Academies and Free Schools

At schools across England, there is a rising tide of anger and concern among parents and teachers. Amid accusations of government bullying, as a result of the 2010 Academies Act, hundreds of schools are being transformed into independent academies that operate outside the control of local authorities. The government says the change, a historic shift away from the comprehensive education system, is for the better. But critics argue it is more about creeping privatisation than improving standards.

Chorlton High School in Greater Manchester is one of many where there is active resistance to the process. Unlike some low ranking schools, which are being forced to become an academy by the Department for Education (DfE), the governors at high achieving Chorlton want to voluntarily convert. They believe that because of the current financial climate, becoming an academy would “best protect the nature and ethos” of the school.

However, parents and community activists have formed a campaign group to oppose the move, which they argue would leave the school unaccountable to local people and could open it up to for-profit providers in the future.

“We’ve got a very good school, why change it for the Tories?” says 55-year-old Mark Krantz, a former teacher whose son studied at Chorlton High. “Without having a ballot of the community which the school serves, they don’t have the right to give our school away and turn it into an academy forever. The school’s been there for over 50 years; how can it be right that a small group of governors decide that they believe this is what should happen?”

As part of its “education revolution”, the coalition wants all schools to have the chance to become academies. Of the 3127 maintained secondary schools in England, as of 1 February, around half – 1580 – had converted to academy status.

Receiving funding directly from central government and not local authorities like comprehensive schools, academies have greater freedom and control over their finances and do not have to follow the national curriculum. Some can be sponsored by charities or businesses, which can choose the headmaster of the school and have a say over what is taught.

Controversial so-called “free schools” can also be set up by groups of parents, teachers, charities, trusts or religious groups, which then become academies and receive central government funding. 24 free schools opened in 2011 and a further 72 are planned to open in September 2012 and beyond.

One, the Phoenix Free School, is set to be established in Oldham next year. Run entirely by ex-military servicemen and women, it will attempt to instil “martial values" in children, using a mix of unqualified and qualified teachers who the school’s ex-army cofounder says will be told to discard “every liberal idea taught in teacher-training courses.”

“Putting troops onto our streets may control the symptoms of social breakdown. But putting troops into our schools would do far more to address the underlying problems,” says Tim Knox, director of right-wing think-tank the Centre for Policy Studies, which is backing the Phoenix school. “In particular, ex-servicemen and women can provide the role models and sense of discipline that is so often lacking in inner city schools.”

But teachers groups are staunchly against the introduction of free schools and academies, questioning the merit of allowing untrained educators and companies with vested interests to exert influence over children.

“For a young person to develop fully, they need to have a really broad rounded curriculum – not something that’s narrow and aimed at one particular job or industry, which is what we’re seeing,” says Avis Gilmore, north west secretary of the National Union of Teachers. “We are opposed to the whole process because we see it is dismantling the state education system.”

There is widespread anxiety that the Academies Act is leading to what is in effect privatisation. Although the coalition has given assurances that it will not open up schools to for-profit companies, it refuses to rule out doing so in the future. Already, firms such as Barclays Bank have sponsored schools – raising questions about what they as businesses stand to benefit.

“It’s anything but privatisation through the back door – they’re parking the tanks on the lawn,” says Alasdair Smith, spokesman for the Anti-Academies Alliance. “They’re blowing local authorities away so lots of schools feel that they have no choice but to become self governing academies or to join chains.

“It’s exactly the same as what’s being done to the NHS. There’s no mandate for this. What you’re seeing are corporate raiders lining up to take over our schools – that’s the bottom line. If you want to improve schools you’ve got to focus on the quality of teaching and learning. It’s not about changing structures and governance.”

The rapid boom in school conversions has proved costly for some councils. In Yorkshire, at least 16 schools tied to private finance initiative deals are applying or have become academies, according to the Yorkshire Post. This could mean the region’s councils are forced to pay millions for schools they no longer run or own.

Last month, governors of Coleraine Park Primary in Tottenham, north London, became the latest in a line of schools forced to become an academy by the DfE following a poor Ofsted report. Coleraine was made to accept sponsorship by the Harris Federation, a charity chaired by Tory peer Lord Harris, which runs a chain of academy schools. The charity is not-for-profit, though notably one of its directors was paid over £240,000 in 2010.

“Coleraine’s governors feel that the Secretary of State has disempowered them without due regard for their role and has in fact bullied them into a decision in a way that nobody wants,” the governors wrote in a disgruntled statement. “We believe that handing it over to the Harris Federation will not necessarily improve standards more than they would have done on the current trajectory.”

Downhills Primary, also in Tottenham, is faced with a similar predicament. Because it has been placed in special measures by schools inspectorate Ofsted, which means it is underperforming, the DfE is able to compel it to become an academy under the powers granted by the Academies Act. The school’s head, Leslie Church, recently resigned after coming into conflict with education secretary Michael Gove – but parents are vowing to fight the conversion in his absence.

“At our school the children are happy, the children are learning and I don’t have concerns,” says Wendy Sugarman, 44, whose eight-year-old son attends Downhills. “There is some really good teaching going on. The Ofsted report was very, very harsh.

“I just think that the whole thing stinks. When you look into the academy chains, it’s all about money. As parents we chose to send our children to the school because it had certain qualities, and I worry that the ethos of the school will be destroyed by an academy chain. I feel that they have no grounding or experience working with Haringey, our borough.”

Fears about the degree to which academy status can improve schools were confounded in February after Birkdale High School in Southport was deemed “inadequate with special measures”, the lowest ranking, four months into its academy status.

“Progress is inadequate and students do not achieve as well as they should,” Ofsted wrote in its report. “The failure of senior leaders to improve teaching quality and tackle inappropriate behaviour has contributed to a far less favourable picture of provision and outcomes than at the time of the previous inspection.”

Outsourcing Accountability: Privatisation and Freedom of Information

Since it was introduced in 2005, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) has helped expose a wide range of scandals. It has uncovered MPs exploiting their taxpayer-funded expenses system, child abuse in Northern Ireland as well as the scale of civilian deaths in the Afghan war. The Act, which is based upon the principle that the public has a “right to know” information contained in government records, has become an important means by which power can be held to account.

But freedom of information as we know it could be under serious threat. In towns and cities across the country, there are rapid, expansive changes taking place. As the government implements the biggest public spending cuts in a generation, many public services are struggling to survive. From Manchester to Devon, libraries, care homes, schools and even hospital wards are faced with a very real prospect of closure. What this means is that, almost inevitably, we are set to see control and ownership of public services being handed over to the private sector on an unprecedented scale.

The FOIA, in its current form, can only be used to gain information from public bodies “wholly funded” by public money, such as the police force or local councils. Private companies not owned by public money, even if they are providing key public services such as care provision, are not bound by the Act. Therefore, as more and more of our services become privatised, freedom of information is likely to diminish.

According to freedom of information campaigner, author and journalist Heather Brooke, this poses a serious problem for the future.

“We’re going to see increasing privatisation of what were public services, and there is a danger that because they’ll be privatised they won’t have the same accountability that they had when they were overseen by public bodies,” she says. “In principle I don’t have a problem with privatisation; my problem is when public money or policymaking or public decisions are outsourced, there’s no way for the public to hold that to account.”

The coalition government expects that as the public sector slowly disappears and the state shrinks, privately owned companies will step in to fill the void. Journalists and citizens will still be able to request information about specific private contracts if they have been paid for by a public body – such as when a council contracts a private company to provide a service – but they cannot make direct FOI requests to the company or ask for information relating to any other matters. The implications of this are potentially huge.

“It is a matter of concern where functions are being removed from public authorities to private contractors,” says Maurice Frankel, director of the long running UK Campaign for Freedom of Information. “A vast range of information is going to be lost from public access.”

Frankel predicts that if the coalition’s plans to privatise elements of the NHS go ahead, GPs will have a right to access only partial information about the performance of contracted private healthcare providers. “If you want to know how many cases of reinfection occurred in the hospital, that’s not going to be covered by the individual GP’s contract,” he says. “The solution is to make the contractors themselves public authorities under the [FOI] Act.“

Across the housing sector, similar changes have already taken place. Private companies are now responsible for building most of the UK’s “affordable homes” – a role that up until the Thatcher era was carried out predominantly by councils using public funds. Often councils will now contract private developers as part of regeneration projects. Consequently, there has been a direct impact on transparency and accountability.

Researching a story on a regeneration project in New Broughton, Salford for Big Issue in the North earlier this year, I encountered firsthand the impact of privatisation on freedom of information. After a significant statistic was quoted to me by a public relations (PR) firm employed by private developer Countryside Properties, I asked to see its origin. Following a lengthy exchange of emails, however, my request was refused. The survey was “confidential and not in the public domain,” I was told. The PR firm would allow me to see snippets of the survey, but not the full thing; they wanted to reveal the favourable statistics, but nothing else.

The government’s plans to create new ‘free schools’ – schools that can be started by businesses, parents, teachers or other groups – have also caused transparency concerns.

Jane Eades, treasurer of campaign group the Anti-Academies Alliance, was refused information about free schools after submitting an FOI request to the Department for Education last year.She believes part of the problem is that a charity called the New Schools Network (NSN) has been set up to help fund free schools. The NSN has received £500,000 from the government, and anyone wishing to set up a school can apply to it for funding. But as it is a charity, it is exempt from the FOIA.

“The Government have been very cunning in the way they have set up the free schools process,” Eades says. “Unless the group [the NSA] publicise what they are doing, there is no local consultation or information. In other words, the whole deal seems to be very secretive.”

Such instances could become commonplace if privatisation is to spread across the public sector. Yet prime minister David Cameron maintains that the coalition government aspires to become “one of the most transparent governments in the world”. In recent weeks, for instance, the government has revealed plans to somewhat strengthen and widen the powers of the FOIA. Under the changes proposed in the new Protection of Freedoms Bill, some organisations previously exempt from freedom of information requests would be included. Bodies performing “functions of a public nature” such as the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) and the Advertising Standards Authority are among those who would be made to adhere to FOI legislation.

Freedom of information campaigners have welcomed these changes; however, although the Freedoms Bill widens the scope of the FOIA, it still fails to address the issue of privatisation. While on the one hand the government is strengthening the ability of citizens to gain information from public bodies, on the other, by privatising public services, they are reducing the amount of information that is freely available. Whether intentionally or not, the coalition is outsourcing accountability.

According to the Ministry of Justice (MoJ), the arm of government responsible for freedom of information policy, the FOIA will soon be reviewed to ensure it remains an effective means by which people hold the government to account. But the speed and scale of the government’s rapidly implemented privatisation agenda seems to have already caught the MoJ off-guard.

When questioned about the potentially regressive impact of privatisation on freedom of information, an MoJ spokesperson responded: “We have to strike a balance between our commitment to increasing transparency and that of reducing the regulatory burden on business. We do not consider it necessary to extend the Act to bodies that provide public services under contract at present.”

Meanwhile, the Information Commissioners Office – the independent authority set up to “uphold information rights in the public interest” – pointed to a statement made by Commissioner Christopher Graham in January.

“It would be perverse if by going for alternative provision of services – privatisation, contracting out, looking at new and imaginative alternative ways of delivering public services – we suddenly found that we are giving important public functions to authorities that are not within the FOI Act and they became less accountable," Graham said in an interview with the Guardian newspaper. “We've got to think through the implications; we can't be so starry-eyed that we can't see the downside. There is a potential for services to become less transparent and less accountable.”

For Brooke, who won a landmark High Court judgement in 2008 forcing the disclosure of MPs expenses, the only real solution is to expand the provisions of the FOIA further. “What I would like to see is a change in the Freedom of Information Act,” she says.

“A better situation would be if it was about the criteria, about how much funding does that organisation receive from the public or are they providing a public service. If they are doing one of those two things then they should fall under the purview of being a public body for the purposes of the FOIA. We’ve definitely got to see some kind of change to the law."

This article appeared originally in Issue No.871 of Big Issue in the North.