Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-79)
LUCY HELLER,
FIONA MILLAR,
DR DANIEL
MOYNIHAN, ALASDAIR
SMITH AND
NICK WELLER
1 JULY 2009
Q60 Mr Chaytor: That's now changed
in terms of Government. The Government's approach to national
curriculum is now far more flexible, I would have to say.
Dr Moynihan: It is more flexible
than it was, but still academies have greater freedom than local
authority schools in that local authority advisers usually bring
in a plethora of initiatives. Academies are able to resist that
and decide which things they want that will actually improve us.
That is another advantage. Academies can have more rigorous performance
management and deal with teachers who need to be coached to improve
or to move on. So that is another kind of freedom, if you like,
compared with the groupthink that exists in some local authority
areas.
Q61 Mr Chaytor: So essentially
it comes down to curriculum and staffing—the opportunity
to sort out the curriculum and the management capacity to deal
with underperforming staff.
Dr Moynihan: And pay and conditions.
Q62 Chairman: Lucy, when we did
our report on the national curriculum we asked if freedom of curriculum
was good enough for academies, why not for all schools? The Government
said that there was no evidence that other schools wanted that
freedom, which amused some of us, but do you think that all schools
should have that freedom?
Lucy Heller: Yes.
Q63 Chairman: That would make
you less exclusive. You don't mind?
Nick Weller: I think the key to
this is more cultural; it is more about ethos and more about attitude.
That is my opinion and in the end it is this question that is
the nub of the argument: do you believe that local authorities
are the most effective way of ensuring local accountability for
schools? As I said before, the school that we're taking over was
failing for 15 years under the local authority, but that is the
question. Do you believe that? With respect, MPs spend a lot of
time with local councillors, so there may well be quite a few
MPs who think that way because they spend a lot of time in their
constituencies with local councillors and people from local authorities,
but not everybody in education believes that local authorities
are very effective.
Chairman: We'll come back to that. Paul,
we're moving on to—oh no we're not: Andy's got a chance.
Q64 Mr Slaughter: Rest assured
that spending time with my local councillors makes me a stronger
supporter of the academies, but we will leave that aside. This
is interesting, particularly given what Daniel has said. It looks
like chains will grow as they are what people are looking for,
particularly as they seem to be successful. You are more likely
to back someone who has a formula that they can sell to you than
someone who is starting out with one or two. Particularly in the
example you gave, where there is geographical co-location as well
as simply a common ethos that has been replicated at the same
time at schools across the country, are you becoming mini local
authorities in your own right? I do not want to use terms such
as "independent" or "privatised", but is that
the way forward? It seems to me that it is the way you are going.
Dr Moynihan: I don't think we're
becoming mini local authorities. Our concerns focus purely on
education. We do not have a range of other things to consider,
so we just focus on education.
Mr Slaughter: Sorry—perhaps more
like mini LEAs.
Dr Moynihan: Our centres are a
lot smaller than a typical local authority grouping and the cost
is a lot smaller. It is similar in some respects.
Q65 Mr Slaughter: But you don't
deny that there is a sort of trend. Final question: where does
that leave your relationship with local authorities? Even with
my example of Burlington Danes or what is happening elsewhere,
I don't get that closeness—that relationship—with
other heads and with the LEA. I get the absolute focus on the
ethos of the individual school or the chain.
Dr Moynihan: We have an absolute
focus on improving exam results for the students in our care,
but we do maintain good relationships with local authorities.
For example, in one local authority there was no mechanism for
dealing with hard-to-place children and no mechanism for managed
moves to avoid exclusions. One of our principals now heads all
that up. In another place, our academy co-ordinates all sporting
provision across 60 schools in the local authority. We are pretty
much meshed into the local authority in terms of partnership,
but in terms of initiatives and things that we do, we decide on
those rather than the local authority doing it for us.
Chairman: Fiona, do you want to comment
on that?
Fiona Millar: I was wondering
what happens when the academy fails. Does it have to go back into
local authority control? The argument always put is that with
a failing local authority the school has to be saved by the academy.
Of course, some academies are failing. What is the next step for
them? The point about the chains becoming like small local authorities
is right. They will become a brand; they will have one uniform
system across the school. It seems to take away something that
we were always told was the special thing about academies.
Chairman: Right. We are moving on to
academy performance, and as we have Fiona only until 11 am, will
you concentrate your questions on her until then.
Fiona Millar: I can stay until
about 10 past.
Chairman: Good. We will bear that in
mind.
Q66 Paul Holmes: I've been fascinated
by the throwing around of ideologies and insults and I would like
to declare that I have never been a member of the Socialist Educational
Association, unlike many people. I've always been interested in
the facts, and I've always been interested in the story of the
emperor's new clothes. Let us look at some of the facts behind
academy performance. PricewaterhouseCoopers has said that in the
reviews that it has done for the Government over four or five
years, there is "no clear pattern" in improvement in
pupil attainment in academies, or in the rate of improvement or
continuity of improvement. In its fifth and final report, it concluded
that the evaluation suggests, "There is insufficient evidence
to make a definitive judgment about the academies as a model for
school improvement." The Centre for Economic Performance
at the London School of Economics concluded after a study that,
based on the crude data, there is, "No evidence that a school
that is turned into an academy improves its exam results more
than any other in its neighbourhood." The academies say that
they are incredibly successful, but two independent studies—one
done for the Government who commissioned the academies—are
saying that the jury is out and the evidence is not there. What
are the facts?
Chairman: Who are you starting with?
Nick.
Nick Weller: The basic fact is
that the rate of improvement for academies overall is double the
national average.
Paul Holmes: But not according to the
Government's own study through PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Nick Weller: I forget which year.
I was involved in that study; I think it was 2007.
Paul Holmes: This was the final report
in 2008, looking back over four or five years.
Nick Weller: Looking back at results
from 2007.
Paul Holmes: They were looking back collectively—
Nick Weller: Yes, but they were
looking at 2007 results. That was the last set of results they
had. How many academies were reporting then? I don't know, but
there would have been very few.
Dr Moynihan: It depends on what
you're looking at here. The 2008 PricewaterhouseCoopers study
said that academy improvement rates exceeded those in comparison
schools and the national averages for both Key Stage 3 and GCSE.
For me, the key figure is what is happening to the students who
have free school meals. Those are the students who are often failed.
For those on free school meals, the academy improvement rate from
2007 to 2008 was 5.3%, compared to a national average of 2.4%.
Academies are delivering twice the national average improvement
rate for the least advantaged pupils. That to me sounds like success.
The 2007 national audit report—the Audit Commission is by
no means a Government poodle—said that, taking account of
prior attainment and students' circumstances, the academies' GCSE
performance is "substantially better" than that of other
schools. That is the second piece of evidence. For me, this is
the third piece of evidence. We have talked about school leadership
and how important heads are. In the long run, good heads produce
good schools. Looking at the Ofsted gradings for academies and
state schools and the percentage that have been graded good or
outstanding, nationally the figure is that about 66% are good
or outstanding. In academies 90% of the judgments by Ofsted say
that leadership is good or outstanding. Therefore, the potential
for further improvement is greater. A study was recently produced
that says that when you take everything into account, academies
have not done as well as their neighbouring schools—
Q67 Chairman: That's the LSE still?
Dr Moynihan: That's right. The
problem with that, of course, is that a school becomes an academy
when somebody makes a judgment that it does not have the capacity
to get better and improve. Those local schools haven't become
academies because they do have the capacity; academies have done
so because they don't. The issue is not how those local schools
have done, but that the academies would not have improved by the
same rate had it not been for academy conversion. So, I think
that that piece of research is spurious. My view is that there
is lots of evidence that supports academy improvement.
Q68 Paul Holmes: So we're still
back to the position that the academies say that there is lots
of evidence and the Government study and the LSE study, which
took into account lots of variables, say that there is no evidence.
On the heads, again, one of your academies, which I won't name
because the press give it enough stick as it is, has gone through
heads like a knife through hot butter. When I was there it still
had not got a head.
Dr Moynihan: I think I know which
academy you're talking of. It has been open for six years and
has had three head teachers—
Q69 Paul Holmes: So it should
have been a dramatic success by now, by all your criteria.
Dr Moynihan: Well, let me give
you some figures. Before it opened it was an unsatisfactory school,
according to Ofsted. On its first inspection three years later,
it had reached "satisfactory". It was inspected last
week and it is "good" with some outstanding features.
That is a far better school than the one that existed previously,
whatever anyone wants to say about it. It has been judged as good
and the results have quadrupled.
Chairman: Lucy, you wanted to come in.
Lucy Heller: I was just going
to add, finally, that one can quote evidence back and forth, but
this most recent thing—the March 2009 academy statistics
from your own House of Commons Library—definitively says
that "pupils of academies progress faster than the national
average for similar pupils. The difference was slightly greater
than the equivalent of one GCSE grade higher in a single subject
per pupil". We can bat this back and forth, and I agree that
it is still early days. One of the reasons I was keen that we
keep the academies movement relatively small and keep it clean,
with focus on the original core mission, was precisely to allow
there to be some more definitive data. I would argue that any
objective observer looking at this would say that there is evidence
that the academies have made a difference, but I accept that there
is not yet the chance to see whether they are sustainable differences.
Q70 Paul Holmes: Again, you seem
to be saying that PricewaterhouseCoopers, the Government, the
London School of Economics and the University of London Institute
of Education are not objective observers, but anyway, let's move
on.
Chairman: Hang on a second. Alasdair
is very keen to reply.
Alasdair Smith: Can I come back?
I want to talk a bit about Stephen Machin's report in CentrePiece
this year. He has managed to focus on what he describes as "matched
school performance". What he has done very carefully is look
at academies' performance in the context of the local authority
schools around them. He has also gone back and looked at the history
of each of those academy schools. He has done a very detailed
survey to look at their performance, and the truth of it is that
it does show that academies have improved, but so have all the
other local authority schools of the same sort. That's the point.
Academies have improved, but so have all the other local authority
schools. We really have got to be careful about that point—we
are not saying that academies are not improving; we are saying
that all the other local schools are improving at the same rate.
That is crucial. The second piece of research to which I want
to draw your attention is from Stephen Gorard of the University
of Birmingham, published in the Journal of Education Policy,
January 2009. In the introduction it says, "Using the most
recent results available, there is no clear evidence that academies
produce better results than local authority schools with equivalent
intakes. The academies programme therefore presents an opportunity
cost for no apparent gain." I do not have time to go through
all the details of his research, but it is something you need
to draw attention to.
Fiona Millar: I would say that
the jury is out. There is a lot of evidence that some academies
are doing well and others are doing less well; some community
schools are doing well, and some voluntary-aided schools are doing
well. I don't think it is conclusive, but everything that I have
heard today suggests to me that the reasons why they are doing
well, if they are doing well, don't necessarily relate to their
independent status. I go back to my original point, which is my
longer-term concern about what having a large number of totally
independent schools outside the maintained sector will mean for
education in this country. It is a high price to pay to get marginally
small improvements compared with other schools. Having been a
governor in this situation before, in an odd sort of way the first
bit is the easiest bit. If you're at a very low base, that first
push for improvement, where everybody is pulling together, is
easy. The hard part is sustaining it, and carrying on the incremental
improvement. I think academies should be compared with other schools
that have had the same investment of time, the same investment
of money, the same marketing exercises attached to them, the same
sort of fresh start, because a lot of the community schools you
are talking about won't have had all the time and attention that
has been lavished on academies. When you see community or maintained
schools that do have that sort of time and attention lavished
on them, with new leadership and new buildings and so on, very
often you see similar results.
Q71 Chairman: You said a very
interesting thing earlier on, when you said you were in No. 10
when these things were envisioned. At that time, surely one of
the things that was the driver was the view that you wanted to
shake up the education system, and academies were one of the ways
of shaking the system up. There were others—there were quite
dramatic interventions in other ways. Sometimes I look at people
who have got the academies under a microscope, asking, "Have
they done this, have they done that?" You yourself said the
jury is out. Is the jury still out on whether academies have helped
shake up the rest of the system? Has it been a force for good
because other schools—community schools, maintained schools,
whatever you want to call them—have actually got their act
together, partly because academies are out there doing interesting
stuff?
Fiona Millar: I haven't seen that
myself. I think the idea that diversity would shake up the system
has been—
Chairman: It wasn't just diversity.
Fiona Millar: It was not just
academies. The idea was that you if you bring diversity into the
system, it will all get a massive shake up, and the boats will
rise for everybody. I don't think that has happened.
Q72 Chairman: But it has happened
in the sense that standards have improved across the board, haven't
they?
Fiona Millar: I would say that
the reason for that is that schools have become accountable in
a number of ways—partly through results, partly through
the league tables, although I have reservations about the ways
those are used sometimes, and partly through Ofsted. The pressure
on schools to improve doesn't come because they have an academy
down the road; it comes because they are much more accountable
than they used to be.
Q73 Chairman: What I'm trying
to get at is that it is hard to separate them from the mix. If
the original intention, in those days when you were in No. 10,
was to shake the system, to see if you could raise standards across
the board—
Fiona Millar: I think everybody
is agreed that standards have not risen as quickly as we would
like to see, and for certain groups of children, they have remained
stuck at a very low level. That is the real ongoing concern—the
gap between the better-off pupils and the less well-off pupils.
I remain unconvinced that simply making some schools independent
is the way to deal with that. I think it needs to be a systemic
change across the board in all schools, and that involves looking
at the curriculum, the quality of the teaching and learning, the
quality of the leadership, the way we invest our money in schools
and whether we want to target our resources much more at other
programmes—parenting programmes and extended schools and
so on—to help the students who most need the support.
Q74 Paul Holmes: In my earliest
speeches, when I first came into Parliament, I said that academies
should succeed because, surely, with an average of £30 million
spent on new buildings, the status and razzmatazz that come with
the opening of fantastic new schools, excluding three to four
times as many pupils as other schools, according to Government
statistics—across the board, whatever you say about individual
academies—of course they should succeed; so let us look
at some of the other background factors in why they succeed or
not. When David Blunkett announced academies in March 2000, he
said they were basically there to replace seriously failing schools,
but now—and I know Lucy said she disagrees with this—we
have lots of schools coming in: an independent grammar school
in Manchester has become an academy; private schools are coming
in; most of the city technology colleges have become academies;
beacon schools have become academies. That is not what academies
were supposed to be about. Nick, when Dixons CTC became an academy,
99% of your pupils were getting five A to Cs at GCSE. Why did
you become an academy? You were not a failing school. What can
we learn from you as an academy?
Nick Weller: The idea originally
was to bring some of those CTCs into the movement because they
had a certain amount of experience, built up over 15 years of
success in inner-city areas. The other political motivation would
be that the single biggest change was to bring us under the new
admissions code. Our intake is, therefore, a little broader and
more inclusive. It also brought us into a wider family of schools:
we work a lot more closely with other local authority schools
in south Bradford, as I described. We are not a chain—we
are a chain of two, from September, which is relatively small.
Nevertheless, we are embarking on the process of spreading that
influence out. It has brought us much more into the local community
of schools and that is very positive.
Q75 Paul Holmes: In your opening
comments—I know Daniel said the same thing—you said
some of the great things about academies are the independence,
the entrepreneurship, and so on. Although everything Daniel mentioned
about getting away from those nasty local authorities is actually
what central government imposes and nothing to do with local authorities.
Pay and conditions, the national curriculum—that is not
local authorities' responsibility. What can we learn from your
example as a CTC that became an academy? In 2007, Ofsted said
about Dixons City Academy: "It is a popular ... heavily over-subscribed
school ... The proportion of students eligible for free school
meals is lower than average ... The number of students with learning
difficulties and/or disabilities is below average ... the majority
of students are White British"—this is in Bradford—"Very
few students speak English as an additional language." What
do we learn from that? That the way to have a successful school
is to not take children from deprived backgrounds?
Nick Weller: No, it is not. There
are three year groups now of academy admissions, and years 10
and 11 were brought in under the old CTC system. Since we became
an academy, in each of those year groups we have a balanced intake;
we are the only mixed ethnic school in Bradford: it used to be
55% white and 45% non-white; it is now 55% non-white and 45% white,
which reflects exactly the proportions applying. The CTC admissions,
although more or less 50:50, did not quite reflect the proportion
of those applying, so we have become more inclusive in that way.
Free school meals in years 7, 8, and 9 is greater than it is further
up the school—that is filtering through. When that report
was written, we had one year group of city academy admissions
in year 7, and four year groups in the main school.
Q76 Paul Holmes: Since 2007, you
have introduced fair banding?
Nick Weller: Yes.
Q77 Paul Holmes: So your entry
of year 7 students is closer to the national average? Are you
based in an inner-city location?
Nick Weller: Yes. As a CTC, the
school would have taken in a national distribution of ability,
but, obviously, in an inner-city area that is creaming off. We
divide into nine stanines. In the old days, as a CTC, the school
would have taken in roughly six from the bottom 4% of the population
and six from the top 4%. We now take in four from the top and
10 from the bottom, so there has been a significant shift. May
I say one more thing on that? I understand your problems with
this. Obviously, I come in as the city academy head teacher and
I did not preside over those previous admissions criteria, but
even under those, 99% got five A*s to C—that is all but
one or two students—and six of those students came in from
the bottom 4% of the population on the test. Yes, Dixons is a
high-performing school and you can throw various things at that
and look at its admissions. The admissions were not as fair and
accurate as they are now that it is a city academy, but it has
always added a great deal of value. Last year's year 11, if they
had gone to an average school, would have got 67% five A* to C
in English and maths. That year group got 89%. That is a hell
of a lot of value added, and it is that that we aim to take to
the new school.
Q78 Paul Holmes: Just moving away
from individual schools and looking again at the national figures
on all academies, so that you cannot say that one is an exception
this way or that way, the Institute of Education, University of
London, did a study for the Sutton Trust. It reports a figure
that comes from the Government's figures: academies across the
board have seen the proportion of pupils eligible for free school
meals decline from 45.3% in 2003 to 29% in 2008. Similar patterns
are seen for special educational needs and so on. The Institute
of Education said, "academies that expel large numbers of
disruptive pupils are having a potentially bad impact on neighbouring
schools" which have to take those expelled pupils. That is
across the board—not this school or that school, but across
the country.
Nick Weller: Can I come back on
that, because it is of interest to me? The Institute of Education
report was written how long ago? Two years ago, I think—something
like that. It was a time when schools like Dixons and the CTCs
were being brought into what was then a very small movement, so
that accounts for the dilution. At the school that we are talking
over, 20 to 30% of the students will churn through the school,
because it is under-subscribed—in other words, they won't
still be there in year 11 if they joined in year 7, because it
is under-subscribed. It is true, obviously, that as the school
becomes more popular, it gets a more stable population, but the
main reason why the institute came up with that figure was that
the free school meal figures were being diluted by schools like
us, Landau Forte and other CTCs—
Q79 Paul Holmes: Unfortunately,
the Government say they do not collect the figures on this, but,
when you look at individual schools and what happens to neighbours
when an academy opens, you see a different story. Walsall Academy
opened in 2004; the nearest community school is a mile away. The
academy's intake of free school meal pupils went down over three
years from 27 to 12%—it more than halved—but the nearest
community school saw its intake of free school meal pupils go
up from 15 to 20%. When Bexley Business Academy opened, the percentage
of SEN pupils at the nearest community school went up from 44
to 53%. When Haberdashers' Aske's Knights Academy opened, you
saw the same process happening: Catford High School nearby saw
its admissions from the lowest ability bands go up. There is a
lot of evidence both from national aggregated figures and from
individual school studies to show that one reason academies succeed
is that they drastically alter their intake of pupils from low-ability
bands, SEN pupils and free school meal pupils.
Nick Weller: Certainly, as schools
become more popular, they will obviously get a different balance
coming into them. That is inevitable. If you put a dot in the
middle of anywhere in London and draw a circle one mile around
it, which might reasonably be its catchment area, you will come
to some quite privileged backgrounds. If you have a failing school,
it will exclusively be serving very underprivileged kids. In the
end, when academies become successful, they will probably be serving
a better mix of students. That makes it important for all schools
to attain that mix—all schools locally can be successful.
In terms of us, on conversion, the one thing we won't have is
fewer statements. Statemented students will remain in academies,
as they are entitled to, so our proportion of statements, for
example, has gone up significantly.
Chairman: Daniel and Lucy, do you want
a quick come-back on Paul's questions?
Dr Moynihan: I'm not sure it is
true that academies have achieved their results by changing their
intake. Most academies' results are the results of predecessor
schools, there long before they became academies. Those are the
results of the pre-existing kids, in most cases. If, as we have,
you take on failing, difficult schools that have excess capacity,
and if those schools become popular, where previously they attracted
a particular type of student, they will take a broader balance
of students and free school meals will sometimes decline. That
is part of what happens when you have excess capacity in an unpopular
school which people don't want to come to. A broader range of
people come to it. The Sutton Trust has also published a report
that talks about the top 200 state schools having below average
free school meals. I do not think that the criticism is a valid
one on a systemic level of academies. It may be true of particular
examples, but it is also certainly true of particular examples
in the community schools sector, if that is the case.
Lucy Heller: I would just repeat
what I said earlier that I am happy to send the evidence that
a group of sponsors prepared for the Prime Minister's Delivery
Unit review of academies back in 2007, which I think shows fairly
definitively, for the group of 30 academies that we represented
out of the then 80 or so, that it is not the case that the academies
were more than representative of their local areas. In fact, they
had higher proportions of deprived children. That at least gives
more detailed and definitive data.
| 
