The academy dream is in freefall. Schools should not have to pick up the pieces

Eight years have passed since the coalition government empowered schools to free themselves of sinister-sounding local council “control” and become academies. Politicians sold a vision of a world in which our children’s education would instead be managed by “charitable trusts”.

The plan was to extend the “big society” – a utopian vision in which citizen groups would run public services, from local libraries to police units. But less than a decade later, and those have-a-go heroes have become walkaway washouts, as charity after charity is pulling the plug and handing back its schools.

In the past fortnight alone we have learned that the Collaborative Academies Trust will walk away from eight academies in the south of England; the Schools Company Trust, which ran three pupil-referral units for excluded students, will lose all of its schools; the Salford Academy Trust, a joint venture between the local council, college and university, is handing back its four academies.

With the Schools Company Trust, the accounts for 2016 show that the school had overspent by almost ￡1m in just one year. Accounts for last year have yet to be filed (they were due in January).

Those figures are not even that unusual. The collapse of the Perry Beeches free school network in Birmingham occurred after ￡1.3m was paid into a company owned by a governor for “executive services” and, from there, a second salary was paid to its chief executive. The schools were left with ￡1.5m worth of debt.

Then there is the collapsed Wakefield City Academies Trust, which sucked up more than ￡1m of reserves from the 21 schools it took over, before tossing them back to the government once the cash was depleted.

In the meantime, the trust’s chief executive was paid more than ￡80,000 for 15 weeks’ work and procured almost ￡440,000 worth of services from his own private IT and clerking companies.

None of this was illegal. There are no caps on chief executive pay and only poorly policed rules on buying from related companies. As the trust pointed out at the time, it followed all the rules and said the contracts were the “best value” available.

Or what about the Bolton Wanderers free school, which paid its football-club namesake more than ￡300,000 a year for rent of a classroom in an otherwise empty stadium, but was punted back to government with a ￡380,000 debt and a ￡200,000 pensions deficit. The school has now closed.

No one in a position of responsibility has paid a price for these collapses. Ministers are ignoring the issue. The Department for Education refuses to publicly release its investigations. Almost no money has been recovered. Instead, the brunt falls on the communities whose children are left in impoverished schools and on the leaders of other academy trusts, who are now expected to swoop in and pick up the pieces.

If there’s a relief, it’s that the government has waived much of the debt so as not to saddle those trusts willing to take on the orphaned schools.

But this is not extra cash. It will be taken from elsewhere. Last month, the government quietly scrapped a fund helping 11-year-olds who were behind in their maths and literacy. Perhaps that will cover one of the collapses.

Resolving the problem is difficult. Harsh penalties could put off good leaders from taking over challenging schools, and charities law limits the liability of individuals to ￡10.

A strict clampdown on pay would help, especially a fixed limit on the salaries of chief executives. The government could also place a lock on schools’ assets, so they could not be sucked out within the first few years of operation, and insist that full details of investigations are released so everyone can learn from prior mistakes.

But, most of all, ministers need to accept that their plan for a “big society” has not worked. The only have-a-go heroes we need now are politicians with the guts to stop it.

For further information please visit https://www.academicis.co.uk/ac/the-academy-dream-is-in-freefall-schools-should-not-have-to-pick-up-the-pieces/