There is no reverse gear, the education secretary, Nicky Morgan, told teachers on Saturday, in a distant echo of a beleaguered but uncompromising Margaret Thatcher. That is a remarkably high stakes defence of the policy of forced academisation, all the more unusual for coming so soon after it was announced. But then rarely has a policy less than a fortnight old been so comprehensively and so widely denounced.
On every count the handling of this has been extraordinary. The biggest change in education for more than 60 years was revealed not by the education secretary but by the chancellor. It astonished local councils, which will now be left with an obligation – finding a school place for every child – without the capacity to control school sizes. Far from devolving power straight to the headteachers most able to use it, power will go to barely accountable academy trusts. In another change that has incensed many, the trusts, of which hundreds will need to be created to meet the challenge of running all England’s schools, will not even need to be encumbered with parent-governors.
In an interview with the Guardian last week, Ms Morgan insisted the policy was necessary to continue to drive up standards. But the evidence is very patchy. There are underperforming academies just as there are underperforming maintained schools. Ms Morgan adds that parents don’t care about structures, and she has some reason for saying education is rarely an election issue. Yet with little more than a month to go before English local elections as well as the higher-profile elections in devolved administrations, she may find that can change.
Ever since the budget and the retreat on proposed disability payments, which failed to prevent the resignation of Iain Duncan Smith, both David Cameron and George Osborne have acquired a renewed reputation for high-handedness. As the row about disability cuts begins to subside, the row over the forced academy programme has been escalating. Tory councillors in loyalist strongholds such as Oxfordshire, Leicestershire, Hampshire and Kent, as well as the councillors’ umbrella organisation, the Local Government Association, are protesting angrily about plans from which they see no benefit and which will rob them of a major part of their responsibilities in local politics.
This sense of a newly vulnerable government may explain why Jeremy Corbyn took the apparently last-minute decision to address the NUT conference on Friday in a speech where he accused the government of asset-stripping the education system. On Saturday, NUT delegates voted to ballot members on a national one-day strike against forced academisation, to take place before the end of the summer term. Meanwhile Ms Morgan, having gone to the conference of the NUT’s rivals, the NASUWT – the first Conservative education secretary to do so since the mid-90s – found herself jeered and laughed at as she defended her policy. It was courageous of her to go; but the remarkable thing about her speech was that having said there was no reverse gear, she then failed to mention academisation in any detail at all.
With good reason, teachers and local authorities are seriously concerned about issues like recruitment and retention, finding the cash in the face of real-terms cuts to pay for expanding school rolls, and dealing with discipline and bullying. They also point angrily to the steady, if not uniform, improvement in performance across most maintained schools. Multi-academy chains of the sort Ms Morgan wants to take over are no more assured of success than the rest of the sector. There is certainly room for improvement in schools. But no one has yet explained which problems will be solved by radical structural reform imposed from the centre. Unless they make a more persuasive case, ministers may find they have another intractable public sector dispute to go with the one they picked with junior doctors. Let’s hope that was not their intention all along.
