HC 269 Education CommitteeWritten evidence submitted by the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT)
1. The National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) is an independent trade union and professional association representing over 28,000 school leaders across all sectors of education. Members hold leadership positions in early years, primary, special and secondary schools, independent schools, sixth form and FE colleges, outdoor education centres, pupil referral units, social services establishments and other educational settings, making us ideally placed to comment on this topic.
2. Schools are inherently collaborative institutions. The very nature of their business requires them to work in partnership with parents, with local authorities, with dioceses, external service providers, further education colleges and higher education institutions to name but a few. Collaboration can help to achieve economies of scale for schools when purchasing goods and services. It can also be a significant driver of school improvement by facilitating professional development for school leaders and other staff, and providing a supportive yet challenging forum for discussing issues particular to schools’ contexts and areas. Significantly, school collaboration can provide wider enrichment opportunities for pupils, including the many successful exchange programmes between rural and inner city schools which offer opportunities for pupils from different and diverse backgrounds to mix, as well as school-to-school and cross authority moderation systems, which have proven rigorous in their approach. Perhaps most notably, obtaining support for SEN/disabled pupils requires significant coordination and cooperation across groups of schools in a locality.
3. School forums are also an important means of school to school collaboration. A professionally constituted schools forum provides a vehicle to give schools, working in partnership together, the opportunity of exercising informed professional judgements in the allocation of the schools funding stream, ensuring that best practice is extended uniformly and to the benefit of all pupils. It would be particularly helpful if more consistently good training were to be made available to forum members. Currently much, if not all, of the information and training provided to forum members is by local authorities. This can unwittingly distort the information given. School forums should be independent of, and not subject to, local authority control. To ensure this, it would be helpful if the forum was also staffed independently as well. In this way, it can legitimately be seen as acting as part of the “check and balance” regime necessary.
4. Collaboration and/or federation can provide the only means of survival for small rural schools.
5. However, the climate for collaboration must be right. There must be trust between those schools working together, mutual respect for staff and pupils alike and confidence and recognition that all schools in the collaboration have something to bring to the group as well as something they want to take out.
6. Collaboration is not without risk. There are financial risks associated with any joint venture requiring physical or human resources. NAHT is dismayed at the government’s failure to make any allocations using the financial incentive model originally promised in the school’s white paper, and questions what happened to the £35 million it pledged to set aside for schools helping to enhance the performance of struggling schools whilst maintaining their own accomplishments.
7. There are also reputational risks associated with working in partnership with a school that may have a particular reputation within the local community. There is also the risk that getting involved in the work of another school will result in a school leader or governing body “taking their eye off the ball”, resulting in a drop in standards in their “home” institution; this is particularly the case when collaborations are focused on school improvement. It is not uncommon for high performing schools to experience an amount of “backlash” if it is perceived by the schools’ parent body that the head and leading teachers are spending too much time off-site supporting other schools.
8. When considering school improvement, it is also important to stress the difference between collaborative or partnership working and a “hostile takeover” of the kind too often observed as part of the “forced academy” programme. NAHT believes that the profession, rather than DfE brokers, is best suited to identifying potential partners based on expertise and local knowledge. Open and transparent collaboration can provide school leaders and governors the opportunity to tailor partnerships to their individual school and pupils’ needs—supporting the government’s promise in the 2010 schools white paper, to move “towards schools as autonomous institutions collaborating with each other on terms set by teachers, not bureaucrats”.
9. NAHT has been particularly impressed by the transparent and open processes conducted by the Co-operative College’s co-operative school trust model, which as of May 2013 has 452 schools in England (including 31 academies), making it the third largest grouping within the English education system.
10. In contrast, we believe that much of the government’s free schools policy flies in the face of its collaboration agenda by allowing schools to be set up in direct competition to existing schools in areas that already have sufficient school places. Such an approach, combined with the threat of forced academisation for schools in challenging circumstances, creates a climate in which collaboration is less likely. It is hardly surprising that there have been difficulties in delivering the commitment that every converter academy will provide support to an underperforming school in their area, as not only does this policy ignore geographical dimensions of school performance but it is being pursued in a climate where any approach from a local academy might be perceived as a potential take-over bid.
11. Unfortunately there remains insufficient evidence in the public domain (particularly in the primary sector) for NAHT to comment with certainty on the level and quality of support offered by school sponsors.
October 2013