The Office of the Schools Commissioner should be renamed the Office of Academy Spin

Janet Downs's picture
 6

'Academies are here to stay and the sooner we embrace the change, the sooner our pupils will benefit'

Headline quoting Frank Green, the new Schools Commissioner, TES, 23 April 2014

So, how have pupils benefitted from academy conversion since the Office of the Schools Commissioner (OSC) was set up in 2007?

1  Some sponsored academies, such as Mossbourne, have succeeded spectacularly. But others have not. And Henry Stewart’s research has found that similar non-academies have done just as well, if not slightly better, than sponsored academies.

2  Sponsored academies are more likely than non-academies to use equivalent* exams making them appear more successful.

3  Converter academies are mainly schools which were already good or outstanding. They are supposed to benefit from extra freedom, but the Academies Commission (2013) found UK schools already had substantial autonomy, the supposed extra freedom didn’t amount to much and non-academies could do most things academies can do.

4  Not all academies have converted willingly: as well as the “rewarded succeeders” there are “punished failures” and “near boiled frogs”.

If pupils haven’t benefited as much as the Government claims, there are groups that have benefited from academy conversion: some academy chains and companies linked to academy trustees. E-Act, for example, whose CEO, Sir Bruce Liddington, was the first Schools Commissioner, operated in a culture of extravagance. Margaret Hodge, chair of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), has asked the Department for Education (DfE) to tell academy trustees that awarding contracts to companies run by trustees or their families is “just wrong”.

The PAC comments followed revelations in the Guardian that millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money were going from academies to private firms linked to trustees. These included a payment of £111,469 from Leigh Academies Trust to Shoreline, a private company founded by one of its trustees, Frank Green, now the new Schools Commissioner, in consultancy fees. Green told the Guardian the payment was “pro-rata for extra work” and had been approved by the board of the Leigh Academies Trust.

MP Rosie Cooper, speaking in the debate on enforced academy conversion, accused the outgoing Schools Commissioner, Dr Liz Sidwell, as “peddling the Education Secretary’s ideological wares as if she was some kind of snake oil saleswoman.”

 

It appears Dr Sidwell’s successor has picked up her banner and waving it furiously.

*Equivalent exams are non-GCSE exams, usually vocational ones, which were given an “equivalent” value (say, two or four GCSEs) in school performance tables. For example, the proportion of pupils reaching the benchmark of 5+ GCSES A*-C including Maths and English in the three secondary academies sponsored by Leigh Academies Trust in Kent dropped considerably in 2013 from 63% to 45%, 66% to 36% and 71% to 31% when equivalent examinations are removed from the 2013 GCSE data.

ADDENDUM 27 April 2014 The above has been amended to make it clear Schools Commissioner Frank Green (aka Alban Francis Xavier Green) is a trustee of Leigh Academies Trust and a director of Shoreline Learning Limited, the company which received consultancy fees from Leigh Academies Trust. The original article did not make the connection clear. Green is also a director of Nipt Limited, a company with share capital set up in August 2013. Nipt Limited has one other director, Mrs Joan Binder, who is also a director of the Freedom and Autonomy for Schools National Association (FASNA) whose tortuous history was described here.

Company information from Duedil.

Share on Twitter Share on Facebook

Be notified by email of each new post.





Comments

Clapped out Barry's picture
Sat, 26/04/2014 - 09:56

He're's a quote from The TES puff piece :

"I have a passionate view that the more independence schools have from the apron strings of the local authority, the more likely they are to grow up, be mature and take full responsibility for their actions and outcomes."

I leave it to others to comment

Janet Downs's picture
Sat, 26/04/2014 - 10:21

Clapped out Barry - in my former life as a teacher, my GCSE pupils would immediately pick out the rhetorical tricks used in that sentence to sway the reader's opinion:

1 Using the cliché "apron strings" to imply local authority schools are too weak to stand on their own two feet.
2 Saying if schools follow the author's advice, they will "grow up" (teenagers can be rather cynical when adults claim doing what the adult advises is a sign of maturity - sometimes the opposite is the case).
3 Implying there's a lack of backbone in anyone who doesn't do what the author suggests.

Roger Titcombe's picture
Tue, 29/04/2014 - 15:49

Is the new Schools Commissioner primarily an educationalist or a politician? He appears to be taking a wholly inappropriate line. As John Mountford points out this sort of thing is at the root of the failings of the English education system.


agov's picture
Sun, 27/04/2014 - 07:43

Yet another branch of the liblabcon's Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.


Janet Downs's picture
Wed, 28/05/2014 - 07:18

UPDATE 28 May: heads have been told the role of Frank Green, the Schools Commissioner, is to ensure all schools become academies, Warwick Mansell wrote in the Guardian yesterday. It appears that Green also has stand-alone academies in his sights: it's been reported he said, " "no academy would be allowed to stand alone".

In other words, all schools will be under the umbrella of sponsors or multi-academy trusts with their "executive principals" and the potential for trustees to profit from contracts awarded to firms linked to trustees or their relatives.

"They create a prison and call it freedom".


agov's picture
Thu, 29/05/2014 - 07:41

That will be a lesson in reality for all those headteachers and governors in stand-alone academies who did it for the money. I wonder how many of them will be sacked by their new owners.


Add new comment

Already a member? Click here to log in before you comment. Or register with us.