Institutional forgetting in academy schools.
Chains of academy schools have replaced local government monopolies in managing our schools in the UK. Moreover, Gavin Williamson, the Secretary of State for Education, has promised to continue with a policy of privatisation the foreseeable future (UK Gov 2021). Out of 32,770 primary and secondary schools in the UK, 4,188 are secondary state funded privatised and non-privatised schools, 2,408 are private (fee paying) schools (BESA 2019). In the most recent government report on the privatised sector, in 2018, there were 7,920 privatised primary and secondary schools in the UK, with 1,172 of those schools privatised between 2017 and 2018 (DfE, UK Gov). The most common form of network governance is the Multi-Academy Trust (MAT). There are 1,170 MATs in the UK with 6,177 academy schools in this type of network. Networks vary in size, from just two schools up to over twenty schools, but 598 of these MATs have less than five schools in their network.
MATs are Public Private Partnerships (PPPs). However, they are complex contractual arrangements between the Department of Education and private interests, where delivery costs and performance risks are supposedly transferred to the private sector while protecting public sector interests. However, it has become increasingly obvious since 2010 that public interests in education are not protected and schools have not been improved by new models of accountability. School buildings and public spaces have been handed over to private interests but there is less transparency in how they are managed. Privatized schools are more guarded in what they present to the public and it is not possible for citizens to use FOI requests to enquire about how public money is spent in privatized schools, because MATs defend their right not to share financial data or operational decision making, in order to protect their market advantage. MATs argue that they face new commercial sensitivities around benefits, contracts and patronage that force them to be less transparent (West and Wolf, 2018). However, those commercial sensitivities are more often described in terms of a private benefit and there is increasing evidence that this lack of openness, described by them as essential for maintaining a market advantage, does not translate into a public benefit. Privatised schools have become less accountable than other state funded schools and authority for sharing information with parents and teachers has seeped away, out of local authorities into MATs. This has been justified as essential organisational privacy, but it is a type of privacy that is contrary to the needs of the public for knowledge sharing and professional networking. There are huge inefficiences and inadequacies in our education system and there is a need to generate more conversation about them.
If we look at public transport, the problem of privatisation is more obvious than in schools. Trains are clean or dirty, late or punctual, too expensive or good value for money and so we can make a solid judgement about the quality of that service and the benefit of that service to us. It’s different with schools. They are services for our children and we are only indirectly involved as consumers. That’s not to say we don’t monitor what our children do in school, it’s more to say that we find it difficult to make a judgement about the quality of teaching and learning in a school relative our child’s performance, in school and at home. It is very often a problem of data interpretation but it’s also about what we are told to value as a measure of essential skills or useful knowledge. Schools have become more guarded in what they share with parents and teachers and they are inclined to use abstract measures of individual performance and behaviour. I would argue that these measures are less recogniseable as what we know as parents about our children. It’s also noticeable that instruments are teacher appraisal have come to mirror instruments for student assessment through target setting and increased monitoring. In this respect academy schools have less autonomy than their state counterparts. Authority for sharing information with parents has seeped out of local authorities and into private businesses.
While the geography of network governance in the UK is easily explained by mapping the distribution of academy schools and MATs, there are some aspects of privatisation that we do not understand. We do not know enough about the public costs of privatizing schools in terms of local and regional inequalities. MATs guard their private market advantage and at the same time hide any public disadvantage. While they have a not-for-profit status, they hold on to a profit motive and do not share information about how they maximise their income. Unfortuenately it appears that we (parents and teachers) have come to accept private gain in education and we have forgotten how to talk about public loss.
Fortunately, we are reminded of what public loss looks like in more visible failing public services such as ‘for-profit’ privatized rail services. Southern Railway is famously dysfunctional example. A Southern Railway ticket for a journey from Brighton to London is one of the most expensive seasonal commuter tickets in the world (£4–5000 pa). Rail travel in the UK has become a sound investment for private interests over the last decade with southern routes into London the most valuable. However, counter intuitively, passengers on these southern lines have had less ‘say’ in the type of service being offered to them as the cost of travel has gone up. Tory MPs, with constituencies along the south coast in towns like Eastbourne and Worthing, have complained almost on a daily basis at the peak of the problem in 2018. But, with very little effect. Southern Railway was criticised by blue MPs and blue commuters, but it remained protected by a blue government even in the face of massive financial and organisational failure. Southern Rail carriages are unreliable and overcrowded while the cost of tickets remains high. It’s important to point out that in all this rail staff have had even less ‘say’ than passengers in the delivery of commuter rail services. This became more clear during the frequent and long disruptions to Southern Railway services with industrial actions in 2018. The southern service is not unique in the UK for its intractability. There are signs of a common lazy market ideology and a misplaced profit motive across our public services.
There is growing evidence that essential services like rail travel and school education are not improved by privatisation. However, it is a messy business in that hybrid-businesses like railways and academy schools are protected from market conditions by public money. If that is not bad enough, they are also insulated from democratic interventions. Public accountability has been reduced to such an extent that our daily interactions with public services are changed significantly. This is as true for teaching and learning as it is for train travel. However, it is less obvious in education where the profit motive is less visible, the consumer is less easily defined, and the service is much more difficult to measure.
The Teacher Workload Advisory Group has given us a very good measure of deteriorating realtionships in academy schools. It has described the problem of teacher workload, psychological stress and demotivation in their report, ‘Making Data Work’ (TWAG, 2018). This report criticises MATs for imposing inflexible monitoring and demands for more data uploads on teachers. New performance appraisal systems have been designed to collect more performance data, but they reveal a deep distrust of teachers and a preoccupation with ideas of market advantage. There has been an increase in the frequency and volume of direct teacher observations, and this has damaged essential working relationships between teachers and managers in subject departments. Externally set performance targets and unfathomable teacher evaluations create tense working conditions. Teachers are more compliant, but they have also become more risk averse and less creative. It is increasingly difficult to see how more testing and more monitoring can improve teaching and learning in schools.
Supervision has replaced collegial practices to such an extent that teachers have been excluded from departmental decision making and organisational planning. In this system, teacher performance appraisal instruments embed the idea that teachers must earn their right not to be constantly observed and so teachers spend more time on self-appraisal or demonstrating their contractual and non-contractual compliance by exhibiting a ‘passion’ for the job. However, this is more often a type of over-compliance and simply a demonstration of ‘passion’ for monitoring, not teaching and learning. This type of quality assurance with standardized criteria for individual excellence has been prioritized over professional values. It is unsustainable.
In this model operational knowledge is filtered and stratified at three levels in a school. Senior managers know more than middle managers who know more than teachers, but this artificial stratification does very little to support effective teaching and learning or essential collaboration between teachers. More worryingly there are a number of glaring contradictions in data heavy teacher performance appraisal systems. On one hand they reify abstract data about teacher performance and student attainment but on the other hand they reduce the value of teacher interventions to add meaning to the same data. In this respect, supervisorial knowledge has displaced professional knowledge in the operation of academy schools. It is not surprising then, that governance decisions about teacher recruitment, appointments and pay which rest on data about individual development, have become more confusing for teachers.
Teachers very often do not understand how they have been assessed or even to what extent they are more or less effective in the classroom. This dissatisfaction is a type of public loss. In so far as it is not formally expressed, it is a loss of professional voice in the presence of strong ideas for individual accountability and the absence of effective collective practices. Voice is defined here as a need to discuss the transactional costs of a failing quality assurance system, where there is too much contractual compliance and an erasure of positive non-compliance. In this sense, compliance is a type of forgetting. It appears as if teachers have forgotten how important their voice is to public service, and they may well have forgotten about the value of shared decision-making in the operation of a school: how to think about the collective good, how to ask challenging questions, how to negotiate, how to network, how to make a moral case, how to share an individual experience for public benefit and how to analyse performance data to give it professional meaning in a local context. This local context became more important in 2020.
There was a sudden an increased need to remember ideas of professional voice and public service in 2020 and 2021 as the Covid 19 virus spread through the UK and as schools were forced to cancel most of their face-to-face teaching. Who would have thought that all exams and all teacher performance appraisal events would be scrubbed? National testing and school inspections collapsed and so too did data collection for teacher performance review and development. At the same time teachers demonstrated their natural self reliance and creativity by adapting to home working and new forms of teaching and assessment. Teachers were obliged to remember how to take risks as they developed new ways of working online. It is too early to tell what effect this has had on teachers, but it is likely that teachers been thinking about how dysfunctional increasingly redundant systems of student assessment and teacher appraisal are. As far as I can see there is an imminent need to dis-embed these market systems. There are signs of resistance too. Recent protests in schools have started a new conversation about a lack of openneness about peer-to-peer sexual harassment and assault in schools. How has this problem remained hidden? How can we give students and teachers a voice in the operation of schools? Children are demanding more transparency in schools and teachers should do the same, by demanding more mutual and more public accountability.
