Academies are state-funded, non-fee-paying schools, which are independent of local authorities. Maintained schools are schools which receive funding and oversight from the local authority. Nationally, academies make up 80% of secondary schools, 40% of primary schools and 44% of special schools.

There is a similar picture in Hastings. Of 20 primary schools in Hastings, 15 are academies, and 5 are maintained. Of the 5 secondary schools in Hastings, 4 are academies. The three largest schools, all academies, Ark Alexandra Academy, Hastings Academy, and St Leonard’s academy, teach 95% of secondary school students in Hastings. This article will look to frame the thinking around academies and maintained schools. What are they, and what are the considerations when forming a judgement on their benefit to our town?

Differences in organisational structure

Some of the key differences between academies and maintained schools relate to their organisational structure at the top. Academies are run by ‘trusts’; education charities which are funded directly by the Department for Education to run state schools. There are two kinds of trust; single-academy trusts (SATs), which run just one school, or multi-academy trusts (MATs), which run more than one. MATs are important to understand: Nearly 90% of academies are run by multi-academy trusts, and in 2022, the government published a report entitled ‘The case for a fully trust-led system’, in which they set a date of 2030 for all schools to be part of, or in the process of joining, an MAT. 

At the very top of multi-academy trusts are two bodies: The members, and the board of trustees. The members’ primary responsibility is to hold the trustees to account. The trustees have a more hands-on role, responsible for the legal, financial and strategic performance of the trust. The trustees then generally appoint a local governing board, who works with the headteacher on the day-to-day running of each individual school. 

In Hastings and St Leonards, Ark Alexandra Academy is part of the Ark Schools MAT, which runs 38 schools across the UK, and Hastings and St Leonards Academies are part of the University of Brighton (UoB) MAT, which runs 15 schools. 

In contrast, maintained schools are overseen by the local authority, which is ultimately responsible for their performance, and can intervene in their management and governance. The local authority oversees a governing board for each school, responsible for overseeing the schools financial performance, vision, and appointing the headteacher. The local authority also nominates a representative to sit on the governing board, giving it an active presence within the structure of each individual school.

Two very different relationships to local government.

The presence of elected local councillors within the leadership structure of maintained schools means there is a secure thread which joins the residents of each community, and the leadership of the schools that serve them. The relationship between local authorities and academies, on the other hand, is wholly more tenuous; although the government advise local authorities to seek positive relationships with academies, there is no statutory obligation for any relationship to exist. Where a local authority has concerns about academy performance it must raise them directly with the Department for Education, a national body.

I had an online exchange with Josh Smedley, my former NASWT union representative at Ark Alexandra, about his experience trying to advocate for staff within an MAT. He said:

“Humanity, community and collegiality are quite often replaced by cold, faceless hierarchies after academisation. There is a discussion to be had about where power should lie in our schools – many decisions for Hastings children are being taken by people based in London, Birmingham or Brighton who have no connection to or understanding of the town. As a Union Rep, it was very difficult to work out who I should be shouting at – had they ever even visited the building? As they were modelled around corporations, there are vast layers of corporate management that unnecessarily intervene in the everyday practice of the classroom practitioners (who truly care about their students). Again – this is money being redirected away from students”.

To put this in context, Ark schools, the academy trust that runs Ark Alexandra, is run by a board of 10 trustees, led by CEO Lucy Heller. They are ultimately responsible for the running of 38 schools, and 28,000 students. To the parent of a child at an Ark school, a teacher or a student, Lucy Heller seems far away.

The academisation rationale

The rationale given for the expansion of academies boils down to the idea that Local Authorities had become inefficient and, bogged down in bureaucratic procedures, slow to innovate. Free from bureaucratic constraints of local government, they say, academies can position the best and the brightest in the most influential positions, and innovate responsively according to the latest in education research.  

In practise, this means academies choose their own curriculum (LA maintained schools have to follow the National Curriculum), staff pay and conditions (LA maintained schools have to adhere to the School Teachers Pay and Conditions Document), term dates, and can enact these wholesale changes quickly. 

The reason for the speed at which academies can enact these changes does relate to the lack of ties to local authority bureaucracy. LA maintained schools must adhere to due process; minutes of governing body meetings must be published and are open to public scrutiny, a list of bodies must be notified and sign off on proposals and decisions taken, proposals for changes must contain certain details. All this, the pro-academy camp says, takes time and resources away from the teachers who want to make quick and incisive decisions for the good of their students. By contrast, academy trust board of trustees can sign off on changes instantly, as, organised in the model of corporations and legally separate from the state, MATs are comparatively red-tape-less.

The other rationale often given for Multi-Academy trusts is that they can benefit from ‘economies of scale’; efficiencies gained when the size of the operation increases. As we know, MATs can be huge organisations. For example, some departments, such as Finance and Human Resources, can be centralised, so that, say, 3 staff can work across multiple schools, reducing the number of employees schools have to take on. In addition, some claim that as the central MAT trust board handling administrative tasks such as accounting and legality, senior management time is freed up. Finally, knowledge and best practise can be shared. Josh Smeddley attested to this as one of the silver-linings of MAT dominance; he said:  

“Academisation can pool scant resources so that change can be delivered at scale. I have no doubt that there is fantastic work being done by teachers in many Trusts up and down the country – Ark’s Greater Teacher Rubric [a set of criteria against which teacher trainees are assessed] for example is a fantastic resource through which teachers can meaningfully engage in conversations about their development; centralised resources can also reduce teacher workload”

My own experience resonates with this; as well as centrally planned resources, senior leaders from other, successful Ark schools would frequently visit or be temporarily placed at our school, as consultants on a particular area of improvement. They would share expertise and run training with staff in a way I found helpful, and felt the school as a whole benefitted from.

Importantly, the case for academies has been made in the context of an increasingly ‘marketised’ education system introduced in the late 80s. A basic description of this is: Schools would be incentivised to improve via a system in which schools are paid-per-pupil. Twinned with parent choice over where their children went to school, and Ofsted reports which brand schools with a single word ‘grade’, governments created an artificial ‘market’, where there was an economic (and existential) incentive to avoid the dreaded ‘inadequate’ grade and keep school numbers up to retain funding. This is not to say schools leaders are unmoved by other motivations like grades and student well-being, just that the system was designed to raise the heat on school leaders. Governments believed that, with the motivational architecture in place, school leaders should be unshackled to compete with each other to ever-greater heights.

A lack of transparency?

There is of course the flip side to lack of red tape; a lack of transparency and due process. A report by the House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts expressed concerns that academy trusts were ‘using public money to pay excessive salaries’, noting the difference between the average annual salary of an Academy headteacher (£92,000) and an LA maintained school headteacher (£88,000), and finding 102 instances of trustees being employed on salaries in excess of £150,000, which they declared ‘unjustifiably high’. The London School of Economics, in a separate report, note that MAT accounts, while having to be signed off by an external auditor, ‘do not provide a detailed account of how public money is spent’, and can ‘easily mask the financial decisions made by individual academies’. They have also reported on the ability for MATs to buy goods and services through ‘related parties’, parties with whom the trustees may have a personal connection. In 2015-16, deals of this kind were worth a total of £120 million’.

A lack of accountability?

Academies enter a funding agreement directly with the Secretary of State; a contract on the basis of which academies receive funding. The government claim this contract protects against financial mismanagement, since ‘The Education Funding Agency ensures compliance with a funding agreement to make sure that spend is securing better outcomes for pupils. Unlike local-authority schools, academies are regulated charities – so they prepare annual financial statements that are fully audited by an independent external auditor’. As well as agreements around finances, the funding agreement includes stipulations such as the requirement of a SEND provision, the requirement for all staff to have an enhanced DBS check, the requirement to provide school lunches, etc.

The other way academies are held to account is through Ofsted. Not only can a bad Ofsted report be a P45 moment for a headteacher, it can ruin the reputation of the school, result in a decline in student numbers, a loss of funding, and can precipitate an enforced change of governance. In my time as a teacher, the spectre of Ofsted always loomed large.

The performance of academies is also monitored, as of 2014, by civil servants, named Regional Directors (formally Regional School Commissioners), who among other powers, is explicitly tasked with intervening in underperforming schools, and hastening the transition of struggling maintained schools to academies.

A democratic deficit?

The government state that these Regional Directors have been empowered, in place of councils who are distracted with the other demands on local government, to monitor schools closely and to hold them to high standards. Yet some are concerned about the power Regional Directors wield, saying this represents a massive centralisation of power to the DfE, via unelected civil servants who operate without public scrutiny or democratic oversight.

The creation of Regional Directors has disempowered Local Government in other ways, too. Local authorities have a duty to ensure there are sufficient schools in their areas, but lacking any link to academies, have no direct power to do anything about it. Where decisions about opening, closing, expanding schools formally involved a public process led by local government, including notices, and the opportunity to object, this process is circumvented by MATs. These observations were made by West and Wolf (2018) in their report (Academies, the School System in England and a Vision for the Future). As stated above, academies being entirely free from local government, the link between resident and councillor as an avenue for school change is removed. 

There is also the convincing accusation that, despite academies being created in order to empower the headteacher ‘on the ground’ and respond to bespoke local interests, actually, when part of a MAT, single academies are disempowered. As the MAT holds the agreement with the government, single academies are not free-standing legal entities, and are beholden to orders from above.

A lack of parental involvement? 

This raises the question of parental involvement. Amongst parents concerned about academies, there is concern their ability to effect the practises of their schools is being squeezed out. The government explicitly deny this. On their academies myth-busting .gov page, the government declare it a myth that “academies won’t be accountable to parents”, stating they “want parents to be more involved in their child’s education- not less”.

They continue: “Whereas one-size-fits-all approaches dictated from County Hall gives an impression of local control, in fact, it’s academy headteachers and governing bodies that hold direct relationships with the parents they serve and have the power to be much more responsive to their communities. If a parent tries to lobby County Hall for change, they’d have to persuade them to change things for the whole local authority; if the academy is approached, it’s their responsibility to make a change at the school the parent cares about”

The government state that they want to ‘enable academies to move from a model where parents are elected for means of representation, to one where they are chosen for their expertise’. Again this follows their meritocratic reasoning that the best and the brightest should be in charge, not parents or councillors who may end up in an important leadership role by dent of legislation.

There is, in reality, at least some substance to the concern that academisation means less parent accountability: Where maintained schools must by law have at least two parents on the governing board, academies do not. 

Conclusion: The debate reflects a classic left/right divide.

The debate between academies and maintained schools reflects a classic left-right division. To the left, councils provide a much needed democratic and community-oriented safeguard against reckless, mechanical, corporate management. To the right, councils are stodgy and prevent change; academies allow the evidence, the science of ‘what works’ in teaching to lead unimpeded. 

The government justify their support for academies stating they are ‘Empowering the frontline and moving control away from managers and bureaucrats and directly to the frontline is an effective way of improving performance – holding them to account for the results they achieve, and to much stricter standards of financial propriety than we ever have with local-authority schools’.

The side on which someone falls in this debate comes down ultimately to their faith in the two institutions in question; MATs or local authorities. Are local authorities full of councillors with a knowledge of the holistic needs of the community, bound by democratic due process ensuring community needs are addressed? 

Are MATs connected to a web of experts from across schools, who can pool talent and resources to innovate educational practises towards the cold science of what works?

The ideological choice is between a large-scale, liberated, market-funnelled pursuit of school improvement. Or a system stewarded by local government, exposed to democracy, and, as all decision making made by committee, an embrace of a slower and more deliberative process.

In my experience, it is best to reflect on your own experiences. With MATs, the absence of bureaucratic due process means how the school is run is determined by the people in charge, and therefore each is quite different. Yes, MATs are free to elect a governing board containing no parents, and make important decisions with no public consultation, but that does not mean they will. The education system successive governments have built relies upon contrived market pressures to incentivise, or terrify, schools to improve, and there is no doubt that Ark is committed to improving Ark schools in Hastings. I am sure the same is true for UoB Academy Trust. Yet this question transcends the local specifics, and reflects an age-old political division between left and right, state or market, regulation or choice.

An edited version of this article will appear in the upcoming issue of Hastings Independent Press (01/03/24).