all schools ranked as ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted, the right to step out of Local Authority control.

The numbers converting represents a significant acceleration compared with the record of the previous government which saw a total of 203 schools converted or opened as academies from 2002 to Jan 2010.

What ‘academy status’ means in practice is that the money granted by the government to a school based on pupil numbers, will be given directly to the school to manage. Other schools have a proportion of their grant funding retained by the LA to pay for essential services such as insurance and rubbish collection.

The government’s website states :

‘Academies have freedom from local authority control, which means that they have autonomy over the decisions they make and the education they deliver to their pupils. They also have the freedom to change the length of terms and school days, set their own pay and conditions for staff, and freedoms around the delivery of the curriculum. There is a range of services that were previously provided by the local authority that academies will now need to provide.’

In fact this has already taken some adjustment, with academy schools having to remember to factor into their budget the cost of having the bins emptied, or visits from support staff employed by the LA- which would previously have been taken care of by the local authority.

Conversion brings some additional regulatory challenges also, with the requirement for the academy to produce yearly accounts compliant with the companies act. The ‘safety net’ - that the local authority would step in if the school got into financial difficulty - is removed. Academies are essentially businesses and could in theory go bankrupt – although whether, in practice, this would be allowed to happen is a point for debate.

Concerns have been raised that the new easier conversion to academy status is diluting the original purpose of academies and may lead to a ‘two tier’ system of education, with the most disadvantaged pupils losing out. The argument against this is that the ‘pupil premium’ – the additional sum of money assigned to the most disadvantaged pupils – will mitigate this risk.

Perhaps the biggest concern is for the future of the role of the Local Authority (LA) in education. Currently the LA provides many services to schools, including insurance, finance advisors and specialist staff who can advise on, for example, behaviour management. LA’s can currently price these services on the basis that most schools will access them. Should this not continue to be the case, the LA’s purchasing power will be severely eroded and some services may become uneconomic to provide, leading to an erosion in LA support services, possible redundancies in LA school support staff and budget cuts to LA maintained schools.

Commenting on this, former education secretary Ed Balls has said “the resources and the power will be handed over, away from the local authority to the best-performing schools which will suck the best teachers and the extra money."

"The losers from the complete free-for-all (the Government) is proposing will be the majority of schools, those children and parents who deserve a better deal but will see their budgets cut.”

The debate has even split the teaching unions, with the NUT taking a clearly ‘anti’ stance, claiming that not only do academies fail to raise standards, they also involve transferring publicly owned funds and assets to potentially unsuitable sponsors. The NASUWT teachers' union claims the policy will "disenfranchise democratically-elected local councils". Only the National Association of Headteachers (NAHT) sits on the fence, stating “academies legislation currently leaves more questions than answers making good decisions difficult at this time.”

As for our local secondary school, the decision to convert to academy status will give the school more autonomy to set a curriculum that suits its students and, arguably, to use its budget to provide the greatest benefit to its pupils. It would appear that the success of the academy project will depend on headteachers and their support staff now not only being experts in teaching but also in accountancy, procurement, contract negotiation and employment law.

Blog Archive

Now in Education...Our First Academy Giles Secondary School

Wednesday, 6 October 2010

A taste of Now in Education