The Guardian view on multi-academy trusts: disputes over school budgets point to deeper issues
The resignation of a Cambridgeshire headteacher following a dispute about the amount of money spent on overheads by the trust that runs his secondary school has placed in the public domain a source of tension more frequently discussed behind closed doors. Top-slicing of school budgets by multiacademy trusts is the way this governance model works. The trusts pool money taken from school budgets to fund themselves and the services they provide. These include IT, premises management and, increasingly, centralised curriculum development.
With school budgets under intense pressure, and nearly half of multi-academy trusts in England in deficit because their income has not risen in line with costs, it is not surprising that negotiations are causing friction. Last year, plans by the multi-academy trust Reach2 to pool funding and reserves were referred to mediation after unions representing teachers and other staff objected.
Mark Patterson said he was leaving Hinchingbrooke school because of “significant concerns” about Aces Academies Trust’s management. The amount taken from his school rose to £770,000 in 2021-22 from £383,206 the year before. The trust has rejected what it called “serious accusations” and said expansion plans lay behind the dispute. The 4% of Hinchingbrooke’s budget allocated to Aces is a smaller proportion than that top-sliced by other smaller trusts; research shows that 7.4% is typical.
It is not difficult to see why the ambitions of a trust and a school might conflict. But by giving up on efforts to make the academy governance model work better overall, ministers have let schools down. Trusts have not lived up to expectations. While some of their schools are very successful, they are overrepresented at the bottom as well as the top of league tables. That’s why the government’s 2022 white paper promised to let councils set up their own trusts, and proposed a new minimum of 10 schools. Had a bill made it to the Commons, Labour would have tried to amend it to give councils more power over admissions.
It is a good thing that the dud, poorly evidenced policy of compulsory academisation was dropped. But by abandoning the bill, the Conservatives also revealed just how few ideas they have got about schools. Reform of school governance lay at the heart of the academies programme. The theory was that old-style governing bodies, with their mixture of parents, staff and other stakeholders, were not doing a professional enough job. Academy trusts, it was thought, would harness a wider range of expertise, crucially bringing on board the private sector. Their schools were meant to outperform the old maintained ones with their local authority ties.
The hope turned out to be false. Education policy has not been helped by the fact that the Conservatives have burned through six secretaries of state in three years. After less than 18 months in post, Gillian Keegan looks like an old hand. But with 79% of secondary
schools and 37% of primaries in England now run as academies, the issue of governance has not gone away. The excessive pay of some trust executives and poor outcomes of some chains, as well as tensions over funding, require policymakers’ focused attention. Inexplicably, Conservative ministers refused Ofsted’s request to inspect trusts as well as schools. Labour has made this its policy. But it will take more than a few visits from inspectors to sort out the unaddressed problems of the academisation experiment.