The Great Education Robbery

How the Government Took our Schools and Gave Them to Big Business

Nigel Gann

• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781398432727
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Corruption & Misconduct
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Nigel Gann explains how English schools provided by local councils and embedded in communities were grabbed by an authoritarian government and handed to billionaire business owners. Administrators and academics with knowledge and understanding built up over decades were replaced by a new 'educational establishment' of hedge-fund investors and political cronies. Utilising the 'seven deadly sins' of corporatised schools, a new 'blob' turned a public good into a milch cow for privately-educated politicians and their mates. Then they abandoned Europe and exploited a world-wide killer disease to corner the market in government contracts. But Gann offers a way forward.
"Nigel Gann's analysis should be read by anyone who is interested in the reality of how control of our schools has become much less democratic. The account of this experienced school governor and teacher makes compulsive reading."
Warwick Mansell, writer/editor of the website Education Uncovered.
"The book is an excellent read... I recommend it to all those involved in the school system in England – you will gain new and important insights."
Chris James, Emeritus Professor of Educational Leadership and Management, Department of Education, University of Bath
"Nigel Gann offers an impassioned rejection of the celebrated gains of 'academisation' in the English education system and communicates a new vision of education, with public trust, transparency and localism at its core." Dr Andrew Wilkins, Goldsmiths, University of London
"A fascinating read into the world of education through the lens of the forced academisation of a rural primary school." Raj Unsworth, chair of governors, special advisor to Headteachers Roundtable

Section III
Professional Fouls

Chapter 9
How To Consult … And How
To Avoid It

People used to be protected by the process of statutory consultation. What happened? Increasingly, democratic safeguards against the actions of the unaccountable have been lost. It stands as a warning that we are losing long-standing protections against summary government actions.

Listening To The Public

A major part of the Conservative Party’s enthusiasm for academies is that local and elected elements can be removed from their governance. While contractually bound to have at least some parent views represented in their structures, they can easily shovel these away into the backwaters of their procedures. It is likely that the proponents of the 1986 Act1 thought that the reconstruction of the governing bodies of maintained schools to include elected parents and staff and co-opted members of the community would be a stick with which to beat the senior professionals in schools. Headteachers would be further disempowered, then, by the contents of the 1988 Act, the National Curriculum and standardised testing, and the 1992 Act creating Ofsted with its rigorous, performance-centred inspections.

No doubt to their disappointment, it rarely turned out that way. The interests of parents and teachers, it transpired, were not generally opposed. On the contrary, there was widespread consensus around a liberal and humane regime in schools with a balanced curriculum meeting a wide range of individual needs. Academies would stunt the growth of a public expectation for transparency, accountability, accessibility and a degree of democratic participation in their schools. Add to this the far greater opportunities to make an honest profit from a £50 billion business, what was there not to like about academies?

But there was still a problem. Over decades since the Second World War, in response to a growing demand for accountability, a complex system of public scrutiny had developed. It had even invaded parliament itself, with its twice-weekly Prime Minister’s Question Time and the comprehensive select committee system. The public now assumed that local and national plans for developments in land use, transport services, industry, hospital provision and schools would be subject to, first, publicity and, second, consultation. As far as schools were concerned, you had to hold a consultation if you wanted to open one, and you had to hold a consultation to close one. If you wanted to change the nature of a school, if you wanted to alter the times of opening and closing the school day, or to change the holiday dates, you had to hold a consultation. The purpose of all this was to ensure both that local people knew what was happening to the organisations that served them, and that they had a chance to express a view about it which had, by law, to be taken into consideration.

This seemed such a confounded nuisance to people who wanted to change the whole school system, especially when most people seemed content with what they had. Other regulations similarly were there to protect the public. Nationally, planning laws and by-laws slowed down business development, acting as a brake on housing and industrial money-making. When the regulations required that you spend money on such socialist flummery as cheap housing for essential workers, or play spaces for children, or community centres for local people to enjoy, clearly the law itself had become far too responsive to the needs of the public. The decimation of legal aid, so that justice would be beyond the reach of the average person, the limitations on freedom of information, even the diminution of the centuries-old jury system would ensure that the money-makers were put back where they belong, at the front of the queue for human rights.

In 2010, the Liberal Democrats, whose support was essential to David Cameron’s first period of office, had had no qualms whatsoever about ditching their unreserved manifesto commitment to the abolition of higher education tuition fees, in order to gain a sniff of power. But even they jibbed at supporting an unrestrained government capacity to remove schools from local authority oversight at will. So Michael Gove’s 2010 Academies Act2 included a procedure whereby any school wishing, or even being forced by the DfE, to become an academy was required to conduct a public consultation.

What Is Expected Of A Consultation

The concept of consultation before significant decision-making is well-embedded in English law. In the past, it has perhaps been best known nationally in the form of government green papers, designed to promote discussions which will pave the way for legislation, and subsequent white papers, which are policy documents produced by the Government that set out their proposals for future legislation. Consultation procedures appear most frequently in the process of relevant authorities making planning decisions, on any matter from the building of a conservatory on the back of a house in a conservation area, to the decision on a third runway at London Heathrow Airport.

In education, local authorities have for many years been required to consult with the public over the proposed closure of, or significant changes in the provision of, maintained schools.

There are some general legal requirements for authorities to follow when undertaking a public consultation, even where to do so is itself not legally required. The following key issues are taken from the blog of David Wolfe of Matrix Chambers3:

“In short, anyone who undertakes consultation must let people know what they are proposing and why, give them a chance to comment, and conscientiously take into account their responses with an open mind before deciding whether or not to do what was proposed.” Wolfe goes on to state unequivocally that a public body, having once decided to consult (even if not required to) "must comply with the following overarching obligations (unless detailed statutory rules supplant these):

• Consultation must be at a time when proposals are at a formative stage.
• The proposer must give sufficient reasons for its proposals to allow consultees to understand them and respond to them properly.
• Consulters must give sufficient time for responses to be made and considered.
• Responses must be conscientiously taken into account in finalising the decision.

All of those are aspects of an overriding requirement for ‘fairness’. The process must be substantively fair and have the appearance of fairness." (Original emphasis).

The Castle School’s ‘Consultation’

Castle Primary School governors met for the last time on the 26^th February 2015. At this meeting, they went through the statutory requirements for conversion to academy status, including receiving a report on the school’s consultation.

Following lobbying from the then National Governors’ Association (NGA), the 2010 Act added at the last minute the requirement that a school hold a consultation before the signing of the funding agreement that sealed the deal and turned a school into an academy. The consultation had to be ‘appropriate’ – as any public consultation must be. That means that, once the governing body has agreed who it is appropriate to consult, it must genuinely seek to establish the views of the consultees; the consultees must be given sufficient and accurate information on the subject; and consultees who are chosen because they are representative of certain organisations or bodies must be told why they have been consulted, given time to respond, and given accurate addresses to which to respond. It must, in other words, meet the requirements of the general law on public consultations and must not be able to be perceived in any way as a merely token operation.

Advice from the NGA was that governing bodies should keep all those involved with the school (parents, pupils, staff, local authority, local community, neighbouring & feeder schools and diocese, if appropriate) informed of their plans throughout the process and that consultation should take place before the governing body took the formal resolution to apply for Academy status. Schools could take their time and ensure that they had carried out the process thoroughly and with due diligence. The recommendation was that the following groups should be consulted as a minimum: parents/carers of pupils at the school; for secondary, parents/carers of pupils in years 5 and 6 of any primary schools in the area; for primary, parents/carers of pupils offered a place at the school for the following September; staff working at the school and any staff due to be employed at the school from the following September; for secondary, pupils at the school; the wider local community. In addition, schools needed to consider whether there was any other organisation, person or group who should be consulted about the proposed conversion. This might include parish, town, district and county councils and councillors, the governing bodies and staff of feeder and receiving schools and any church representative, especially where schools concerned are faith schools4.

One might have expected Castle governors to be particularly aware of this. Four years earlier, the local secondary school had had to rerun its consultation, because it had given only a very one-sided view of the costs and benefits of conversion, it had given insufficient time for consultees to consider the proposal, and the return email address for comments had been given incorrectly. Elsewhere, there had been at least one reported case of a school temporarily withdrawing its application for Academy status following a solicitor’s letter which, amongst other things, challenged the way in which the school had sought parental views. The NGA had noted the judgement in R v Northumberland County Council, Ex Parte Parents for Legal Action Ltd – 18 May 2006 – which revolved around what constitutes proper consultation. The Judge commented that:

‘The whole purpose of consultation is to inform the process before the public body formulates and publishes its final processes.’ Although this judgement referred to statutory proposals in relation to a maintained school, as opposed to an application to convert to Academy status, it was the NGA’s view that governing bodies would not go too far wrong if they bore it in mind when considering Academy status.5

The consultation, it was recommended, should take the form of a letter, which might refer the reader to a website for more information (but it should be recognised that access to the Internet was still not universally available). Separate meetings for parents and staff allow an exchange of views and clarification where there are queries, and some explanation and possibly consultation should take place with pupils. It was recommended that the consultation period should be open for 4-6 weeks.

Responses to a consultation must be formally considered before the funding agreement is signed, and the DfE requires a ‘report’ on the consultation to be provided prior to the signing of the Funding Agreement by the Secretary of State. This needs to be a simple account of what consultation took place and when. It is probably wise to ensure that governors and staff are not quoted in local media giving views about their own school’s conversion before or during the period of consultation. The decision either way should certainly not be pre-empted by the headteacher or chair of governors – let alone by the local authority or the proposed sponsor. It is best if the consultation is even-handed and represents accurately, if not in fine detail, any points that have been raised on both sides of the argument. Consultees must be given both appropriate information and time to respond. Arrangements to collect responses must, of course, be accurate and accessible. The list of those to be consulted should probably be drawn up by the governing body. Where church schools are directly or indirectly involved, for example, local diocesan authorities should be consulted.

Thanks to the lobbying of the National Governors’ Association at the time, the 2010 Act is quite unambiguous about the purpose of consultation. Section 5.2 states: “The consultation must be on the question of whether the school should be converted into an Academy”6.

None of this advice, and not much of the legal requirements, appears to have been taken on board by the various authorities involved in the conversion of Castle School. Indeed, as Kulz shows: “these consultations have been criticised as toothless exercises. Former Secretary of State Michael Gove wielded this power with great controversy, publicly overriding parental opposition to conversions. Despite ninety-four per cent of parents voting ‘no’ to the conversion of a London primary school, it was taken over by the Harris Federation”7. With the senior minister of the DfE openly defying the spirit of the law, local politicians and officers were given the green light to follow suit, sometimes crossing over into blatant illegality.

What follows is a description of a procedure that provides a handbook for anyone wanting to silence opposing, or even merely questioning voices.

How To Block A Consultation

The key figures organising the conversion of Castle School were committed to its being done with the maximum efficiency and the minimum disruption. Those who opposed it – the governors, staff and parents – were critically hampered by a lack of information regarding their responsibilities. It seems that the governors did not formally agree to call on any experts or legal advisers except the Somerset County Council governance adviser who, of course, was employed by the organisation whose policy was to convert without delay any of their maintained schools placed in special measures.

So the field was left clear for the LA advisers, the DfE academy broker, and the officers of the Redstart Learning Partners...