The academies sector must avoid a “slip back” to a “creeping centralisation” from central government, a senior leader in the academy trust sector has warned.
Speaking at the Schools and Academies Show in London this week, deputy chief executive of the Confederation of School Trusts (CST) Steve Rollett said that some in the sector had started to experience this “during and since the pandemic”.
Speaking at a panel talk on the structure of the English education system, Mr Rollett said it was important to be able to “empower organisations” in the sector and “avoid...a slip back to creeping centralisation from government”.
Mr Rollet issued his warning as he described how he was seeing a growth of “connectivity” between trusts and external local organisations, which was leading to discussions about them being more “at the centre of local area-based partnerships”.
Academisation ‘gone past tipping point’
His comments come after the Department for Education said today that the number of schools that are academies had passed 50 per cent, which Mr Rollett said means school academisation has “gone past the tipping point”.
Speaking at a different panel at the event, John Barneby, CEO of 53-school national trust Oasis Community Learning, also said the sector is arriving at a point where it “can start thinking about how to resolve” some of the wider social issues by making connections - such as with the voluntary sector and providing “wraparound holistic services” like counselling.
Mr Barneby added that he could not think of another area like the schools sector that had a similar “long-term relationship with families”.
Addressing the issue of the growth of academies, Mr Rollett said that CST is not “banging on the door of government” asking it to focus its energies on driving this forward.
Instead, Mr Rollett said it was up to trusts to make a positive case, but added that there are other critical issues the government needs to focus on right now, including recruitment and retention.
CST chief executive Leora Cruddas previously said that multi-academy trusts could be doing “a lot more” to solve the problem of teacher retention.
‘No such thing as a perfect destination’
Speaking alongside Mr Rollet, Tom Richmond, director of the EDSK think tank, said that there was “no such thing as a perfect destination” within the academisation process but called for “clarity and a vision and a move towards it together”.
However, Mr Richmond criticised the enormity of the task facing the government Regions Groups, which makes decisions about the academisation of schools in local areas.
“The resources that these Regions Groups have to deliver, the scale of what they’ve been asked to deliver, just looks completely mismatched,” Mr Richmond said.
He added that the fact regional directors were civil servants meant there is “always going to be the concern that actions they take aren’t necessarily the right thing to do, but are what politicians want”, which “can change very quickly and not necessarily in a healthy direction”.
He said: “When it’s still ultimately a lot of civil servants reporting up into the DfE, there is always going to be that concern.
“This back and forth - full academisation, not full academisation, drip feed of secondaries, drip feed of primaries - is probably the worst outcome in the next five to 10 years.”
Paul Gosling, former president of the NAHT school leaders’ union, who was also part of the same panel discussion, said the last few “maddening” years had “been a bit of an experiment and a Darwinian evolution” within the schools system.
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