The new school rules

Anne McElvoy cites the Sutton Trust Chain Effects report in an Economist article on academies.

THE King Solomon Academy, a squat modern building overshadowed by social-housing tower blocks in central London, feels like the kind of inner-city school that reformers dream of creating. The mood is attentive, the walls festooned with quotes enjoining pupils to aim high.

The school, set up in 2007, is run by ARK, one of the charities, regulated by the government, that are reshaping English education. King Solomon says it wants to be “transformational” and, so far, it has succeeded. Fully 93% of the school’s 16-year-olds gained five good pass grades in core subjects in their GCSE exams this year, compared with 64% in the capital as a whole, even though three-fifths of its pupils come from homes with low incomes.

The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition came to power aiming to improve England’s dismal showing in global education rankings (it came 26th in the recent maths-centred round of PISA tests run by the OECD). It swiftly embarked on a mission to expand the conversion of state schools into so-called academies. The last Labour government began the project in 2002, creating non-selective schools financed from the public purse but outside the control of local authorities, which for decades had presided over a patchy system of state secondary schools, known as comprehensives……

The good news for the reformers is that, where academies are well-run, the results vindicate the argument for greater freedoms. Two new pieces of research, tracking pupils from schools which converted to academies before 2010, suggest that more freedoms for those who run schools can indeed raise results for both richer pupils and those from less well-off backgrounds (an important point, since many opponents on the left fret that academies attract middle-class parents and neglect the less privileged).

A report entitled “Chain Effect” for the Sutton Trust, which promotes social mobility, found that in the five leading academy chains, the proportion of poor pupils achieving five good GCSEs is at least 15 percentage points higher than the average for similar pupils in non-academy schools.

A separate study by Professor Machin and Andrew Eyles at the London School of Economics identified “beneficial effects” in schools becoming academies. Rates of improvement were also faster for more autonomous schools than for general secondary schools, and the biggest improvements were in schools converting from comprehensives, rather than from other types, such as church schools. “Autonomy”, the authors conclude, “effectively acts to facilitate school improvement.” Additional research shows that 43% of pupils entitled to free school meals in comprehensives that did not convert to the academy model gained five good GCSEs. That rose to 45% in those that did convert—a small increase, but achieved rapidly.

Alas, this promising picture describes only about half of the schools set free from local authorities. There are strikingly large differences in the performances of academy chains. One, the E-ACT chain which ran over 30 schools, was ordered to hand ten back to central government control earlier this year. Sir David Bell, the most senior civil servant in charge of the school reforms in 2007-10, now vice-chancellor of Reading University, thinks larger chains can acquire some of the same problems that local authorities had, “being too big to have oversight over what happens in individual schools and too bureaucratic”. Hopes that big providers might offer consistent quality at scale have faded, to be replaced by an acknowledgment that keeping chains small or medium-sized may prove more reliable……

Read the full article here. Read the Economist leader on academies here.

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The new school rules

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