HC 269 Education CommitteeWritten evidence submitted by the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL)

1. The Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) represents over 17,000 heads, principals, deputies, vice-principals, assistant heads, business managers and other senior staff of maintained and independent schools and colleges throughout the UK. ASCL has members in more than 90% of secondary schools and colleges of all types, responsible for the education of more than four million young people. This places the association in a unique position to consider this issue from the viewpoint of the leaders of secondary schools and of colleges.

2. ASCL welcomes this inquiry into an issue in which the association has long had a strong interest. The inquiry is timely given that there is a fundamental and systematic change taking place very rapidly in the schools sector as most schools are moved away from local authority ownership into academy status.

Summary

3. ASCL strongly supports partnerships between schools and colleges of all kinds. It has persuasive evidence that collaborative working improves the performance of the education system as whole, as well as the particular institutions involved in a partnership.

4. There are a number of policy drivers that work against this.
ASCL recommends:

that there be an attempt to reach consensus about the proper balance between competition and collaboration,

that policy in this respect should be more consistent, over time and between different initiatives, and

that disincentives to partnership working should as far as possible be removed and replaced by strong incentives to collaborate.

General Remarks

5. Some five years ago ASCL conducted extensive research into this topic, which resulted in the publication of a book that is commended to the committee.1 Although the political and regulatory landscape has changed, the underlying principles have not, and many of the issues raised remain current.

6. With regard to partnership there is a sceptical school of thought, within schools and within government, that it involves more effort than it yields in return. The evidence that ASCL discovered is conclusive: partnership does add substantial value:

It makes for more effective teaching and learning.

It broadens opportunities.

It enables faster policy implementation of new ideas and policies.

It contributes to efficiency.

And it helps to raise achievement and attainment.

7. Collaboration is not a panacea; its benefits are sometimes exaggerated, and added value is not always spread evenly across all members of a partnership. However, the full potential of collaboration is not being realised, and ASCL remains committed to promoting partnerships between schools and colleges of all kinds.

8. Part of the problem is related to the inevitable tension between collaboration and competition. This is a creative and positive tension: schools and colleges in practice do both, and, as in other walks of life, can strike a balance between them. But finding that point of balance is not helped by it being moved unpredictably, as policy shifts between emphasising one extreme or the other. This is bound to happen to some extent between one government and the next, but can also happen simultaneously, with conflicting messages coming from different arms of government.

9. It would be helpful to approach some degree of consensus, across and within political parties, about where this balance should be struck, and the present inquiry may assist with that.

10. ASCL would argue that under this and the previous government there have been and remain too many disincentives to partnership working, and too little support for it.

11. The accountability regime works strongly against partnership. In particular, both Ofsted reports and performance tables are focussed very strongly on performance at the level of the individual school or college, and ignore partnerships and the performance of the education system in a local area.

12. A particular problem is the criteria being applied to individuals or institutions leading certain kinds of partnership. In particular recognition of teaching schools and national leaders of education (NLEs) can be withdrawn because of minor variations in results (for example a “blip” in English GCSE results that no rational assessment would consider to represent a catastrophic loss of quality) causing a nascent partnership to be broken up. The possibility of such “de-designation” happening before the value of a partnership has been realised is a strong disincentive to engaging in these types of work in the first place.

13. Schools and colleges themselves have a responsibility to practice the disciplines of partnership working. What is effective in building successful and effective collaboration is known; the challenge is to commit to the application of that learning. ASCL encourages its members, as the leaders of schools and colleges, to model collaborative behaviour: They should encourage intensive networking between staff at all levels across the partnerships in which their school or college is involved. They should have an open approach to sharing data with partners. And they should realise the huge potential to be gained from organising professional development on a collaborative basis. Many school and college leaders are already doing these things and thus demonstrating their leadership not only of their institution, but also of the system.

14. But there are exceptions, and there are strong pressures, often coming from governing bodies, to stay within the bounds of the one institution, especially if there is any doubt about the maintenance of performance table position or Ofsted grade. There is a need to provide real incentives to collaborate, or else partnership working will be limited by such pressures, and by self-interest and inertia.

15. There is a need to be patient and persistent in pursing partnership. Collaboration is not a quick fix but a strategy that proves itself in the long run. It takes time to build the trust that enables partnership to go deep: to learn how to make the most of each other’s strengths and confront one’s own and each other’s weaknesses. This is an age when the demand is for instant success; partnership working does not deliver that—but it can provide improvement that is deep-rooted and sustainable.

With Reference to your Specific Questions

The differing forms of school partnership and cooperation, and whether they have particular advantages and disadvantages

16. First, it is important not to be fixated on a limited number of named types of partnership. Schools and colleges are each involved in a number of partnerships and collaborative arrangement of varying degrees of formality, for various purposes, some more significant to them than others.

17. Likewise one should not forget the possibility of partnerships that cross sector boundaries. There are a number of useful partnerships that link state schools with schools in the independent sector, and with colleges in the FE and sixth form college sectors.

18. Thirdly, not all partnerships have one or more successful schools assisting or supporting weaker colleagues. Some particularly successful partnerships are built around explicit mutuality and equality. And even when one school is manifestly stronger, it often reports that it nevertheless learnt from the school that it was supporting.

19. Partnerships can be more or less close, range from soft to hard, be short or long term, and be focussed on a specific issue or be quite general. This makes for a very complex picture, too complex to analyse here; again the committee is referred to the ASCL research publication mentioned in paragraph 5 above.

20. In our experience the most successful partnerships are those where there are shared values, at least about the issues being addressed but ideally more widely; those that are between essentially equal participants seeking mutual support and improvement; and those that form “bottom up”, where the initiative is at the school level and the participants enter freely. Where schools are forced to collaborate, especially with partners with very different institutional cultures, then the collaboration tends to be token, and the benefit slight.

21. Academy chains are often touted as the way forward in the present situation, and they certainly have a place, but are not by any means a universally applicable answer. They also vary very considerably in size, in their mode of operation, and in the extent to which they promote genuine collaboration. Those which operate more as a federation of schools can be effective models for collaboration and peer-learning, though many have not realised that potential.

22. Other chains have adopted a “supermarket” model in which the approach of a particular school or head teacher is replicated across other schools by formula; the heads of the individual schools become branch managers. This is not a collaborative approach, and will stifle the creativity of local school leaders across the chain. It can be superficially effective in turning round some failing schools, but is more likely to lead to rapid but temporary improvements in performance table figures than sustainable improvement. Especially if the chain becomes large it is likely to lead to a fixation on figures—financial or related to accountability—to the detriment of the needs of individual students and local communities.

23. The alliances which are growing up around teaching schools have many of the right characteristics, and many school leaders are finding them to be of value. The problem mentioned in paragraph 12 above applies here, though, as the criteria for being a teaching school are inflexible and exclude some schools that would be able to make a contribution, whilst others have faced de-designation because of relatively minor worsening of their performance table indicators.

24. School leaders in the London area feel that the recent London Mayor’s education initiative, although flawed, has some interesting opportunities for collaboration.

25. We should remember the possibility of cooperation between state schools and the independent sector, and between schools and the college sector. In both cases there are some examples of good practice, and valuable work has been done. This includes the sponsorship of academies but is by no means limited to that model, and some of the best examples have very different origins and modes of working together. In both cases there is scope for much more such collaboration, though incentives may need to be put in place.

How highly performing schools could better be encouraged to cooperate with others

26. The present Secretary of State early in this government talked about making the English school system self-improving. Using successful approaches in good schools to support others must play a key role if this aim is to be achieved. There is clearly a balance to be struck between autonomy and market forces on the one hand and incentivising partnership and mutual support on the other. This balance is not yet right.

27. Too often “highly performing” means, having a large proportion of able, well-supported, middle-class children. It is hard to see what incentive there is for such schools to involve themselves with schools with the opposite characteristics, and many would have relatively little to offer. Collaboration and mutual improvement does not necessarily need to involve a strong school helping a weaker one—see paragraph 18 above. This also applies when one of the partners is a college or an independent school, which in effective partnerships learn from as well as help their partner schools.

Whether schools have sufficient incentives to form meaningful and lasting relationships with other schools

28. There are incentives, but perhaps they are insufficient at the moment. There is strong encouragement for schools to sponsor less successful schools in mini-academy groups, which is one strategy, and there are schemes like national leaders of education (NLEs) which incentivise successful leaders to contribute to system improvement. There are teaching schools, which, though they are not well funded to do so, form networks around them that are beginning to work in some parts of the country.

If and how the potential tension between school partnership and cooperation, and school choice and competition can be resolved

29. Autonomy and collaboration are both needed, so these tensions cannot be resolved; rather they need to be held in balance. The tension then has the potential to be creative and positive. There is a risk when one dimension is too heavily emphasised at the expense of the other. At present the balance needs some redressing in the direction of incentivising collaboration, particularly the more mutual forms mentioned in paragraph 20 above.

Whether converter academies’ requirements to support other schools, included in their funding agreements, are sufficient and are effectively policed

30. They are not successfully policed at all. Some academy leaders are clear that they have done little in this respect, and there are some strong disincentives. Quite apart from the general disincentives mentioned above in paragraphs 11 and 14 some converter academies are hard pressed financially, and not all are outstandingly successful schools with the capacity to do this work.

Whether academies sponsored by another school receive sufficient support from their sponsor

31. This varies greatly. There are cases of outstanding sponsor arrangements, and there are others where the sponsoring school has entered into the arrangement for reasons of its own and has provided very little of practical value. This is not a reason to abandon this model altogether, but there is clearly a need to set up better systems to ensure that it works more consistently.

Whether school partnerships drive effective school improvement

32. Again, they can do, and this is seen as a way forward. There are many local and contextual factors, and it depends on well-judged decisions at the outset about capacity and the needs of the sponsored school, and also on accountability measures. There are a number of different models that work in different circumstances, and the focus at this point should be on encouraging innovation, monitoring and sharing. See some of the general principles in paragraph 20 above, and in Achieving More Together.2

33. Where there is the greatest need for improvement and the number of schools is relatively small then the best approach may be for there to be a single cohesive senior leadership structure with hard-edged accountability and an executive head who is tasked to drive the improvement and accepts the accountability for doing so. In other contexts more or less close federations or confederations can be appropriate models.

34. More research needs to be done in this exciting and relatively new area, which should take into account the impact of different educational approaches on people’s lives, not just whilst they are at school but beyond that into their adult lives. It would also be useful to compare partnership models and practices elsewhere in the world with those emerging here in Britain.

35. This should not be aimed at finding some “best” model—different approaches are emerging to suit different circumstances. But there is more to be learnt about the best working practices for effective co-operation that can lead to low input but high impact on school improvement.

Whether there are any additional upsides or downsides for highly performing schools supporting others through partnerships

36. School leaders are naturally flattered at being approached to take on a sponsoring deal, and most have a desire to help. But it is very easy to underestimate the strain on the supporting school. It is clearly important not to simply arrive at a situation where the sponsoring school is weaker to the same extent that the sponsored school is stronger. There are examples of sponsors overreaching themselves to the detriment of a formerly very successful school or college. While sponsoring is a good idea and a useful strategy, there are hard questions to ask about capacity, especially where resources are limited.

Conclusion

37. Partnership should be more strongly supported than is currently the case, as this would help to improve our education system as a whole, raise achievement across the board, and narrow the gap between those young people achieving most and least.

38. It would be helpful for there to be a political consensus about the proper balance between competition and collaboration, leading to policy in this respect being more consistent, over time and between different initiatives.

39. The disincentives to partnership working should as far as possible be removed and replaced by strong incentives to collaborate.

40. I hope that this is of value to your consultation, ASCL is willing to be further consulted and to assist in any way that it can.

October 2013