The Schools Bill: school leaders speak out
People who actually run schools explained to MPs what's wrong with the Bill
The troubled Schools Bill is currently going through Committee Stage in the Commons. It was the main subject of today’s Prime Minister’s Questions.
In general, the first part of the Bill - on wellbeing - is not too controversial.
But the second part, on schools, has been hastily crammed in at the last minute, and is much less well developed.
And that’s the bit that’s created a backlash from school leaders.
Yesterday in the Bill Committee we heard from school leaders and educationalists about the problems with the Bill, and how and why it needs to change.
Probably the biggest thing we learned was the sheer number of elements of the Bill that school leaders have concerns about. So far there has been a lot of concern about the measures in the Bill taking away academy freedoms over pay and conditions.
But there are plenty of other things school leaders are worried about.
The end of freedoms over the curriculum
The imposition of the National Curriculum on all schools was raised. As Nigel Genders, Chief Education Officer of the Church of England, noted:
The complexity is that this legislation is happening at the same time as the curriculum and assessment review, so our schools are being asked to sign up to a general curriculum for everybody without knowing what that curriculum is likely to be.
Several school leaders gave good examples of why it is a mistake for the Bill to take away academy freedoms to vary from the national curriculum.
As Sir Dan Moynihan, who leads the incredibly successful Harris schools, explained:
We have taken over failing schools in very disadvantaged places in London, and we have found youngsters in the lower years of secondary schools unable to read and write. We varied the curriculum in the short term and narrowed the number of subjects in key stage 3 in order to maximise the amount of time given for literacy and numeracy, because the children were not able to access the other subjects. Of course, that is subject to Ofsted. Ofsted comes in, inspects and sees whether what you are doing is reasonable.
That flexibility has allowed us to widen the curriculum out again later and take those schools on to “outstanding” status. We are subject to Ofsted scrutiny. It is not clear to me why we would need to follow the full national curriculum. What advantage does that give? When we have to provide all the nationally-recognised qualifications —GCSEs, A-levels, SATs—and we are subject to external regulation by Ofsted, why take away the flexibility to do what is needed locally?
Luke Sparkes from the Dixons Academies Trust argued that:
we also need the ability to enact the curriculum in a responsive and flexible way at a local level. I can see the desire to get that consistency, but there needs to be a consistency without stifling innovation.
Rebecca Leek is a head teacher, but also Director of the Suffolk Primary Headteachers’ Association, with 253 primary schools in Suffolk. She argued:
Anything that says, “Well, we are going to go slightly more with a one-size-fits-all model”—bearing in mind, too, that we do not know what that looks like, because this national curriculum has not even been written yet—is a worry. That is what I mean. If we suddenly all have to comply with something that is more uniform and have to check—“Oh no, we cannot do that”, “Yes, we can do that”, “No, we can’t do that”, “Yes, we can do that”—it will impede our ability to be agile.
The end of freedom over recruitment - and the threat to small and village schools
Rebecca Leek gave a good example of why it’s a mistake for the Bill to take away freedoms over recruitment:
I had to step in as an interim headteacher in Ipswich just prior to covid. I did not have an early years lead… There was someone who was not a qualified teacher, but who had been running an outstanding nursery… I took her on, and although she was not qualified, she was really excellent. I was able to do that because it was an academy school, and it was not an issue. In a maintained school, there is a specific need for a qualified teacher to teach in early years, so I would not have been able to take her on.
She also pointed out that this loss of freedoms over recruitment will pose a particular challenge for small village schools:
… maintained [i.e. non-academy] schools, I think under the 2002 legislation, must have a full-time headteacher—they must have a headteacher at all times. In a small rural school, that is financially a real burden, and it is one of the reasons why I am not a permanent headteacher. Last year, I was an interim headteacher. I came to an agreement with those at the local authority that I would do it on four days a week, and they kind of accepted that—it was a bit of a fudge, because it is actually non-compliant. They asked, “Will you carry on?”, and I said, “No, because I am not going to be full-time.” At the moment, I am three days a week and, again, it is okay because I am interim—academies can have great flexibility around leadership arrangements.
Former headteacher and mathematics expert David Thomas said:
I have concerns about limiting the number of people with unqualified teacher status who are not working towards qualified teacher status…. I have worked with some fantastic people—generally late-career people in shortage subjects who want to go and give back in the last five to 10 years of their career—who would not go through some of the bureaucracy associated with getting qualified teacher status but are absolutely fantastic and have brought wonderful things to a school and to a sector. I have seen them change children’s lives. We know we have a flow of 600 people a year coming into the sector like that. If those were 600 maths teachers and you were to lose that, that would be 100,000 fewer children with a maths teacher. None of us knows what we would actually lose, but that is a risk that, in the current system, where we are so short of teachers, I would choose not to take…
Ultimately, headteachers should be able to make that judgment call because they are the ones who will have to manage those people, and to look parents and children in the eyes and tell them that they believe they have made the right decision for them.
Sir Martyn Oliver from Ofsted gave another good example of how these freedoms are used:
In the past, I have brought in professional sportspeople to teach alongside PE teachers, and they have run sessions. Because I was in Wakefield, it was rugby league: I had rugby league professionals working with about a quarter of the schools in Wakefield at one point.
Clause 43 - power to boss academy schools around on any issue
I wrote before about the scary and unlimited power the Bill creates for the Secretary of State to direct academy schools to do… pretty much anything.
Leora Cruddas from the Confederation of School Trusts suggested a way to bring this unlimited power under some limits:
We do have concerns about the power to direct. We think it is too wide at the moment. We accept that the policy intention is one of equivalence in relation to maintained schools, but maintained schools are different legal structures from academy trusts, and we do not think that the clauses in the Bill properly reflect that. It is too broad and it is too wide. We would like to work with the Government to restrict it to create greater limits. Those limits should be around statutory duties on academy trusts, statutory guidance, the provisions in the funding agreement and charity law.
David Thomas also made this point:
If the purpose is, as it says in the explanatory notes, to issue a direction to academy trusts to comply with their duty, that feels like a perfectly reasonable thing to be able to do. The Bill, as drafted, gives the Secretary of State the ability to “give the proprietor such directions as the Secretary of State considers appropriate”. I do not think it is appropriate for a Secretary of State to give an operational action plan to a school, but I think it is perfectly reasonable for a Secretary of State to tell a school that it needs to follow its duty. I think there is just a mismatch between the stated intention and the drafting, and I would correct that mismatch.
Clause 50 - the Corbyn Clause
I wrote before about my concerns regarding the new power in the Bill for local authorities to object even if good academy schools want to keep their admission numbers the same. I worry that as pupil numbers fall over the coming years, without some rules around this, we will see good schools’ admission numbers being cut in order to prop up less good schools. People like Jeremy Corbyn like this clause, which makes me nervous. Where the LA is also running its own schools, there’s also a potential conflict of interest: they can cut numbers at other schools to prop up their own schools.
We asked Leora Cruddas from the Confederation of School Trusts about this. She said:
We are concerned about some of the potential conflicts of interest. We say “potential” conflicts of interest in the context, as you point out, of falling primary school rolls. We would like to work with Government to set out a high-level, strategic decision-making framework that would mean that, in a local area, we know our children really well and we get our children into the right provision at the right time… Those conflicts of interest can be managed, but they would need to be set out in a very carefully framed decision-making framework so that they are managed properly…
We are not sure what the intention is behind the Government’s need to bring forward the clause in the Bill that would introduce greater powers for a schools adjudicator. That is one of the conflicts of interest that we would be alive to—if a local authority could bring forward a case to resist an academy trust’s pupil admission number, that would be a source of concern for us.
Sir Dan Moynihan echoed this point regarding Clause 48, which extends local authority powers to direct admission of individual children to academy schools:
“there is potentially a conflict of interest if local authorities are opening their own schools and there are very hard-to-place kids. There is a conflict of interest in where they are allocating those children, so there needs to be a clear right of appeal in order to ensure that that conflict can be exposed if necessary.
Some of the schools we have taken on have failed because they have admitted large numbers of hard-to-place children. I can think of one borough we operate in where councillors were very open about the fact that there was a school that took children that other schools would not take. They said that openly, and the reason they did not want it to become an academy was because that process would end. The school was seen as a dumping ground. I think there are schools that get into difficulty and fail because there is perceived local hierarchy of schools, and those are the schools that get those children. That is why there needs to be a clear right of appeal to prevent that from happening.
As did Luke Sparkes:
I think we accept that the current arrangements are fractured, but—similarly to what Sir Dan said—it is that conflict of interest that we have been concerned about.
Clause 44 - The end of the academies order
The Bill ends the automatic conversion of failing schools into academies. One surprise was the scepticism about the schools part of the Bill from the government’s Children’s Commissioner, Rachel De Souza, who is herself a former Head:
I have two issues with the academies provisions. First, I cannot let children remain in failing schools, so if those are going, I need to know what is going to happen. Childhood lasts a very short time, so if a child is in a failing school, how will those schools be improved, immediately and effectively? Secondly, as well as a real vision for the schools system—I know that it is there—I would like to see what will happen to attainment data, under what is envisaged as replacing it, so that no child, particularly the most vulnerable, is disadvantaged.
I asked whether the Children’s Commissioner shared the concerns raised by Labour MP Siobhan McDonagh that the end of the automatic academy order for failing schools would lead to a return of the divisive community campaigns and long-running legal cases we saw before the academisation was made automatic.
Prior to this McDonagh had seen a two-year court battle to get a failing school in her constituency turned into an academy. De Souza echoed this:
Probably the main reason for academy orders was to try to expedite improvement quickly against a backlash. Would it not be great if we could get everyone on side to be able to act really quickly, together, to improve schools that need improving?
Pay and conditions
Last but not least, we had a partial u-turn from the government on pay and conditions.
Sir Jon Coles leads the largest school trust in the country, United Learning Trust. He explained the issues on pay. He is concerned not just about the loss of academy freedoms on teacher pay but also on non-teaching staff - which are being taken away in another Bill. Coles said:
I think we really need those freedoms. They are very important to us. Obviously, that applies to this Bill, in relation to schoolteachers’ pay and conditions, but it also applies to the Employment Rights Bill, in relation to the school support staff negotiating body. Those are fundamentally important to us.
Support staff are more than half of all staff in schools - but so far the government has not agreed to make amendments to its plans to cut across academy pay freedoms for them.
Coles warned that the Bill currently doesn’t do what ministers claimed it did, and brings academies under the Schoolteachers’ Pay and Conditions Document (STPCD)
I have been hugely encouraged by the Secretary of State’s remarks that what she wants is a floor but no ceiling, and that is something that we can absolutely work with. I hope that that is what we see coming through. At this moment, that is not what the Bill says; it says that we have to abide by the schoolteachers’ pay and conditions document.
The STPCD is a long (and very detailed) document, setting out over 89 pages very specific minimum and maximum pay for different roles and everything to do with conditions and hours and the like.
As Coles noted, if STPCD is to be made binding on academies it will bind them in detail:
The thing about the schoolteachers’ pay and conditions document is that it is fundamentally a contract. Section 122 of the Education Act 2002—it happens to be an Act that I took through Parliament as a Bill manager, when I was a civil servant—essentially says that the Secretary of State may, by order, issue what is commonly known as the pay order, but the pay order includes a lot of conditions. Section 122 of the Act says that that applies as if it were a contract. Indeed, if you are a teacher in a maintained school, typically your contract will literally say, “You are employed under the terms of the schoolteachers’ pay and conditions document,” so it is your contract.
Therefore, the schoolteachers’ pay and conditions document has to act as a contract. It has to be specific. A teacher looking it up has to be able to see, “What are my terms and conditions? Have I been treated properly?” and so on. That is how the schoolteachers’ pay and conditions document needs to work, so if we have to abide by it precisely, that is what we would have to abide by
This point about the application of the STPCD to academies is very relevant because of the partial u-turn announced by ministers late yesterday and referred to by the PM today at PMQs. Here’s what Minister Catherine McKinnell said about the government’s planned amendment to its own Bill:
The amendment will do two things. First, it will set a floor on pay that requires all state schools to follow minimum pay bands set out in the school teachers’ pay and conditions document. Secondly, it will require academies to have due regard to the rest of the terms and conditions in the school teacher’s pay and conditions document.
It’s the second line that worries me. I asked her about it:
Neil O'Brien: So it is still your intention to make all academies comply with the school teachers’ pay and condition document, despite what Sir Jon Coles talked about regarding the problems that that would create?
Catherine McKinnell: As I said, the amendment will require all state schools to follow the minimum pay bands set out in the school teachers’ pay and conditions document, and then it will require academies to have due regard to the rest of the terms and conditions in the school teachers’ pay and conditions document.
Why worry?
Well, schools are subject to quite a lot of lobbying from militant left groups and the unions are very powerful. The freedoms over pay have been used in the teeth of this, and, for that reason, mainly by bigger academy trusts with more resources.
And that’s been in a world where their academy schools freedoms are unambiguous.
Once unions and various left wing groups have a legal way in which to challenge such arrangements, we may well see lawfare and measures which will intimidate school leaders into not trying to use the freedoms.
If militant groups think a primary school is not quite “having regard” to something on page 86 of the STPCD then that little school may now be dragged through the courts, and that will create a hostile environment for innovation.
Luke Sparkes explained that conditions were just as important as pay. Their school trust works in very challenging places, and is offering teachers an innovative nine-day fortnight to give them more preparation time:
we still believe that a rigid set of expectations around conditions will stifle innovation… Leaders working in our context need the freedom to do things differently. That, of course, was the point of Labour’s academy policy in the first place. I accept that in some instances, it is possible to negotiate around standard conditions, but not everybody can do that. The innovations we are leading will not be scaleable if we are all forced to align to a set of rigid standards.
It is also worth knowing that our most successful schools at Dixons—the ones that are getting the best results for disadvantaged students nationally—would have to fundamentally change as schools if they had to align to a set of rigid standards. That would be bound to impact negatively on outcomes for children, and not just academic outcomes. It would be a significant backward step.
Conclusion
I have been surprised by the number of school leaders who have been prepared to speak out about the problems with the Bill.
It seems like the government have been surprised too, with some nasty briefing by Number 10 against the DFE.
This is silly, because ultimately the buck stops with Number 10. They signed this Bill off.
Starmer’s record on this is not exactly heroic. When he ran for leader he made it clear he was a critic of academies. In 2020 Starmer wrote:
"The academisation of our schools is centralising at its core and it has fundamentally disempowered parents, pupils and communities… That’s why I want all schools to be democratically accountable to their local communities,… to be working together as one family, to serve their communities, rather than competing against each other.”
This is ironic from a PM now pushing through a Schools Bill that really is centralising.
The evidence is pretty clear: 30 years of cross-party school reforms in England have worked. With the same funding, schools in Wales have sunk even as schools in England have improved.
The government have no clear vision to address the biggest issues facing our schools. Instead, we have this Bill, which really does read like a retro trade union wishlist. A point which the unions have made themselves.
There is still time to try and fix some of the glaring problems that school leaders are pointing to, as the Bill goes through the Commons and Lords. I really hope the government will listen to them.