For headteacher Sam Offord, it began with a phone call last May. She was told by a senior quality assurance adviser for Manchester local authority that the dept for Education had decided her school must become an academy.
In Offord’s five years as head, Birchfields primary had received two “good” Ofsted reports. The varsity, 93% of whose children speak English as an extra language, had always met the ground standard for progress, but had not yet reached the objective for attainment. The decision was a shock, particularly as Offord knew her school was heading in the right direction to succeed in the attainment standard within the next set of results. “I said that our results were going to be good and was told: ‘That’s irrelevant now. They’re coming’.”
Offord decided to place up a fight. “i actually didn’t believe this variation would help the youngsters in our college,” she says. “i myself thought it might make things worse for them. We had worked hard and long for 5 years and everything we had installed place was working. i believed all that could be installed jeopardy.” She set about getting advice from her union, the National Association of Headteachers (NAHT), and from specialist lawyers in an effort to resisting the conversion.
Offord is one in every of several headteachers who’ve fought back and won against the specter of enforced academisation because they believed the explanations given by the DfE failed to stack up.
Initially, the grounds for forcing primary schools to become academies were either that they were in a single of the Ofsted “categories” or that they were failing to satisfy the department’s floor targets. However, in plenty of cases, when schools or local authorities challenged the department’s orders at the grounds of the ground targets, they discovered the DfE backing off from legal challenges and every so often having their orders overturned on appeal.
Nottingham-based lawyer Laura Hughes, of Browne Jacobson solicitors, says that between last March and November she was receiving about three calls every week from primary schools being told they might become academies. “The brokers [the consultants employed by the DfE] were promoting the message that primaries needed to academise in the event that they were below the ground targets, regardless of whether or not they were an improving school,” she says.
One of those consultants came visiting Birchfields. Offord told her that during the subsequent round of Sats results, the varsity was expected to succeed in the ground targets. “She said: ‘Yes, that’s fine, but you are still going to need to become an academy’.” Offord recalls it as “a type of surreal moments”.
“That’s after I said, ‘I’ve politely accepted you getting into my school, however the rules state you should be below both floor targets for 3 years.’ We hadn’t been below floor targets for progress since 2007.” Offord explains: “If I hadn’t had that knowledge, from attending my union’s briefing sessions, I’d have just accepted what the consultant said.”
On receiving the recent and improved Sats results, Sam wrote to the broker. “I reiterated that we didn’t meet the factors. I added that, “Surely, most people would think it was ludicrous that the DfE is targeting a 93% English as a different language school it really is achieving above the national average and is heading in the right direction to take action for the foreseeable future”
Offord received an email reply from the DfE broker saying, “Providing you might be above floor and never in an Ofsted category, the college isn’t always a concern to become a sponsored academy immediately.”
According to the National Audit report of November 2012 at the expansion of the academies programme, the DfE forecast that around 600 primaries would convert last year. The particular number was just 325. There are actually 974 primary academies in England, but that’s just 5.7% of primaries. DfE projections will not be being met.
Russell Hobby, general secretary of the NAHT, says: “All the brokers has a target of more than a few they have to convert. Their job is to transform a college someway. It’s once they cope with schools which are improving under their very own steam, or with the support in their local authority, that we get most angry. It is a shadowy and unaccountable process, which doesn’t allow schools to defend themselves appropriately, and the incorrect schools often get caught up on this.” The DfE denies that brokers have quotas to fulfill.
According to Hughes, the telephone calls to her office have diminished, and never because there aren’t any more visits from brokers. “Schools are more confident and word is getting around,” she says. Some local authorities and unions are actually advising schools that every one isn’t lost simply because a broker turns up on their doorstep.
According to the DfE, just two primary schools had been forced to transform on orders of the secretary of state. But school leaders in lots of other schools feel they’ve been coerced by the brokers, without or with assistance from their local authorities. The DfE was unable to inform Education Guardian what percentage schools had successfully resisted conversion.
Mike Barnes remembers being told his school, Flakefleet in Fleetwood, was at the DfE’s original list of so-called failing schools. “Two DfE civil servants and a broker came to work out us in September 2011 and told us what a dreadful school we were and the single way out of it was to become an academy.”
He recalls the sentiments. “Headship is lonely anyway and there has been a particularly strong feeling of shame,” says Barnes. Since his appointment in 2007, Barnes had brought the college out of special measures. By 2011, it was rated “good with outstanding features” by Ofsted. The difficulty was that it was below floor targets, which, hence, have been applied retrospectively.
“We investigated what it meant to become an academy,” says Barnes. “But we decided the appropriate thing for the kids will be to stay with Lancashire local authority.”
Barnes and the governing body sent off a “No thanks ” letter in March 2012. “We’ve never heard anything back. The governors keep asking me, ‘Have you had an email’ But there’s been nothing.” Barnes praises his local authority for its support. “They might ask, ‘Do you wish us to go looking over this’ or ‘What about getting a plan together like that'”
Lancashire council put him involved with eight other heads who were within the same boat. Of these eight targeted primaries, just one is now an academy.
One of the eight heads was Margaret Thacker, of Walverden primary in Nelson, Lancashire, who, regardless of not meeting floor targets, fought off academisation by appealing against the warning notice. A warning notice is the trigger for the method of academy conversion. Under the 2010 Education Act, Ofsted hears appeals against warning notices, which ought to be issued by local authorities. When Thacker’s school appealed to Ofsted, it upheld the appeal. Says Thacker: “Ofsted recognised that the college had the capacity to enhance, given the school’s improvement plan and improved Sats results.”
In September last year, the DfE backed down from defending a legal challenge by Coventry council over a warning notice to Henley Green primary school in Wyken Croft, which might have triggered academy conversion. Coventry stated that the college was making good progress in an area authority partnership, and argued that the DfE had no power in law to force them to issue the warning notice. Barristers were hired and, in September, days before the case was by means of come to court, the DfE wrote to mention it was not defending Coventry’s legal challenge.
For Anne Mortimer (not her real name), another north-west head, the specter of forced academisation was also a shock. Her school’s last Ofsted was “satisfactory with good features” and it had reached your complete floor targets – facts she mentioned to the DfE consultant. She was told the cause of the DfE’s actions was “historical underperformance”, she says, meaning that “they were concentrating on data that was 18 months old, despite the fact that there has been a more current data set available”.
A week later, the pinnacle and the whole board of governors were summoned to a gathering with the local authority and told the college must become an academy. “We were told lets not leave the room and needed to decide there after which,” says Mortimer. “Lets agree immediately and select a sponsor, and if we didn’t the method would happen anyway within the next two weeks and we would become an academy without choosing the sponsor.”
“The governors were panic stricken,” she says. Mortimer refused to make a snap decision. She contacted Browne Jacobson solicitors, who’ve become specialists within the rules of forced academisation, and the NAHT. Their representatives advised the governors that they weren’t obliged to become an academy under those terms. Mortimer says the governors were shocked. “They couldn’t believe that government could mislead them, for want of a higher word, to the level that they did.”
They then wrote to the DfE declining the “offer”, and failed to receive a reply. “We were told by the local authority that the DfE weren’t bothered about us any longer.”
Mortimer believes the DfE were on a “hunting mission” for schools that were showing signs of improvement “which might then provide ‘evidence’ to support Mr Gove’s policy of academisation”.
Last month Sir Michael Wilshaw, the executive inspector of colleges, announced that teams of inspectors would any more be inspecting schools in entire local authority areas in an end what Oftsed sees as unacceptable variations in standards between local authorities with roughly similar social and demographic mixes.
The first within the frame, Derby, has a consistent policy of discouraging academy conversion. Some, like Hobby, suspect a connection. “Any sense that that is about politics as opposed to quality will raise the suspicions of faculty leaders,” he says. “We’re concerned that Ofsted is straying from its mission to judge the standard of faculties and signing as much as the controversial ideology of replacing local authorities with chains of academies.” This can be a charge that the inspectorate denies. “Ofsted doesn’t promote ‘academisation’ or every other particular way of organising schools,” says a spokesman.
But with inspectors descending on entire areas, a few of the schools that fought off the threat could soon have a brand new battle to stand.
• a movie by Rhonda Evans about forced academisation will also be viewed at www.academiesandlies.org.uk
