Union leaders have accused the government of relying on “badly flawed” evidence to justify its plans for all schools in England to join academy trusts.
The National Education Union (NEU) met the education secretary, Nadhim Zahawi, on Wednesday to challenge him over evidence used to support the government’s drive for full academisation by 2030, announced in the schools white paper earlier this week.
Describing it as a “con job”, the NEU said the evidence cited in the government’s supporting document, The case for a fully trust-led system, published alongside the white paper on Monday, was “extremely weak” and potentially “misleading”.
Academies are state-funded schools with higher degrees of autonomy in governance, use of resources and curriculum. The government said it wants all schools to either have become academies or be in the process of joining a multi-academy trust (Mat) by 2030, to “help transform underperforming schools and deliver the best possible outcomes for children”.
The NEU said, however, there was no evidence to support the government’s claims. On the contrary, it said its own analysis of Ofsted judgments indicated that schools that join Mats are less likely to improve and more likely to fall back.
According to the union’s research, local authority-maintained primary schools previously judged outstanding by Ofsted are more likely to retain that rating when re-inspected than other types of schools – 30% compared with just 7% of primaries in Mats.
“Shockingly”, if an outstanding primary school in a Mat is transferred to another Mat in a process known as re-brokering, 0% retain their outstanding status, while only 12% of good or better local authority-maintained primary schools fall to less than good at their next inspection, compared with 35% of primaries in Mats.
The Department for Education (DfE) roundly rejected the NEU’s criticisms. “The claims made are incorrect and based upon selective data, misrepresenting our published evidence.
“We have a decade of evidence that academy trusts can transform underperforming schools. More than seven out of 10 schools that have become academies due to underperformance now have a good or outstanding Ofsted rating, compared to about one in 10 of the local authority-maintained schools they replaced,” a spokesperson said.
“We want all schools to be part of a strong academy trust so they can benefit from the trust’s support in everything from teacher training, curriculum, financial planning and inclusivity towards children with additional needs, to excellent behaviour and attendance cultures.”
But Kevin Courtney, NEU joint general secretary, said the union’s analysis made a nonsense of the government’s drive towards full academisation in the name of raising standards. “It demonstrates that there is no compelling reason for a school to join a trust. It also provides strong evidence against the re-brokering of schools from one Mat to another.
“Nadhim Zahawi says he wants to be driven by evidence. He must respond to this evidence and must pause this ideological drive. Teachers and parents want the government to focus their efforts on supporting schools to improve and what works and to drop their ideological obsession with marketisation.”
The NEU also accused the DfE of “systematically misreporting” Ofsted ratings for many schools when building its case for academy trusts, claiming outstanding judgments for schools in Mats that were awarded when those schools were council maintained.
The union accused the DfE of using small samples in order to produce higher results for schools in Mats, and of failing to report information about pupil premium – additional funding for the most disadvantaged children – for these samples in a way that was “highly misleading”.
Previous research by the Education Policy Institute (EPI) and others found little difference between attainment outcomes of academies and local authority-maintained schools.
EPI’s head of analysis, Jon Andrews, said: “The ambition to move all schools into multi-academy trusts may be a necessary tidying up of the school landscape that has been left to fragment for over a decade, but it is not a silver bullet to improvement or equity.
“If the government is going to argue that full academisation is going to lead to an improvement in standards then we need a much better understanding of what it is that the highest performing trusts are doing that sets them apart from the rest.”