Academy Ally - a game with no winners

There is, it seems, a cynical and Machiavellian game being played by the Department for Education. Its rules are secret and deniable but what is going on is far too organised to be mere serendipity. The game might be called Academy Ally.

As Smarden Primary School - a tiny Kent village school - celebrated becoming the 1000th converter academy, many were struck by the thought that, trumpet the success as loudly as you might, a thousand is a small proportion of the nation's schools. And we all know that this flagship, adorned with the bunting of freedom and flying the colours of independence, needs to gather a much bigger flotilla if it is to fulfil the dreams of its admiral.

And this is where the game comes in. It looks like this;  the DfE looks at the figures of those schools in challenging areas and leans very heavily on their local authority. The local authority, bowing to the pressure and threat to its independence, appears mob-handed on the school's doorstep, carries out a review and places the school in whatever is its equivalent to special measures, but with much shorter deadlines. Special Measures on steroids. It also breathes very heavily down the neck of the headteachers, with varying degrees of threat. This is not a nice place to be.  Enter the white knight - a minor DfE minion, a political spokesman, a passing peer - who then says, 'don't let the local authority bully you, break free of their pressure and become an academy.' 

This is exactly what happened at Smarden. Kent is an authority which, on the one hand is committed to supporting schools so they don't become academies but is using the other to beat up those schools who are struggling with meeting progress and attainment standards. Some officers have adopted a particularly bully-boy, intimidating approach. However, Smarden won a highly publicised visit from Lord Jonathan Hill, a junior education minister who promised heads that schools can stop officials 'breathing down their necks' by becoming academies.  And, from the bottom of an LA officer's boot, that suddenly looks very attractive.

It's not just Kent. My colleagues and I are working with schools in several authorities where the game is being played. There are a lot of scared heads out there and a lot of schools are feeling the pinch. They point the LA to satisfactory Ofsted reports, often reporting good leadership, to be told that 'the Secretary of State doesn't care about Ofsted reports!'

So, not by will but by fear, schools will slowly be added to the thousand to enjoy the new freedoms promised them. Does that freedom include not meeting floor targets, even in the most challenging areas? What do you think?

One rule for Mr Gove, another for the rest of us

There is  a lot that annoys this writer about the ideological steamroller that is the Coalition government's Department for Education but I am aware that quite a lot of the electorate - generally those outside education - seem to quite like Mr Gove. When I see the guy on TV, I reluctantly accept that he seems to come across as pretty genuine.

So I'm pretty disappointed to discover that, despite all the rhetoric, Michael Gove is as manipulative and disingenuous as the rest of the political world. And how do I reach this conclusion? It was a brief news item last week when it was reported that Mr Gove and his department had been using their personal email accounts rather than the DfE's because, that way, they would avoid Freedom of Information (FOI) enquiries.
The DfE did not deny that this was going on but merely said that they were not acting illegally.  Now, this may be the case - there is no law to say that you have to use the company email account but there IS a very strong DfE policy that personal email accounts must not be used because, to do so, compromises security.

In the years I have been inspecting, the importance of not using personal accounts has been driven home again and again and there is an online training course that gets wheeled out every couple of years. This is focused on secure practice and safeguarding of information. It covers a lot of stuff, like why you should not go to sleep on the train with your laptop open. It also makes it quite clear that, for people who work for the government or a government agency, they should absolutely not use their personal email account. It is assessed and, passing it is an expectation for all inspectors - and all DfE staff.

But not, it seems, for Mr Gove.

What has the man got to hide?

Fighting for Religious Education - MPs coming on board

Religious Education is the only subject where kids get the chance to ask really deep questions about big issues. It's not, as the secularisers would have us believe, anything at all to do with brainwashing or evangelism. It's about learning about religions and beliefs because they are an important part of grown up society, shape life-styles and drive values. Whether it's a religious belief, a humanist view or the belief of an atheist.  Perhaps its the name that's misleading in the 21st Century and perhaps we should call it Religion and Beliefs (but not Ethics or Citizenship!)

And that's why we need to make sure that it is not collateral damage in Gove's curriculum reforms. RE needs to be in the Ebacc and it needs its statutory status strengthened.

I will never again criticise my MP, Helen Grant (Anne Widdecomb's successor) for any lack of support on this issue. Not only has she written of her support, she has written an article on the issue in our local newspaper and written to Gove. She has just telephone me to confirm her support. She believes that RE is important - as do many MPs on both sides of the House. So, Helen...thanks for your clear commitment, and welcome to the fight.

Religious Education and parliamentary support

I've just had a letter from my MP, Helen Grant (Con, Maidstone and the Weald). She says, 'I have spoken to a range of people regarding this matter and have reflected on the situation personally. Having considered all the arguments put forward, I now fully share your concerns about the sidelining of RE within the curriculum.'  This is tremendous news and comes soon after a meeting that colleagues and I had with Roger Gale MP (Con, Thanet North). Roger's argument was that there was probably not much hope for the EBacc because Gove had made up his mind and that he never listened to anyone. However, he threw his support behind a campaign to protect RE as a statutory subject.  In a way both these views are right and we need to mobilise our MPs to support a two-fold campaign for both these ideals.

Roger Gale suggested we needed a national voice for RE rather than the fragmented voice we have at the moment. Hopefully, under John Keast, the RE Council will assume that role.

Something sensible suggested at last?

The proposals that may be emerging from the review of the national curriculum in respect of Key Stages 3 and 4 look as if, for once, the coalition may be about to do something sensible for education. Tim Oates, director of research at the Cambridge Assessment exam board and chair of Gove's 'expert panel' set up to review the national curriculum has proposed that those students who are less academic could be offered vocational-focused education, leading to an apprenticeship. The figure of 40% of students has been suggested, with vocational lessons starting as early as Year 7.

Now, this is either inspired thinking or it's a return to the sixties - or perhaps it's both. The difference is that, in the 1960s, government policy was always aimed at full employment - which meant an unemployment rate of around 3%. That policy was abandoned by Thatcher and has not returned, even under Labour. Look at it from the fat-cat perspective; high unemployment brings wage costs down and drives profits up.  However, let's go back to this wheeze of Oates's. It has got to make a lot of sense, to provide an education that best meets the needs of the students. Nearly 20 years ago I visited Kernahan High (now Kernahan Park High) School in Niagara, Ontario. This is a school where traditional academic subjects have given way to a whole range of trade-based skills  and it works really well. The School Board support it and the kids service the Board vehicles, cater Board events, maintain Board gardens and fund it all by building a house on the estate each year.

Perhaps this was the kind of thing Oates had in mind when he expressed the view in an interview with the Telegraph that  'England risks being left behind other developed nations because the country fails to offer students the chance to go down a “rigorous vocational route” at the end of secondary education'.  There, it's that international comparison element again.

The Coalition has long condemned Labour's vocational diplomas as too complicated - but then they did not have a lot of chance to get going before the Gove axe fell. Maybe, just maybe, this proposal is a good plan that might just benefit our young people and reduce the chance of their becoming NEETs. However, a generation of apprenticeship-ready young people need a thriving and growing economy in which apprenticeships will flourish - and there doesn't seem to be happening any time soon!

World class - but who cares?

It took a lot of people a lot of work and a lot of time to create what was collectively one of the best set of resources for educators in the world. The Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency's site offered a superb range of teaching and planning resources; Teachernet gave instant access to the current guidance on a wide range of government education policy; Teachers' TV was a wonderful source  of video resources covering governance, leadership, teaching and support staff.

As a headteacher I made frequent and constant use of teachernet, for example for detailed guidance on exclusion or matters of school governance. Meanwhile, my staff used QCDA resources to help their planning and delivery of many aspects of the curriculum.  As a trainer I have made regular use of the excellent video collection on TTV and frequently speak to headteachers who use them for staff development.

In a world where our political masters bang on about Britain needing to be world class these resources were just that. It is doubtful if any nation could boast such a wide range of high quality and professional resources. You would expect Michael Gove to be a proud man.  And you would be wrong.

As part of his mission to take education back to the twentieth century one of the first steps taken by the Secretary of State was to deprive schools of these wonderful resources.  It was easy to justify, of course, on the grounds of economy - these website must have cost..... hmmm, how much would it really have cost to have kept these world class resources? We are left to conjecture what might have been the real reason for Gove to remove them. Surely, surely, his refusal to acknowledge that there was anything good about New Labour's education advances would not extend here?  Perhaps his 20th century thinking excludes them?

The QCDA resources and teachernet have already been consigned to the National Archives and tomorrow is the final day for Teachers' TV. The site will then be taken down.  They may have been world class but nobody noticed. And few cared. Certainly not Michael Gove or Sarah Teather.

A storm in a chalice

This furore about the Church of England preparing to open the doors of its schools to the children of non-believers really is a media storm over nothing. Even the most casual observer of education history will appreciate that Anglican schools have always been there to serve the community in which they are located. Let's not forget that, before state provided education began in 1870 the only volume providers of schools were Anglicans' National Society and the non-conformists' British and Foreign Schools Society. The schools they built were to serve not the denomination but the nation. This was different for Jewish schools, established to support Jewish tradition and teaching among Jewish children and to help migrants to Anglicise. It was also different for the Roman Catholic schools, established from the early 20th century to uphold Catholicism among the mainly Irish migrant communities.

It has only been in relatively recent years that the Church of England has been in a position to be able to restrict admission to members of the Anglican communion, with a small percentage of open places. This is a Roman Catholic model that has always sat uneasily alongside the founding purpose of CofE schools. Several years ago the Archbishops Council resolved to create more open enrolment, taking us some way back to founding principles. The recent remarks by the Bishop of Oxford, as Chair of the CofE's Board of Education merely confirm this intention.

The move, of course, only relates to the minority of Church schools who have had the dubious luxury of being this selective. Many Aided - and all Controlled - schools simply serve their local community as the founding National Society intended.  The proposals make a lot of sense and represent what must be the future model of faith schools within a state-funded system. It really does no good for sneering popularists such as Toby Young to make capital from a return to first principles. He and the more scornful sections of the press are making much of not much.

Gove speaks with forked tonge

Things are not exactly secure for RE in English schools under the Coalition GOVErnment. The strange thing is that its members seriously seem to think that they are protecting it!  Up and down the land MPs have been lobbied by thousands of people who are worried that this administration is determined to dump RE. Down here in Kent we have 14 MPs and, as Chair of Kent SACRE, I have written to the lot. Twice.

The standard way that MPs deal with such queries (after all, they are not necessarily experts in the field) is either to deflect the question with eyewash or to forward it to the relevant minister and then reply with a copy of teh reply. In Kent most of our MPs are pretty hopeless in dealing with the RE question, for example neither Greg Clark (Tunbridge Wells) nor Sir John Stanley (Tonbridge and Malling) have bothered to reply. Others, like Roger Gale (Thanet North) act immediately by passing the matter to the minister or secretary of state and then simply believe what they are told. Interestingly, the new MP for Thanet South, Laura Sandys, was one who did not bother to reply. Damien Green (Ashford) doesn't care about RE and isn;t willing to move a muscle but at least he replies.

Some of our MPs, on the other hand, are genuinely concerned and prepared to take action. Juilan Brazier (Canterbury) is one, Michael Fallon (Sevenoaks) is another. These men are robust in their support. So is Charlie Elphicke (Dover), who not only took the matter up with Mr Gove but went out of his way to tackle him about it. Helen Grant (Maidstone) promises support but leaves a sense of doubt about giving it.

There is an Early Day Motion to be taken before the end of this parliamentary session, which calls for RE to be included in the new Humanities E Bacc. The government line is that it is not necessary because iot is a compulsory subject. However the demonstrable reality is that, if it is removed from the GCSE agenda - as would happen if it was not in the Bacc - then it would effectively vanish from many schools. 'Compulsory' it may be but nobody is policing it and many schools have quietly dropped it - and nobody in government is prepared to lift a finger to have it reinstated.

So the government and its Secretary of State speak with forked tongues; the very alleged protection they say they are giving to RE is proving the be the means of allowing schools to drop it from their curricula.

And already we are seeing the impact; no GCSE > no A-Level course > fewer applicants for Religious Studies degrees > end of some university courses > fewer trainee RE teachers > less RE in schools.

Gove and the government know this. It's a pity they don't tell the truth.

Teacher Registration - a threat to democracy?

Almost the first thing that Michael Gove did when he emerged from the shadows to become Education Secretary was to announce the abolition of the General Teaching Council (GTC) for England. Sure a lot of teachers saw little return for their £33 annual subscription and Gove tapped into this sentiment by suggesting that the Council "acts as a further layer of bureaucracy while taking money away from teachers."

However, what seemed to be behind this was the notion that, in its roles of disciplining naughty teachers, the GTC had not been as robust as Mr Gove would have liked. So, rather than ensure that it was suitably robust in its decisions, he chose to abolish it, announcing that "I want there to be stronger and clearer arrangements in relation to teacher misconduct and I am not convinced the GTCE is the right organisation to take these forward." Presumably his Welsh counterpart did not feel the same as there seems little threat to the GTCW.

The teaching profession had waited many years and fought many battles - mostly with whichever union wanted domination - before ending up with a professional body. For years we had claimed we were a profession and now we had what other professions had; a regulatory and registering body. For all its faults.

It seems that Mr Gove wants teacher registration to continue and wants the (tough) regulatory function to continue so, while the GTC goes to law to look for a solution that will protect it, the Secretary of State proposes that these functions are taken into the Department for Education. And this will leave the legislature (parliament) also being the executive, carrying out the legislation through maintaining the teacher registration function and, it seems, being the judiciary, dispensing justice and clemency.

Is it not a tenet of democracy - and has it not been since Ancient Greece - that the three functions of  legislature, executive and judiciary should be kept separate?

Not in Mr Gove's democratic world it seems!

Possible green light for RE after all

There is a campaign among the RE community, to alert MPs to concerns about Religious Education. As the previous blog illustrates, there are well founded concerns that this government may be the administration that removes RE from the statutory curriculum.

However, there are chinks of light; it may be as a result of the many questions that MPs have been asking. Charlie Elphicke (Con, Dover) is one of the several Kent MPs who feel strongly about this issue. He has not only written to the Secretary of State, but has also spoken to him personally.

Whatever the reasons, two positive signs have recently manifested. The first is an acknowledgement by Michael Gove that RE will now be included as one of the subjects in the new English Baccalaureate, the second is the remit for the National Curriculum Review. The DfE paper says, " it is essential to distinguish between the National Curriculum and the wider school curriculum.  There are a number of important components of a broad and balanced school curriculum for which, as is currently the case, it would be inappropriate to prescribe national Programmes of Study.  This applies, for example, in the case of religious education (RE), where what is taught needs to reflect local circumstances.  Religious education will not, therefore, be considered as part of the review of the National Curriculum.  The Government does not intend to make any changes to the statutory basis for religious education.


This is very positive. There are still concerns about the regulation and monitoring of RE in Academies anmd Free Schools but it seems that, for the moment, RE is safe.

Worrying about RE

Religious Education has been a part of the English school curriculum since 1870. At that time it was the churches who were the main providers of education and the new education act, which was designed to fill up the gaps - not replace the existing system - retained the obligation to teach RE. This was controversial even then, and pressure groups such as the National Education League opposed it. The compromise solution was to allow parents to withdraw their child from RE and/or collective worship in both state and voluntary schools.This amendment was tabled by William Cowper-Temple and is cited, even today, as the Cowper-Temple Clause. This position has remained ever since and has been reinforced by subsequent education legislation, notably the 1944 and 1988 Education Acts.  This is a potted history only - those who want to read more could do no better than read my book 'Leading a Faith School' (Optimus 2009), which they could  request from their local library (while we still have local libraries!)

Religious Education is no longer the Christian Bible-story-based curriculum it once was but is both an introduction to world faiths and belief positions and an opportunity for students to get to grips with deep questions that they may not be able to tackle in other subjects.  RE has enjoyed surprising growth at GCSE, especially with the introduction of the Short Course.

Although required nationally, RE is not subject to a nationally determined curriculum. Instead, each local authority is required to have a Locally Agreed Syllabus that is reflective of the religion and beliefs profile of the area. Each LA is required to have a Standing Advisory Council on RE (SACRE), which is the body charged with overseeing RE and collective worship in the authority. SACREs are comprised of four groups, representing the religious communities, professional teacher associations and the local authority. Their role is set down in Circular 1/94 (10/94 in Wales) and in the 2010 non-statutory advice on RE.

While there are - and always will be - those who oppose RE in schools, it is generally agreed that it is a Good Thing with an important role to play.  However, although the present Education Secretary says that he supports RE, this is not the message coming from Whitehall. One warning sign was the Academies Act, which makes no mention of RE at all (and therefore does not reinforced existing legislation). Mr Gove has surrounded himself with a coterie of 'experts' but none comes from an especially pro-RE perspective. Academies are supposed to deliver RE as it is in their funding agreement but pragmatic research indicates that many are in breach of this expectation. When challenged the Secretary of State merely responds that his intention is for schools to have free choice of their curriculum. Therefore, since they are free of local authorities, there is no regulatory role for SACRE - and therefore no regulation of RE in any academy.

The RE community is writing to MPs but keep hitting a brick wall. Colin Parker, of the Public Communication Unit says,

We recognise, as many schools do, the benefits that religious education (RE) can bring to pupils.  This is why the teaching of RE remains compulsory throughout a pupil's schooling.  Success in all subjects studied at GCSE will also continue to be recognised by other performance table measures, as it has in the past. We have not included RE as fulfilling the humanity requirement of the English Baccalaureate because it is already a compulsory subject.  One of the intentions of the English Baccalaureate is to encourage wider take up of geography and history in addition to, rather than instead of, compulsory RE.  However, the other messages suggest that RE is not protected. At a recent meeting of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust, David Bell (once HMCI, now Parliamentary Permanent Secretary at the DfE) was asked directly about the future of RE. He refused to answer, simply saying 'that's enough, I've got to go now.' This does not inspire confidence.