Freedoms, for ‘free’
Anastasia De Waal, 30 January 2009
As education secretary Ed Balls announces the further rolling-out of the government’s flagship academies, resisting ‘calls for a slow-down’, a significant hidden cost of the programme has been revealed.
Today’s Times Education Supplement reveals that millions of pounds are being spent on compensation packages for teachers whose jobs have been lost (as they haven’t transferred to the replacement Academies) because of the introduction of academies. Westminster local authority, for example, has spent over £1 million on redundancy payments.
Liz Walker, of Dudley in the West Midlands local authority is quoted as saying: The Government has moved the goalposts and made local authorities responsible for transfer of staff costs, redundancy costs, project management. The bill could be anything up to £3m at each academy.’
The question is whether these costs, on top of the costs of the expensive academies are worth it?
The best thing about the academy, and why its closest counterpart in the United States, the Charter School has been so successful at impacted on disadvantaged achievement, is the relative freedom that the schools are allowed. In principle, academies are freed from the shackles of Whitehall diktat and allowed to respond, both pedagogically and management-wise, to the pupils in front of them and their context. In theory. Under Balls, who is much less keen on autonomy-generating than his predecessors (and why we saw Andrew Adonis bumped off to transport), that very freedom is being clawed back. The bit that really matters, the curriculum, is being increasingly centrally determined. If this approach is to continue, then the associated costs of academies are certainly not money well spent.
Balls’ reclaiming of control aside, arguably the more important question is whether we ever really needed academies at all, with their pricey buildings and their matched funding, to reap the benefits of greater school freedom. The most probable answer is no. Improve accountability mechanisms for schools (to remedy currently distorting target-driven ones), raise the bar for teacher-entry, and revise Ofsted’s remit, and these freedoms would work very effectively in your bog standard comprehensive.