The Great City Academy Fraud

Francis Beckett

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN:
  9780826495136
• eBook ISBN:
  9781441152558
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This highly controversial and compelling book exposes the government's city academies project: the ways in which companies and rich individuals have been persuaded to sponsor academies, their real reasons for sponsoring them, the lies that have been told in support of the academies project, and the disastrous effect it will have on Britain's schools. It brings together existing research, by the author and others, and adds new research, to build up a picture of a deeply flawed idea, which is educationally disastrous and inherently corrupt. In his provocative yet fascinating tour de force, Francis Beckett pulls the plug on the most high-profile educational scam for decades.

1

From Colleges to Academies

It all looked so hopeful in 1997. We had a new Government under a Prime Minister who told us that his priorities were ‘Education, education, education.’ Failing inner-city schools were at last to be given the money and the opportunity to start again.

Ten years after Tony Blair made us that promise, we are looking at the wreckage of a failed and discredited policy. How could something so obviously right have gone so horribly wrong? Why has a policy designed to make a better society become a byword for sleaze and political double-talk? How could we have ended up closing some good and tolerant schools, and often replacing them with bad and bigoted ones? How could the policy have become a weapon with which to trash the lives and careers of some of Britain’s best and most dedicated teachers? And is there a darker purpose to it all?

This book is an attempt to answer these questions.

City academies, their sponsors and their principals, feel misunderstood and misused. ‘The media is always very suspicious -there have been a lot of intemperate criticisms of academies’ says Lesley King of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust, the quango that promotes them. They feel they are doing their best to do good, and getting only brickbats in return. Most of them are there because they understand that education is the route out of poverty. They think children have been let down by bad and under-resourced schools, and they want to be part of a national movement which will change all that. They do not think the academy model is perfect, but it is the one the politicians have offered. The politicians tell them that anyone who opposes academies must also oppose having better schools for poor children. And they blame the messengers – the commentators like me – who tell them that the model has fatal design faults. But it is the politicians who have defrauded and betrayed them.

To understand what happened, we need to go back to October 1986, when the then Conservative Education Secretary, Kenneth Baker, announced the creation of a ‘pilot network of 20 city technology colleges (CTCs) in urban areas’ and appealed for potential sponsors in the business community, the churches and existing educational trusts’. Sponsors would own their CTCs, and run them, employing all staff. The Government would pay all running costs, but sponsors would contribute to the initial capital required to set them up.

If we look at the above brief sketch of the CTC idea from our vantage point two decades later, one thing screams out at us. These details are exactly the same as those of the city academy idea. In all essentials, city academies are the same as CTCs. So when the Labour Government arrived in 1997, it should have been able to look at the history of CTCs to see if the idea worked.

Here is what it would have found.

At first Mr Baker wanted sponsors to put up £8 million towards capital costs, but it rapidly became clear that they were not going to put up anything like that amount of money, and the figure was quietly forgotten. Mr Baker made it known that he would accept £2 million and be grateful. The Government would happily stump up the rest, on average about £10 million. But even though the Government was now paying most of the capital costs and all the running costs, the sponsor would still own the CTC.

As it happens, £2 million was the figure New Labour decided on for city academies 14 years later, though of course £2 million was worth far less by then, and was a far smaller proportion of the total cost. And, as Mr Baker had done, New Labour was to find that it was more than most sponsors wanted to pay. But we run ahead of ourselves.

In order to attract sponsors, Mr Baker said that business people were welcome to name their colleges after themselves or their companies, and that they could dictate the curriculum. It was to be the ultimate sponsorship opportunity: to be known as a company which cared about education, to have your name and logo engraved on the hearts of millions of schoolchildren, and even to ensure that they were taught the skills your company required.

Yet it was not enough. IBM, ICI, the banks, Marks & Spencer and other household-name companies all said no. Mrs Thatcher herself had to be called in to try to twist the arms of top business people, personally telephoning the chairman of BP BP’s then educational adviser Jeremy Nicholls told me why, even then, the company resisted the Prime Minister s blandishments:

Companies with a strong tradition of local community support and partnership have tended not to support CTCs. The problem is that companies want to make friends in the communities where they operate. They do not support high-profile initiatives which are seen by many people in the community as divisive. There was a feeling that CTCs were going to focus a lot of resources on a few children. We want UK pic to invest in the future of all its children.

We were also unhappy about the confusion of an education agenda with a political agenda. The country needs to find means of educating more people to a higher level. The taxpayer at large is the proper person to do that, rather than the BP shareholder.

Try re-reading that, replacing ‘CTCs’ with ‘city academies’. It sounds remarkably contemporary. And Mr Nicholls’ judgements are as valid today as they were then.

So CTC sponsors tended to be smaller companies, headed by the sort of businessman whose admirers call entrepreneurial, and whose enemies call him nothing at all unless their lawyers are present. Mr Michael Ashcroft was chairman of Bermuda-registered security services company ADT and a guarantor of the Conservative Party’s overdraft, and paid just £1 million to sponsor the ADT city technology college in Wandsworth, which his company owns and controls to this day, though the taxpayer pays the bills. In January 1990 he made it clear how his business interests and Wandworth Council’s politics could be made to benefit, in a private letter to council leader Sir Paul Beresford:

From a political point of view the higher the profile that can be given to the creation of the CTC concept here in Wandsworth the better, and no doubt this will be of much help to your local Conservative candidates for the May 1990 elections.

I have therefore suggested to the Prime Minister and Kenneth Baker that it would be helpful if a small ceremony could be held on or around 2 April 1990 so that the college can be formally handed over … to the new CTC Trust. The Prime Minister’s presence would of course guarantee publicity.

You might wonder whether a tobacco company ought to be sponsoring a school, but British American Tobacco’s money was gratefully accepted in Middlesbrough – a town which has again found itself the centre of controversy with its city academies, as we will see.

In Lewisham, south London, the sponsor, the Haberdashers Company, did not actually part with a single penny. Since it was already running a state school on the site, it ‘gave’ the site to the new CTC. The CTC Trust valued the site in the region of £2 million. This arrangement, as we shall find, took an even more bizarre turn with the advent of city academies.

Sometimes even creative accounting was not enough. Brighton property speculator Ivor Reveres aborted CTC in Sussex triggered a National Audit Office investigation after it was discovered that he had paid £2.3 million for the site and charged the taxpayer £2.5 million for it. After Mr Revere’s withdrawal the Government was left with a disused Sussex school the value of which was declining. It was still unsold four years later, in 1993, and was costing £1,000 a week for Group 4 Security to look after it.

Labour quickly realized that the idea was a dud. Labour’s then education spokesman Jack Straw told the House of Commons: ‘No programme has been such a comprehensive and expensive failure … [It] is wasteful and wrong, so why does he [the Education Secretary] not scrap it altogether and immediately save £120 million, which could be spent on a crash programme of repairs and improvements, as we have demanded?’¹ He was horrified that the Government was spending many times as much money on each CTC pupil as on state school pupils.

He called Kenneth Baker ‘the architect of the lethal combination of city technology colleges, opting out, the local management of schools, an inflexible national curriculum, and the constant denigration of the teaching profession which has brought the service so low’, Every one of these has continued under the Government of which Mr Straw has been a member since 1997. I’m not aware that Mr Straw has made any protest at all.

He added: Is not the truth of the city technology programme that financial controls have been so inadequate that Ministers and donors have been able to play fast and loose with public funds?’

By July 1990 Mr Straw was able to point out that only a fraction of the private sector money which had been promised had actually been delivered. Exactly the same has happened with academies, though you will search in vain for any mention of the fact from Mr Straw.

Perhaps his deadliest attack was a 1990 press release in which he said that sponsors were ‘second-order companies whose directors were interested in political leverage or honours’. In the case of city academies, we have had to discover this for ourselves, without Mr Straws assistance.

In 1989, Margaret Hodge, the Labour chair of the Association of London Authorities, said that the next Labour Government should return all the CTCs to local authority control. Ms Hodge has been a New Labour luminary throughout the life of the New Labour Government, and has even served a stint in the DfES.

‘Pupils’, said Mr Baker, ‘will span the full range of ability.’ But almost in the same breath he added: ‘They will be selected on the basis of their aptitude, their readiness to take advantage of the type of education offered in CTCs, and their parents’ commitment to full-time education up to the age of 18 and to the CTC curriculum and ethos.’

In practice, at first, this allowed CTCs to interview children with both parents, and, so long as they selected from across all ability bands, they could choose the children they thought would be easy to teach, and whose parents were likely to cooperate and not make waves.

A businessman, Cyril Taylor, was appointed to head the CTC Trust. Today, now Sir Cyril (knighted for services to education), he heads the Trust which promotes city academies.

I was shown around the first CTC, Kingshurst, near Birmingham. The spacious classrooms, full of the latest technology, would have turned a teacher in most state schools green with envy. The brochure was glossy and expensive. Nearby stood crumbling, decaying, cash-starved schools for the pupils who could not get into Kingshurst. Its sponsor, the automotive company GKN, had a manager in the school to advise the head and the teachers on teaching and curriculum matters, though he had no experience of education.

Its first head teacher, Valerie Bragg, later decamped to run a private education company, Three Es. Under her successor, Ann Jones, Kingshurst is going to become a city academy, though this will not require any changes, just the ability to absorb some more public money which state schools need far more urgently. Kingshurst concentrates on vocational subjects, especially engineering, and Ms Jones insists that the fact that the sponsors are engineering companies is entirely coincidental.

That was to be a mark of CTCs, as it is of city academies: that they were to teach vocational subjects. Cyril Taylor spelled it out with a characteristic directness and honesty which is absent from New Labour statements about academies. ‘Employers are telling me that the schools do not teach the skills that they require. In the CTCs that they fund, they will ensure that the correct skills are taught.’ Mr Baker admitted that such things as arts subjects might suffer in the CTCs. These were to be hothouses for the worker bees of industry.

The last CTC to be authorized, in April 1991, was Kingswood in Bristol. After the by now familiar scramble for a bit of private sector cash to make the thing look respectable, the chairman of Cable and Wireless and former Tory Party chairman Lord Young stumped up the required £2 million. The Government gratefully handed over the other £8 million. Avon County Council’s deputy director of education, Edward Watson, bitterly contrasted that £8 million for capital spending on the 900 children at Kingswood with the £4.5 million which he had for capital spending on the county’s other 150,000 children. With the extra money, he said, all secondary schools in Kingswood could be fully repaired, all improvements they asked for could be done, all could have a new science laboratory, and there would be enough left over to give all primary schools an extra nursery class for a year.

Mr Watson was unlucky. If he had been able to hold out for just a few months more, he would never have had a CTC on his patch. For by then, while a new Education Secretary, Kenneth Clarke, was blustering about the success of CTCs, he was actually in headlong retreat. Kingswood was the fifteenth and last CTC. The very next one to be proposed, in Barnet, north London, was quietly vetoed by Mr Clarke, and no more were considered. This is the nearest politicians ever get to saying ‘Sorry, that policy was a dud.’

But nine years later, in March 2000, David Blunkett, the New Labour Education Secretary, announced the revival of the policy, and called it city academies.

By then, New Labour had been in power for three years, and was not looking as though it was minded to change much of Conservative education policy. It had even had a go at getting private sector sponsorship, with Mr Blunkett’s ill-fated Education Action Zones (EAZs), launched in 1998. If the history of CTCs had not taught New Labour that the private sector was not keen on putting loads of money into state education, the searing experience of EAZs should have done so.

Mr Blunkett obtained glitzy presentations for his EAZs from 47 local consortia at a total cost to the taxpayer of just under £1 million. Each one had to show him that they could raise money from private enterprise to fund an EAZ, designed to raise standards of the schools within it. If they could convince him of this, he would bung them £750,000 a year for three years.

So, of course, they set out to convince him. He made it as easy as he could. He said that business contributions could be ‘in kind’ – perhaps the services of a superannuated executive to sit on committees.

And this is the sort of thing he got.

North-east Derbyshire’s consortium said that the local NatWest bank is ‘unfortunately not in a position to be able to offer any financial support’ but will be glad to continue its help in kind. So, for example, more head teachers would be offered the opportunity afforded to John Young, who ‘has recently benefited from a teacher placement with Paul Adcock, Nat West’s area business manager’.

The Post Office offered ‘talks on professional skills for teachers/school staff/governors’ and ‘telephone/customer answering techniques (interpersonal skills) for students’. It has future call centre staff to think about.

At Ellesmere Port, Associated Octel offered ‘to make the facilities of the Learning Centre open to local schools, providing hi-tech learning opportunities’. This was calculated as a £70,000 donation. The local branch of Barclays Bank offered to send someone to sit on the ‘forum’ that controls the zone and asked for volunteers from its staff to sit on school governing bodies. It also offered ‘mentoring/contribution to training of staff especially regarding banking and financial matters’ and work placements. The bid valued the Barclays contribution at £30,000.

A Bradford company allowed two managers to give occasional advice, and Bradford’s grateful Action Zone called that £5,000 a year. The Blue Planet Aquarium in Ellesmere Port offered half-price entrance for Zone pupils: there, that’s another £12,500 donation.

In Newham, east London, the construction giants Mowlem and Laing agreed to take Action Zone pupils to their offices and tell them about how splendid it was to work in construction (an in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Also available from Continuum
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 From Colleges to Academies
• 2 Blunkett Throws Money at Academies
• 3 Sponsors in Ermine
• 4 How They Tore Up the Laws on Schools
• 5 Faith in Academies
• 6 A Learning Curve in West London
• 7 Islington Feels the Wrath of Downing Street
• 8 The Schools that Fail to Fail
• 9 Selecting Staff, Sponsors and Students
• 10 But Does It Work?
• 11 Where Do We Go from Here?
• Appendix 1 Academies Open as at September 2006
• Appendix 2 Timeline
• Appendix 3 Academies that Are in Development
• Index
• eCopyright