Education Committee

Oral evidence: Academies and free schools, HC 981
Wednesday 19 March 2014

Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 19 March 2014.

Written evidence from witnesses:

–       Ofsted (AFS0088)

–       Local Schools Network (AFS0054)

Watch the meeting

Members present: Mr Graham Stuart (Chair); Neil Carmichael; Alex Cunningham; Bill Esterson; Pat Glass; Siobhain McDonagh; Ian Mearns; Caroline Nokes; Mr David Ward; Craig Whittaker

Questions [298-394]

Witnesses: Dr Olmo Silva, Research Associate, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE, Henry Stewart, Founder, Local Schools Network, Dame Sally Coates, Principal, Burlington Danes Academy, and Gabriel Sahlgren, Research Director, Centre for Market Reform of Education, Institute of Economic Affairs, and Affiliated Researcher, Research Institute of Industrial Economics, Sweden, gave evidence.

Q298   Chair: Good morning, and welcome to you all to the session of the Education Committee looking at academies and free schools.  We left our inquiry for a while into this Parliament to allow more data to emerge, but is it still too early to tell whether the converter academies that have taken place since the Academies Act 2010 are making a positive difference to outcomes for children?  Who would like to start off answering that?  Olma, you have caught my eye. 

Dr Silva: In short, yes; it is too early to be able to say something about converter academies.  We know from previous research, in terms of the Labour academies, done by some colleagues of mine at the LSE that it takes three, four or five years of observation to detect an impact.  It poses questions about selectivity of the intake of the schools because, at the same time as an academy effect might be emerging, the academy itself might be changing its composition, but if we want to understand whether pupils will study in an academy for the full course of the secondary education, we need at least to wait four or five years in order to be able to see something meaningful.  At least this is my take. 

Chair: Thank you.  Does anybody disagree with that?  You are all in agreement pretty much.  Excellent.

Dr Silva: If you want, I can say something more controversial.

Q299   Chair: Sally, the impression is it does not matter how you structure schooling; great leaders have a positive impact and manage to ride over any of the policies that come out of central government and deliver anyway.  What is it about academy status that could give us hope that leaders are going to be able to have a more positive impact than they would under the previous regime?

Dame Sally Coates: It is difficult, because my main view is that leadership is the most important factor in school improvement; however, I do think academisation has had a significant impact as well.  There are various things—regarding financial control, you have more money.  It is not significant any longer, but you do have more money and you can spend it how you wish.  In my case, it was spent on more teachers.  I felt that was the need, rather than outsourcing lots of other support services.  You do have control over the curriculum, which means that you can disapply it when you need to, if you want to give more English and maths and not other subjects for a short while, for students who have come in below average.  The fact that you are self‑governing and have autonomy has an impact on the leader as well.

Q300   Chair: The most important thing in education is the quality of teaching and the most successful systems appear to be the best at attracting more applicants, so you can do a more effective sift and then get better teachers into the system.  What is it about academisation that will make it more likely that we will be able to attract, retain and get the best out of a teaching workforce, or might it have a contrary or negative impact?  Henry, any thoughts on that? 

Henry Stewart: As you probably know, I question whether academisation has produced great benefits.  As my colleague said, it is too early to say on converters, because they have only been there for a year or two.  His colleagues did produce some evidence on the performance of early Labour academies, but made clear that could not be applied to what is happening now.  If you look at the general sponsored academies, I did some research from 2008 to 2011, and the key is to compare them with schools that are similar.  If you compare them with all schools, then they appear to be doing better because they are coming from a lower base.

Chair: It is a sort of regression to the mean, is it?

Henry Stewart: Exactly.  If you take the academies that were below 30% in 2008, which was the floor, then yes; they grew by 18.6% to 2011 in their GCSE benchmark results.  If you then take the non‑academies also below 30%, they grew by 19.1%, which comes back to it actually being about leadership.  My worry is that, while many academies are doing a great job particularly a place like Burlington Danes, the whole focus on it ignores the great work being done by non‑academies, schools near me like John Cass and Central Foundation, which have amazing results with high levels of deprivation.

Q301   Chair: Thank you for that, which in a way was an answer to my first question, but that is fine.  On the second one, is there anything about teachers?  Is there any aspect of academies and the greater autonomy there that might be negative in terms of the ability to attract, retain and get the best out of teachers, or might be positive?  Gabriel, have you any thoughts on that? 

Gabriel Sahlgren: That all depends on how much they pay and what type of work environment they have.  I do not think there is a general rule that says that academies or free schools would necessarily attract better teachers.  We have some evidence from Sweden, since the voucher reform of 1992, on the teacher labour market.  It seems to be the case that that increased teacher salaries to a certain extent but, more importantly, it increased the kind of dividend you got if you were a good teacher.  It seemed to be the case that competition, via academisation and perhaps free schools as well, might at least spur an increase in the dividend to make sure you attract better teachers into the schools.

Q302   Chair: Rather than a system that just rewards seniority, etc., one that better matches performance is more likely to make it an attractive career for people coming in.

Gabriel Sahlgren: Yes and also, as I said, in a schools market, if you want to improve achievement you need to get the best teachers.  Right?  How are you going to get the best teachers?  It is partly by increasing salaries, and that is what they found.

Dr Silva: I think increasing the salary across the board is not going to be sufficient.  We need to give clear incentives to teachers to perform well and try to measure this performance, and then link salaries to performance rather than just raise the base.  If you do not change incentives, we are potentially going to continue selection in a negative direction, which might not attract teachers who are especially effective. 

There are at least a couple of other things that could be said about academies.  One is that, partly because of strong leadership and autonomy in the way they manage their teaching staff, they might be able to recognise that, whereas the system as it is usually sends the best teachers to educate the best children, because that is the best way of deploying your workforce if you want to do well in performance tables, the best thing to do is to use the best teachers to teach the worst children—the ones who struggle the most.  It is only through raising the tail that we are really able to display some effectiveness for academies. 

Another important point we need to draw a distinction on is whether the academies are operating as standalone academies or as part of chains.  My experience and understanding of the way that chains work is that they are particularly attractive for young people who are highly motivated and talented, partly because they promise within‑chain careers, so they might be starting as a teacher in a specific class with a specific subject, become the head of that subject in that specific school, move on to become deputy head and then move around the different schools of the network through promotions that really highlight the fact that they have done well. 

If at some point they get fed up with a teaching career, this is an important signal and skill: the possibility of managing the good leadership they have displayed, which they can take on when they move to the private sector.  It is important to think about the teaching sector as part of a general labour market, because it is only by understanding that people might switch in and out of this profession that we understand how to incentivise them and get the best teachers in.

Dame Sally Coates: Being in an academy is attractive to teachers.  Maybe it is because we are in ARK academy and a lot of people want to work for ARK.  They see it as a charity; it is philanthropic; it is making a difference.  Therefore, we have attracted a certain kind of teacher who has made a difference.  Money does not matter as much as people think it does.  It is nice to be able to pay people more to come to a school in difficulty but, for really good teachers, that is not the overriding concern.  Also in a network you can grow leaders; you can share teachers; you can grow expertise; there is good CPD.  Those kinds of things attract teachers to come and work in a network. 

Q303   Chair: That was the point that Olma made about it offering a structure.  When we did our Great Teachers inquiry, one of the criticisms was that, other than through leadership, there was not really a career ladder.  In Singapore they have specialist teachers and a sense that you would stay in the classroom and develop.  Do you think the chains in particular offer benefits in that way?

Dame Sally Coates: I do think so, yes.  There is more rigour and accountability in a chain of academies, particularly a really effective one like ARK.  That does not attract some teachers, but maybe they are not the ones who you want to attract.

Q304   Pat Glass: Olma, can I just ask you about what you were saying about being able to move into managerial positions in chains?  That used to happen in local authorities.  Teachers would move into being educational psychologists, educational social workers or directors of education.  That stopped some years ago, because the salaries of headteachers started to outstrip massively salaries in local authorities.  What are the salaries like in these chains of academies?

Dr Silva: They are not dramatically different, but Sally knows more than me about exactly where the scale is. 

Pat Glass: I am thinking about the managers.

Dr Silva: I am sorry; I have no idea about that.  What I have understood from the structure of the academies I have interacted with is that there is a much clearer link between performance, the continuous monitoring of teachers, and whether they are rewarded.  As Sally was saying, rewarding through money is not the only incentive that attracts these people. 

Q305   Pat Glass: It does deter people wanting to move into management if they are going to get far less money than they would as a headteacher.  Do we have that information?  Can we get that from the academies—about salaries of managers in chains?

Henry Stewart: We do know the directors of chains are very highly paid in some cases.  At Harris, there are six directors over £200,000, and we know that, at E‑ACT, the chief executive was on £300,000.  We know that at the very top they are earning a lot more than local authorities.

Q306   Pat Glass: That is money presumably coming out of the—

Henry Stewart: Out of the schools, yes.

Q307   Mr Ward: It may be naïve or idealistic, but is the idea behind evidence‑based policy not that we collect the evidence before we introduce the policy?  Do we not seem to be in a situation here where we have introduced a policy, the growth of academisation, and now we are desperately trying to collect evidence as to whether that in fact was a good thing or not?

Henry Stewart: I think that is absolutely true.  We have primary academisation; there is absolutely no evidence or background to that.  We have no evidence or background to converting strongly performing schools.  We had some background for less-well-performing schools, but we have had 1,000 schools converted from being “good” or “outstanding” with no knowledge at all, no pilot, no anything.  I think, David, you are absolutely right that it is a huge experiment and it is a huge experiment with our children.  Whether that is a good thing is open to question. 

Gabriel Sahlgren: Can I just add that it is an experiment that many other countries have tried before England?  It is right that most of these reforms, if you look over the world, have not been designed to be able to be evaluated, and they rarely are, because of politics, and neither was this one.  You need to draw to a certain extent upon the evidence from other countries, at least to see whether or not our academies are likely to have a negative effect.  At the very least, if you look overall, there is very little evidence of any negative effects of academisation.  Most evidence, from Sweden, Chile and America, suggests mildly positive effects.

Dr Silva: Can I just add on to that, again, the split between sponsored academies in the first round of transformation, potentially similarly the second type of sponsored academies and the converter academies?  Sponsored academies tend to be underperforming schools in urban settings, and we know that, to some extent, they have been effective at improving the average outcome of their children, not even trying to understand whether this is by raising the tail or improving the achievement of people who are already close to attaining the magical level of five A* to C GCSEs.

The new converter academies tend to be schools that are already performing extremely well so, if we want to draw, as Gabriel was saying, from international comparisons, we certainly might want to look at some of the Swedish experience.  I have no clear understanding of whether the overall evidence is positive or negative.  We might want to draw a parallel with chartered schools in the United States, but chartered schools are to be split into two different groups again.  There are chartered schools that operate in urban environments, like the sponsored academies, and they tend to be highly effective at educating under‑achieving children.  There are, however, some charters in the United States that tend to educate pupils who are not in core urban poor areas, and these schools do not seem to be effective.  They are actually, if anything, doing worse than before they converted to charters. 

There is an issue here with whether the conversions that are happening now, of schools that are already “outstanding”, are going to push the outcomes even further up, which is unlikely, because these are already “outstanding” schools.  They are not going to do anything potentially.

Dame Sally Coates: I know there is not a lot of data.  When did it start?  2005, around then.  Burlington Danes became an academy in 2006 under the Labour Government, and so it was one of the early converters.  We are 77% with English and maths now.  There is no doubt that academisation has changed a school from “special measures” to now “outstanding”.  If you look across a very successful network of chains, they have taken underperforming schools and transformed them.  I do not think there are any schools left in ARK that are now anything less than “good”.  All of those schools, or most of those schools, were in “measures” before they were taken over. 

There is evidence.  The quality of the chain matters, because we have seen that some chains have been less successful, but there is no doubt about it: regarding the aspirations that come from being part of a network—the accountability, the data gathering and the monitoring—from me as a head of an already successful school moving into the ARK network, I was surprised at the amount of monitoring and accountability that I faced, but that is all for the good.  It is the job; it is a public duty. 

Chair: We have four excellent witnesses, limited time and quite a lot of questions, so I am reluctant to give two bites of the same cherry, Henry. 

Henry Stewart: If the evidence is based on the US, Chile and Sweden, those are not strong education systems to base it on.  Sweden has been tumbling down the PISA international charts. 

Chair: Point made; I am going to cut you off there, Henry.  Alex wanted to come in briefly.

Q308   Alex Cunningham: I just wanted to ask a supplementary question.  Sharp eligible parents find ways to put their children into the best schools.  Are the profiles of the schools that are making these huge improvements, the profile of the child, actually changing across the country?  In other words, their improvement might be based on the fact that the child coming in is more highly motivated, better supported, etc.

Dame Sally Coates: In my experience in my particular school, no, because our admissions are by distance and we still serve a very large social housing estate.  However, I do think admissions is something that really needs to be looked at, because that is happening in other schools across the country, and it is unfair and wrong.

Alex Cunningham: We could be seeing great improvements in some schools, but it is not real improvement, because it is not dealing with the same group of children.

Chair: We are going to return to this later, if I may, so I am not going to allow any more.

Q309   Mr Ward: Just on what you were saying, Sally, about the benefits of the chain, what you were describing to me sounds like an extremely good local education authority.  If there is some magic dust—the things that will make things different in an academy—what are the things that you could not do within the existing system as a mainstream school?

Dame Sally Coates: I come back to the fact that leadership matters the most.  To be honest, it made it easier for me to turn the school into “outstanding”, but I still would have done it regardless.  Academies bring the scrutiny of data and the monitoring that comes from the chain.  I did not do anything particularly I could not have done before, but the scrutiny and monitoring have made the difference.

Q310   Alex Cunningham: I was interested in one of Henry’s earlier statements, when he was talking about the performance of the non‑academies and the original academies.  The non‑academies were actually improving at a faster rate than the ones that had been converted to academies.  I am also interested in understanding the level of improvement made by the new generation of academies, in comparison with the original academies, bearing in mind that most of them were “outstanding” or “good” on conversion.

Henry Stewart: The Public Accounts Committee talked about how the Government has overspent £1 billion on this.  I take your point that it is too early to say but, in the first year, the converter academies’ results went down, after having converted.  I did not answer the point earlier, because it is too early for that to be conclusive, but that is the initial data that we have, so yes; there is nothing to indicate that all that focus, which could have been put into teacher development or could have been put into leadership development, was well spent.

Q311   Alex Cunningham: You are starting to answer my next question.  Perhaps the others could continue, but what other policies could address underperformance, rather than this policy presumption by the Government in favour of academisation?

Dame Sally Coates: I would say admissions.  Make it fairer.  Share out the children who are in most need, as against lumping them all together.

Q312   Alex Cunningham: Would you say that, in some cases, the academisation programme is actually failing the most challenging children, because they are not getting to the schools where they can get the best education?

Dame Sally Coates: No, I do not think that is happening in most schools.

Gabriel Sahlgren: I can add something to that regarding the tie‑break device that is usually used in most academies, which is significantly different from that in the chartered schools.  Most academies seem to still use proximity and chartered schools tend to use lotteries.  If you do have proximity as the tie‑break device, you also enable richer parents to move closer to them and eventually take over, basically.  That is something that probably should be changed and thought about.  All these reforms are heavily dependent on system design and how you carry them out, so that is one thing.

I also wanted to mention here that we should not only focus on the impact of academies on the pupils attending them.  We should also try to focus on the broader systemic‑level effects that they have.  Again, I mention Sweden, but I also mention the evidence on the international test scores—PISA and TIMSS.  The strongest evidence suggests that a higher share in academy‑type schools improves countries’ achievement in PISA.  It is the same thing when it comes to school autonomy, at least in developed schools.  Now, the OECD does not find that, but that is partly because of poor research design; it is not because the effect is not there.

Dr Silva: Can I just add a couple of points here?  I fully share the concern that academies might become more stratified, as in selecting pupils on a differential basis.  Randomisation whenever there is over‑subscription might be a solution to that problem.  Having said that, the results that my colleagues mentioned in these quarters were over and above potential changes in index, so there is some evidence that academies can be beneficial, even if you take into account the changes in the composition.  Now, is this because they are really helping pupils in the tail or does the achievement improvement happen somewhere else in the distribution?  Unfortunately, we do not have any evidence that the pupils at the bottom are very much helped; it is predominantly pupils in the middle.  That is the first thing I wanted to say. 

In terms of the systemic improvements an academy might bring about, I had to say that I had very strong hopes to be able to detect a competition‑of‑choice effect in the UK education system when I started analysing these data a number of years ago.  Unfortunately, I was not able to detect any benefit brought around by having more autonomy in the system, at least within the London area, which we analysed a number of years ago, with one exception: the schools that have slightly more autonomous governance tend to respond more to competition incentives.  Whereas across the board the idea that academies can improve outcomes by generating competition effects for other schools does not seem to hold much water, if you think about the sub‑groups of schools that are allowed to compete on some dimensions, because they have some autonomy in terms of how they can respond to these competition threats, there is some evidence this might actually raise achievement for children across the board.

Q313   Alex Cunningham: We see this reliance on school autonomy and yet, as the chains develop and expand, we see less autonomy, because there are schools within a group that is directed from the top.  Is that proving a problem?

Dr Silva: I am not sure school chains are actually stifling the autonomy of their schools.  They provide help with data analysis.  They provide help with teachers being able to share best practices, but I do not see the leadership being taken away from schools.  Sally surely knows more.

Dame Sally Coates: It is intervention; it is made however much it is needed.  If the head is new and needs a lot of support and help, then they do get quite involved.  If the head is experienced, it is hands‑off; that is the best way of allowing a head to flourish.  I have worked for 40 years in London, and I have seen schools failing over a long period of time, and local authorities not taking any action.  Everybody knows the school is failing.  It may have had an Ofsted years ago that did not say it.  Until Ofsted has come in and put the school in “measures”, nothing has happened.  In a well-run chain of academies, intervention is much quicker.  As soon as the data seems to show that progress is going down, there is an issue and intervention takes place.

Q314   Alex Cunningham: We have already seen one chain broken up, have we not?

Henry Stewart: That is the key point.  Sally talks from the point of view of a very effective chain, ARK, but if you look at the chains, you have ARK and Harris, which have very strong results, then you have a huge tail of chains that do not.  E‑ACT is not the lowest performing chain—the one that we have just heard all the problems about.  If you take out the GCSE equivalents like BTECs and look at the performance of the seven top chains, and take only the schools that have been with them for five years, then four out of the seven are on 35% or less as the average GCSE benchmark.  In the entire country, out of 151 local authority areas, only two are below 35%.  Actually, there is a lot of evidence that the chains are underperforming.  You have one or two very strong chains that, like you said, are like the best local authorities, but then you have a whole set of chains that appear from the data to be like the worst local authorities.

Q315   Alex Cunningham: Maybe Mr Wilshaw’s desire to inspect chains as well as individual schools is something that you would support.

Henry Stewart: Absolutely.

Dame Sally Coates: Yes.

Alex Cunningham: I see four heads nodding.

Gabriel Sahlgren: Yes, sure.  First of all, when it comes to chain versus school‑level autonomy, if you look at the most successful chartered schools, they are part of chains.  KIPP schools, Harlem Children’s Zone and so forth have very prescriptive ideas of how education should be carried out.  The no‑excuse paradigm—I do not know if you are familiar with it—has longer school days, longer school years, selective teacher training, parent/teacher conferences and so on and so forth.  They pass that down, so they have a vision of how education should be carried out.  If you can scale up, excellent; why not do it?

Q316   Alex Cunningham: We will get an understanding of that next week when we visit the United States.  Talk about free schools.  Should we not be concerned about the number of free schools that have been found to be underperforming?

Gabriel Sahlgren: Not necessarily.

Alex Cunningham: We should not be concerned about schools that are underperforming.

Gabriel Sahlgren: Absolutely, but you should be just as concerned when state schools are underperforming, academies, faith schools—whatever they are.  You should be just as concerned.  Free schools have brought this to light.  We have had failure in the system forever.  It is just that now, under private operators, we tend to bring it out in the media and we talk about it.  That is a good thing, I would say.  Look, you are always going to have under‑achieving schools; the question is how you deal with it.  In my experience, you have to produce something similar to orderly school failure: enable pupils to be able to migrate to other schools, and that is where the supply issue comes in.

Q317   Alex Cunningham: They are not a special case then, free schools; they are just another failing—

Gabriel Sahlgren: Absolutely.  Just because you have set up free schools, not every single one of them will succeed—absolutely not.  That is not the question. 

Q318   Ian Mearns: The evidence that we have seen is that, unfortunately, the free schools system has allowed a level of financial autonomy that has seen us experience financial difficulties within these schools, which were never experienced in the state system, because the oversight was there in terms of financial management.  In free schools, a number of problems have been brought to light, but mainly because of whistleblowers, not because of any real system of oversight.

Gabriel Sahlgren: Sure, and whistleblowers are part of the system as well.

Henry Stewart: You have put your finger on it there.  We want innovation in our school system.  We want new ideas and, to some extent, free schools are welcome for that, but you must have accountability; you must have oversight.  There are many people setting up free schools who have very little background in education and do not have the systems in place.  We could put this back together by making them accountable to local authorities.  With a good local authority there to support and challenge, it will notice if something is going on; it will provide the support.  There is no reason why you cannot have innovative schools with autonomy and accountability.

Q319   Mr Ward: Can I just come back to Gabriel?  What you seemed to be describing, Gabriel, was freedom to be extremely prescriptive.

Gabriel Sahlgren: Yes, absolutely, in terms of the chains.  It is the same thing in corporations or in big companies.  They have a specific view of how they want to carry out their business, and they exercise it.  Look at Apple; they have a specific idea of how their business should be run.  The same applies to chartered schools in America, at least the ones in chains.  The successful ones obviously want to scale up. 

Mr Ward: They would be autonomous, providing they did exactly what they were told to do.

Gabriel Sahlgren: Yes, because, at the end of the day, the chartered school network decides how education, broadly speaking, should be carried out in their schools, and that is probably why they have been successful all over the country, for example the KIPP network.

Q320   Alex Cunningham: We can talk about structures until the cows come home, but is the student experience of an academy different from that of a maintained school?  Maybe not.

Dame Sally Coates: David asked me what the freedoms were, and one thing that you can do is have a longer day.  You can have more enrichment activities.  Students, particularly those in need, can be at school for longer.

Q321   Alex Cunningham: That happens in good schools, whether they are an academy, free school or whatever.

Dame Sally Coates: Yes, but you have more freedom with the teachers’ pay and conditions to do things like that. You can say that that child coming in at below level 4 should do more periods of English and maths, and less of technology or something else.  You can vary the school experience and you can make the school day longer.  Teachers will work longer hours.

Q322   Alex Cunningham: Is there much evidence of that happening?

Henry Stewart: Can I draw a distinction quickly between autonomy and freedom?  Autonomy is about them having more control; freedom is about central prescription.  One freedom academies have been given, which is a very good one, is to select extra free school meal kids.  That is a great freedom that I welcome.  I do not know how many are using it, but why should all schools not be able to do that?  If a freedom is worth having, let us give it to every school in the country.

Dr Silva: I want to add to some of the previous points.  I do not think academies do anything that is very radically different from what the best schools are doing in a normal system.  It is their autonomy with incentives that very often are set in place that allows them to do this, because these incentives bring around this motivation to do it.  We have to couple with that with accountability for sure, otherwise things might go completely wrong.  In normal schools, partly because these incentives are not in place and there is less autonomy, this potential for making the school flourish and the pupils have a better experience often relies on individuals who are intrinsically motivated and not incentives that are built into the system.  This is the most important difference. 

Q323   Alex Cunningham: Everybody tells us that it is a good leadership and it does not matter where that leader is; that leader is going to succeed. 

Dr Silva: Yes, but the monitoring and incentives that are brought around and operating—and, again, I am talking predominantly about some successful chains, so I have probably a skewed view—are institutionalised, as opposed to left to people’s will.

Q324   Bill Esterson: Just on Alex’s point about what the student sees as different, is there a difference in teaching practice and what goes on in a classroom between an academy and a maintained school?

Dame Sally Coates: No.  You want good teachers in every classroom teaching, and teaching is the same in all schools.

Dr Silva: That is precisely the point I was trying to make.  There are systems in place that incentivise good teaching practice, allowing people to move across a network or be promoted.  Very often also the use of data allows you to identify failing teachers and potentially help them by putting them through some additional training.

Q325   Bill Esterson: The only question I have following up that is I have heard about some chains where there is a very prescriptive approach to teaching, which is so prescriptive in some cases that teachers are not allowed to use their initiative.  Have any of you got evidence of that or come across that?

Dame Sally Coates: No, and a head could do that in any school, regardless of whether it is an academy or not.  The head could say, “I want everyone to teach in this particular way,” so I do not think that is anything particular to do with academies. 

Henry Stewart: There is some evidence of that, but not in the best ones.  Michael Wilshaw used to give this speech where he talked about how, at Mossbourne, they had one teacher who was incredibly traditional and very formal, and another teacher who was incredibly creative, but they both got great results.  He allowed both and encouraged both to prosper.  You are right there are some chains, one in particular, where they have a prescriptive model.  I would agree with Michael Wilshaw that you need to give the professionals the freedom to work within their own style to achieve the best results.

Q326   Chair: On governance, if you read Andrew Adonis’s view, he says the key difference really is governance.  What evidence is there that governance of academies is better or attracts new or more able people into the system than we had before or we have in maintained schools, typically?  Is there any new evidence on that? 

Dame Sally Coates: Again speaking from my personal experience, my governors are highly professional.  It is a small governing body.  It is very intelligent with data and the monitoring of me and my performance management. It is a more professional tighter governance than probably I have experienced before. 

Dr Silva: Unfortunately, we do not have any evidence yet.  Surely ARK schools are very proactive in terms of recruitment of their governors.  Not all networks, chains or academies are probably the same.  If we go back to the earlier question of whether it is too early to speak about these academies because we have not evaluated them, the answer is probably yes.  That is the first question we had.  We have ahead of us a very fruitful number of years, where we have had so many schools flourishing and introducing different practices that we will hopefully be able to identify what works and what does not work, with of course the problems of having first introduced something and then evaluating it.

Henry Stewart: Speaking as a chair of governors of a Hackney school, it is a very good point and, in the whole education debate, relatively little attention is given to governors.  There are 600,000 governors out there.  There is a whole mixture of states of training.  It would be a useful focus for Government to put something into governor development, as well as teacher and leadership development.

Q327   Ian Mearns: On governance, is there any evidence coming out now about any significant growth in related party transactions involving governors in schools?

Henry Stewart: Yes.  That is one of the problems from the chains.  The Guardian highlighted several million pounds that have gone to companies of which the trustees of the academy or the chain are directors.  The DfE technically does not allow profit, but it does allow an average‑cost method, which enables people to make a profit from it.

Q328   Ian Mearns: Henry, like you I have been a school governor for 30 years and it has never crossed my mind to try to make any money out of it.  I am afraid to say that seems to be something that is creeping in to governance in schools—the fact that the business that people are involved in quite often is making money out of selling services to the schools they are a governor of.

Henry Stewart: I agree with you completely.  In my day job as an entrepreneur I run a business but, in 15 years as a governor, I have never sold a single thing to the schools I am involved in.  I do not see why directors should be able to.

Chair: I was just thinking what a shame it was that the Happy company does not want to sell happiness to schools. 

Henry Stewart: We give.

Q329   Siobhain McDonagh: I would like to ask a question that I do not agree the contents of, because my experience of the London Challenge was that it was not a local‑authority‑run scheme, but a regionally, DfE and hands‑on, Andrew‑Adonis‑run scheme.  The question as set is: in the last few months, a number of witnesses, including David Laws, have talked about the success of the London Challenge, a local‑authority‑organised initiative.  Is there still scope for that kind of area‑wide, co‑ordinated initiative in an autonomous system?

Dr Silva: Can I just start the discussion?  Maybe I have a slightly less rosy view on the real success of the London Challenge.  If we look at the data and you try to make a comparison with schools that are like for like, I am not sure there is so much evidence that the London Challenge did change things substantially.  Two important things that I want to say about the London Challenge are that it seems to, first of all, address in the vast majority of cases failure with some specific teachers or a group of teachers who were comfortably sitting on underperforming classes and were not incentivised to do much.  We have talked about the importance of teachers.  The chances are that, by addressing the teaching issue across the board, we are better off than thinking about whether you should come through the London Challenge or through academisation. 

Having said that—this is a point I have made before—the London Challenge is also relying on specific personalities pushing this idea forward, and personal networks allowing individuals to put teachers in touch with other better teachers, so that they learn how to become more effective.  In some parts of the academised world, this has become more institutionalised—peer monitoring, teacher to teacher—but also the chances of teachers sharing information with other members of staff about what the best practices are is institutionalised and incentivised.  There is some hope there, simply because rather than relying on specific personalities, you build this into the system, but this does not mean that it could not happen in other schools as well.

Gabriel Sahlgren: I agree with Olma that there is no rigorous evidence that the London Challenge actually brought about the improvements so far.  We still have to wait for that evidence.

Henry Stewart: There is overwhelming evidence that there has been a transformation in London education.  There is some question of where it came from.  Before 2003, the performance of London schools was below the national average.  Now it is well above the national average, and local authorities did play a key role in that.  I would put in Tim Brighouse rather than Andrew Adonis as the key man.  The education universities and the teachers all played a role in it.  I find it intriguing that the people who played a key role are the ones who are sometimes blamed and called a “blob”.  If you want to look at evidence of transformation, it has to be how London got to where it is now.  Whether it was the Challenge or whether it was local authorities, or whether it was something else, there is no question it was the most successful education project of the last few decades.

Gabriel Sahlgren: Other things were changing as well in the country.  We cannot just look at before/after; that is the issue.  We have to try to isolate the factors of the London Challenge and study it significantly with better research methods.

Dame Sally Coates: My particular boroughs were never involved in the London Challenge, so it did not affect me.  There has been a huge transformation in London schools.  My feeling is that is mainly down to the quality of teachers that we are attracting in London schools, because initiatives like Teach First, etc., have brought in all these very young dynamic committed staff into our schools.  It would be difficult to get the London Challenge to happen again in a highly autonomous system, unless there was some kind of middle tier and some kind of co‑ordination.

Q330   Siobhain McDonagh: A recent report by the University of Southampton found that student attainment was higher in schools run by effective academy chains.  It also found huge variation in performance between different chains, in terms of actual school experience.  Do chains differ from local authorities in their variable performance?

Henry Stewart: I would say yes.  From the evidence I quoted earlier, the less well‑performing chains—and we are talking about 50% of the big chains here—are actually in the bottom 2% of local authorities.  There is massive variation and we need to be looking at the accountability of those chains.  This is coming back to the point that virtually everybody agrees Ofsted should be able to inspect chains.  It was only because Ofsted did the nearest it could—it went in and inspected a dozen schools from E‑ACT—that the action that has been taken has happened.  We need greater accountability for the chains.

Dr Silva: Unfortunately, I am not very much on top of this report, so I apologise for that.  The variation in chain performance should also be put into the context that we have not yet had enough years to evaluate what these chains are doing.  Let us keep in mind that some of these chains basically take on failing schools, and it might take some time to turn their performance around.  If anything, in the initial time when you try to do something with the school, there could be even further dips down in terms of the performance.  I am not entirely sure there is, as yet, some conclusive evidence as to whether there is more dispersion within the chains, as opposed to across standard schools. 

Q331   Craig Whittaker: I just need to mention the David Young Academy in Leeds and indeed the Trinity Academy in Halifax.  Both have replaced incredibly failing schools and have done incredibly well.  Speaking to the two headteachers, Ros McMullan and Michael Gosling in Halifax, in fact they have gone from 20% five GCSEs to 82%.  That is a massive improvement.  The three key things for them have been autonomy, leadership and CPD for the teachers.  In fact, we saw in Singapore that they offer 100 hours of CPD a year to their teachers.  How do you think that has changed some of the academy process, where CPD is offered much more widely than it traditionally was?  Is that the case or should it be the case? 

Gabriel Sahlgren: Tom Loveless, of the Brookings Institution, had an interesting paper about the evidence of whether or not professional development works.  It does not seem to work that well.  I wonder if that is what actually caused the improvements.

Dame Sally Coates: In a chain, there is real collaboration among schools, which does not necessarily happen in a local authority, where schools might be in competition with each other and there is no incentive, necessarily, to collaborate.  In a chain, there is real collaboration and, therefore, really good sharing of good practice and strong CPD.  If a particular department is really good at something, they will offer that to other departments in the chain. 

Q332   Craig Whittaker: Gabriel says it does not work.  You say it does work.  We have seen in Singapore, where they have one of the best teaching systems in the world, that it seems to work very well. 

Gabriel Sahlgren: Again, we do not know why East Asian countries perform well in PISA terms.  It might be because they eat a lot of rice.  Who knows?  This idea of just looking at one specific policy across high‑performing systems does not tell us much at all.  You need to do much more rigorous work to isolate what the policies are and why they perform very well in these international tests.

Henry Stewart: I do not know the Brookings research that Gabriel is referring to, but it does feel very counter‑intuitive and counter to other evidence.  The best‑performing chains, like ARK, do twice the teacher development that is the norm.  There are examples in Singapore, Shanghai and all sorts of places.  Teacher development was a key part, as I understand it, of the London Challenge.  I think focusing more on teacher development is a key way to improve.

Q333   Craig Whittaker: Let me just ask you then: is the ability to appoint unqualified teaching staff key likely to improve outcomes or not?

Gabriel Sahlgren: It is likely to have no impact at all, according to the evidence in general, if you look at the research from the States at least.  We cannot do that type of research here, because most people are qualified.

Q334   Craig Whittaker: What are you saying then?  It does not decrease attainment at all but, on the same token, it does not increase it. 

Gabriel Sahlgren: There is some evidence.  If there is any impact, it is very tiny in that unqualified teachers would be worse than qualified teachers.

Dr Silva: I agree with Gabriel’s view.  We know very little about what makes a teacher effective; it is certainly not certification and qualifications.  Years of experience seem to do the trick but, after a couple of years, good teachers are up to full steam and bad teachers are not improving anymore.  That is why the important thing is to set in place incentives to allow the best individuals to self‑select themselves into the profession because, ex ante, it is really hard to detect which ones are going to be good or bad.  Potentially once exposed, we have been able to identify the ones who are not so promising.  Either try to put them in touch with good teachers so that they improve, where good teachers are identified from the data by how much students’ performance improves, or kindly get them out the job.

Henry Stewart: There is a big difference between one unqualified teacher and an incredibly supportive school that is helping develop them, and a free school that might set up with half unqualified teachers or something like that, which would be a very risky environment.  That distinction has to be drawn between those two.  The danger is that people encourage the set up of free schools or similar and just go out and recruit anybody, without being aware of what is needed.

Q335   Craig Whittaker: I know we have briefly spoken about this, but we took evidence from the DfE that says leaders in academy chains tend to earn slightly higher amounts than those in maintained schools.  However, it is the reverse for teachers; it is slightly lower for teachers.  Should we read anything into that?

Dame Sally Coates: I did not realise that was the case, to be honest.

Q336   Mr Ward: You say collaboration is stronger between members of a chain.  Do you collaborate with local schools near you that are not members of the chain?

Dame Sally Coates: Yes.  I also attend local authority heads’ meetings and work quite closely.  My local authority is very good, Hammersmith and Fulham.  I work with schools in the local authority.  It is also very important that you are rooted in your community because, as you know, ARK is across London.

Q337   Mr Ward: What is the difference in the degree of collaboration?

Dame Sally Coates: I do not particularly collaborate.  I would collaborate if somebody asked me to, but we tend to go and have professional conversations about local issues; we do not tend to say, “Would you like to come and visit my English department?” 

Q338   Mr Ward: Is that not a great shame?

Dame Sally Coates: It is a great shame, yes; it is.  That does not tend to happen in my experience at local authority level, which is a shame.  It certainly does in the network. 

Henry Stewart: In my local authority, Hackney, which is majority academy at secondary level now, there is very close collaboration.  That is a key difference between some authorities.  Hackney made sure when they were setting up that there were no academies that were part of chains and that they all work together.  Our teachers go to visit academies; academies’ teachers come and visit ours.  I think the academy model works much better where there is that working together as a local authority and co‑operating, and it can be a good model.

Dr Silva: I agree that it is a big shame that academies do not collaborate more with local schools, particularly the converter ones.  We cannot expect them to perform much better than they already do for themselves, because they are already outstanding.  The hope was that they would collaborate and help other schools to improve in one way or another.  Let us not, however, forget that another possibility is that, by increasing the competition pressure on other schools in the local market, they might even indirectly produce some effects on standards improving in other schools, even though, once again, following your point earlier, it is a bit early to evaluate.

Gabriel Sahlgren: There is evidence of that.  I mentioned some colleagues’ research found that there is a positive impact from academies on the nearby state schools.  It is not very big, but it is there.

Q339   Chair: Any further insights on this collaboration issue?  We did an inquiry into partnerships and collaboration—the self‑improving system.  You wanted open doors within schools and between schools.  You wanted the profession to control it rather than outside bodies, whether it was highly paid people in chains or local authorities.  You wanted to get a much more self‑reflective, self‑improving system.  What needs to be put in place to help facilitate that and encourage it more?

Dame Sally Coates: I think it is a great shame there is not more collaboration, because I have learned more from visiting schools and talking to other school heads than anywhere else or any course I have ever been on.  Unfortunately, you need someone to broker it.  If it is a network chain, they will broker that collaboration and get it going.  I am very happy to collaborate with anybody but, if nobody brokers it, then it does not happen.  Sometimes heads are friends and they get together, and that informal partnership happens, but it does need somebody to look at the structure of it.

Dr Silva: A long time, I ran some analysis where I tried to understand if a system set in place called Beacon Schools, to allow schools to co‑operate, had any meaningful effect or not.  My answer was unfortunately not, which suggested that thinking about co‑operation top‑down, where you identify a school and try to force it to co‑operate with other schools, might not work.  Hopefully bottom‑up might produce better results, with someone brokering it.

Henry Stewart: This brings us back to the London Challenge, because we all know one of the big reasons for its success was that it was peer to peer.  It was collaboration.  It was everything you were describing there about a school system.  What do we need?  I believe we still need to keep local authorities as a middle tier in place, enabling that role.

Q340   Chair: We also know that so often, for so long—over so many decades—so many places singularly failed to do it.  That is a big problem.  I ask why you have people making radical change because, although there are beacons of excellence, they are all too few and, therefore, there was this desire to shake it up and try to create a new dynamic, in order to bring about the self‑improving professionals‑led system, which local authorities simply had not brought about.

Henry Stewart: I will give you the example of Hackney.  15 years ago when I was first governing in Hackney, the education system was a disaster.  They were bottom of all the tables, and the Government correctly intervened.  They said, “We’re going to take education away.  We’re going to put it in a not‑for‑profit local trust called the Learning Trust,” and it is now, arguably, one of the top‑five, top‑ten, best performing authorities in the country.  It is possible to learn from those that do really well, like Hackney, like Tower Hamlets, like Camden, like Fulham, and enable other authorities to be as good as that, rather than inventing a whole new system and leaving all sorts of chaos around the place.

Gabriel Sahlgren: There is a danger though that, if we do not know why they are doing well, we are trying to copy methods that have nothing to do with it.  This is my worry: that we look at certain isolated examples, and we say, “Oh, these guys did really well.  Let’s do what they did.”  We go to East Asia and try to copy their models, to Hackney or wherever it is.  It is very difficult.  That is why we need to ensure there is very good research on the methods you are talking about here as being responsible for the improvements.  That is all I have to say. 

Q341   Bill Esterson: Coming back to freedoms, is there realistically anything that the headteacher of a maintained school cannot do that can be done in an academy?

Dame Sally Coates: Probably not.  A good head is a good head and will do those things.  Graham at the beginning said that sometimes you do not always necessarily follow Government policy; you do what you think is right.  I certainly think good heads do that; they do what is right for the children in their care.  Probably not, but you have a bit more money, and that does enable you to spend it in the way that you think is most appropriate for students, so a lot of schools have become academies for that reason in recent times.

Bill Esterson: So, it is all about the money.

Dame Sally Coates: It is not all about money, but it does free you up to spend that on what you think is important.

Dr Silva: Leaving aside the consideration I made before, there are more margins for incentivising teachers without higher wages but wages more targeted at performance.  There is the potential in effect for becoming an academy, which is just like shedding some old habits that might have made the school crystallise into underperformance and left it wondering about what to do.  Just by turning itself into an academy, it potentially frees some new spirit that seems to bring about change.  It might simply be an enabling effect that enables some motivated leaders to use some of the freedoms that were already available.

Q342   Chair: Is that a punt or is that a research‑based assessment?

Dr Silva: No, this is just an interpretation of what might have been going on.

Q343   Bill Esterson: It is either money or psychology.

Dr Silva: What I wanted to also add is that the evidence that we have collected so far at least shows that, if you go from a school that is completely under the control of the local authority, a standard community school, to an academy, you gain much more in terms of pupil improvement than if you go from a voluntary-aided school to an academy, which is already similar in terms of their freedom.  There is a spectrum of liberties that headteachers and teachers can achieve by granting academy status, and that is reflected by the fact that the more freedom you are able to gain, the more benefits you are able to bring.

Bill Esterson: I have a feeling Henry did not agree with that.

Dr Silva: I am sure he does not. 

Chair: Before we come to Henry, can I ask Pat to come in briefly? 

Q344   Pat Glass: I have a theory about why we have seen so many huge numbers of converter academies, and I do not think it has got very much to do with money or to do with freedoms.  It is not based on evidence; it is just based on talking to hundreds of headteachers and working with them over the last few years.  That is the establishment of children’s services.  So many headteachers have said to me, “Why did I stay with this local authority?  There is nobody in the local authority to float down in the system who knows the first thing about schools.  It is all about children’s services; it is all about social services.  Therefore, I am going to join with other people who know about schools.”  I think that is why there have been massive numbers.  Comments?

Dame Sally Coates: Again anecdotally, some authorities where schools have tended not to become academies are the better local authorities.

Pat Glass: Where there is somebody who knows something about education.

Dame Sally Coates: Exactly.  Kingston might be a good example, if I remember.  Very few schools have become academies, because they think the local authority really knows and understands the schools. 

Pat Glass: People who talk more about schools.

Dame Sally Coates: Yes.

Henry Stewart: You know the data questions whether academies improve more than others, but it is a lot about money.  When we looked at the ready reckoner for our school, it said we would get £2 million extra if we converted to become an academy.  I think the evidence was that 72% said money was the main reason they converted.  I went to visit Mossbourne several years ago, and asked Sir Michael how he managed all this after‑school provision, which was very impressive.  He said, “It’s because we get more money than you.”  I certainly talked to somebody from your chain, ARK, who says that was the case before.  Early on in the academy programme, the academies basically got more money.  That is less the case now. 

Dr Silva: The best research we have controls for the direct effect of money, so there must be something over and above the fact that academies are somewhat richer in terms of pound per pupil. 

Henry Stewart: I must share my research with you. 

Dr Silva: I will share mine with you, then we can compare methodologies and see.

Chair: It is exactly this sharing we are trying to promote. 

Dr Silva: More confrontation and then sharing.  The benefits of competition and collaboration go hand in hand.

Q345   Bill Esterson: Moving on then, can you give us examples of innovative programmes being implemented by an academy?  Sally, that might be for you to start. 

Dame Sally Coates: For example, in the network we have looked very hard at maths and there has been a lot of research into Maths Mastery and Singaporean maths.  That is an innovative programme that the network has started, which is used in all their schools or most of their schools, and is now being used by other schools outside the chain.  Maths is an area that the country is not particularly strong at, in terms of results in the international tables, and so we have really tried to look at improving maths education.

Henry Stewart: I will give a non‑academy example.  Last night at our governing body we were discussing adopting Musical Futures.  I do not know if people have come across this, but it is a very exciting programme that has been developed to transform the music education of our young people.  It is nothing to do with academies, nothing to do with non‑academies.  It is simply a programme to help improve music throughout schools.

Q346   Bill Esterson: What freedoms are academies typically using then that maintained schools are not?

Henry Stewart: The controversial one is unqualified teachers.  Even on changing pay and conditions, in Hackney, we only have one academy that has done that, and that is having great problems with teacher retention.  Extending the school day is probably the only one, and that is probably available to non‑academies.  

Bill Esterson: Unqualified teachers is the point you made there.

Henry Stewart: I do not think it is very widely used.  For instance, Toby Young is one of the great advocates of it, so I asked him, “How many unqualified teachers do you have in your school?” and he said they have one.

Q347   Chair: I do not understand.  Maybe Sally can help me with this.  We have got the big political argument, and yet there are many fewer now than there were when Labour was in power when apparently you did not have them.  I do not understand that. 

Bill Esterson: Is it not the categories that they do the analysis on?

Pat Glass: It is how you count them.

Henry Stewart: You could under Labour have unqualified teachers who were becoming qualified.  There were quite a large number of those.  That again seems perfectly sensible.  Somebody talked about the barrier to entry of teaching.  Let them in on a programme of training.

Chair: There are fewer now than there were then.

Pat Glass: It is the way you count them.

Chair: I am trying to take evidence from the witnesses. 

Pat Glass: It is how you count them.

Bill Esterson: I think Gabriel was going to answer that question.

Gabriel Sahlgren: I am not sure.  Did they not change the fact that you could hire teachers who were on the verge of becoming qualified?  Before that, you could not, so when was that changed?  I do not know.  That just popped up. 

Dame Sally Coates: It is easier to train to be a teacher now.  You can do it in school or with School Direct.  There are all sorts of methods to become a teacher, so there is no reason why somebody should not become a teacher.  They might start as unqualified and work towards qualification so, within a year, even whilst working, you can gain the qualification, so that is probably why there are fewer now, because it is easier. 

Henry Stewart: Although you might join as unqualified, why would you not want to be qualified?

Gabriel Sahlgren: If it does not matter, why would you want to be qualified?  Can I just add something on the freedoms that might have an impact?  We cannot just look at the English evidence and what the Labour academies did but, if you do look at the successful charter schools, again it seems to be the case that, in order to improve achievement in the tail of the distribution, this no‑excuse paradigm is very good—longer school days, longer school years, using diagnostic tests to drive instruction, parent/teacher contracts and so on and so forth. 

Up until now, we did not have good evidence of whether or not those practices were actually responsible for the KIPP success or for the Harlem Children’s Zone success but, up until about a year ago, when a Harvard professor injected these practices into the failing state schools in Houston, or some of them, the improvements were just as large there.  It seems to be the case that those specific policies are very good for pupils who are low achieving.  We cannot say that would necessarily translate into positive effects for high‑achieving pupils.

Dr Silva: Very briefly, longer teaching days and a longer teaching year implies that you also need to have a slightly more flexible management of your workforce, so that helps as well—how you manage your teachers.  Surely that is part of the freedom that allows academies to do better. 

Another thing that emerges from the charter literature that Gabriel is referring to is a focus on a few specific core subjects—maths, science, English—before broadening out your curriculum.  This seems to be particularly helpful, especially for children at the bottom end of distribution.  There is the philosophy that ARK espouses, “depth before breadth”.  That is exactly the idea the no‑excuse idea that Gabriel was mentioning. 

Having said that, once again I want to caution this US evidence.  It works for urban schools that belong to these chartered groups; it does not work across the board.  Applying this no‑excuse strategy in rural schools or more affluent neighbourhoods in the United States seems to produce zero effect, counter or failing effects.  If we think about the sponsor and the converter academies—20% are sponsored and 80% now are converters—we need to draw some worrying lines about where we could expect to see some positive effects and where, for the vast majority of cases, we might not see anything work.

Gabriel Sahlgren: Can I just say it is not about the urban/rural divide?  It is about the socioeconomic area when you compare it.  It depends on the pupils you educate.

Q348   Neil Carmichael: US chartered schools obviously were a precursor to the academies and free schools.  First of all, I cannot find any description of the way in which they are governed at school level.  Does anybody know the answer to that?  No?

Dr Silva: Similarly to academies.

Henry Stewart: When you visit them, can you ask them about their levels of exclusion?  They often have levels that simply would not be acceptable in this country.

Dr Silva: No, they are very low, because they have a charter, which is a contract that they write with the founding authorities, whereby a specific group of pupils are identified and they are responsible for improving those pupils’ attainment.  That is the fundamental difference.  In 15% of cases, they do not do that and they do not renew the charter, so they go belly up.  We need to think about whether we want to do the same in this country, because it is threat of closure, with the specific charter that you either improve this lot of children or you are out, that seems to do the trick. 

Gabriel Sahlgren: Again, not always, because some of those schools underperform and some of those schools do perform.  I am not necessarily sure that it is the threat of closure that makes the KIPP schools perform well.

Q349   Neil Carmichael: Anyway, research about these schools in the United States seems to focus on three drivers to improvement.  One is lengthening the school day.  One is this question of a system of small rewards and small punishments, in terms of discipline policy.  One is a robust and very clear academic policy statement for the school.  My question really is: in your experience, do those three things, or any one of those three things, apply to the academies and free schools here and to what effect?

Gabriel Sahlgren: Can I just say that many of those things that you outline, in the research at least, do not seem to be that positive unless you also are very flexible with teachers and management?  In the kind of injection of these practices in public schools in Houston, which I mentioned, they fired all the headteachers and fired 45% of the teachers.  They used a specific formula to hire new ones.  The human capital level of those teachers was not that different, but it was new.  It was a radical change, and that is the same thing with school turnarounds.  The evidence there is also quite clear that it does not happen unless you get rid of the underperforming staff. 

Neil Carmichael: That is precisely why I asked the first question about leadership and governance of these schools in US charters, so I think we need to do some research on that. 

Gabriel Sahlgren: It is selective.  Obviously now in the state schools that you had in Houston, you had to fire because they were already there.  In the charter schools they set up, they had a very selective policy of how to hire their staff.

Dr Silva: There is in fact some evidence, which is probably the same as what Gabriel is talking about, that basically compares the performance of these standard charter schools with schools called pilots, which are very similar to charter schools with one specific difference, which is that they retain, in terms of their teaching staff, predominantly the standard public sector contracts, with rewards for talented teachers being less significant.  There is also less flexibility in terms of working hours and how to deploy their teachers.  Pilot schools do not do as well as chartered, so you need to combine both: these efforts, the no‑excuses contract, but also flexibility to deploy your teaching staff.

Q350   Neil Carmichael: Does anyone else want to comment on that question?  The next question is really following on from Pat.  Pat came up with a theory as to why there were so many academies, which is largely the relationship that our schools had with local authorities.  Reform, a pretty effective think tank in public services, has noted that 62% of academy heads said that their relationship with the local authority has stayed the same.  Now that begs the question: what was that relationship like before?  Does that reflect Pat’s point that nothing much was happening; there was little or no real result?  Are we really saying that academies are still thinking of the local authority as the final resort?  Or instead are we saying that the chain system is not quite mature enough to really give them that confidence?

Henry Stewart: The danger is that whatever support was there from local authorities is disappearing.  The Local Education Authority has been greatly slimmed down.  Where there are a lot of academies, they effectively are almost not seeing it as their role.  Our director of services in Hackney says they may not be in our schools anymore, but they are still our kids and the local authority should still have that responsibility.  It needs to have the resources; it needs to have the skills.  There is a great danger that is disappearing at the moment. 

Q351   Chair: Is there any evidence of that?  Has anyone actually mapped this?  It is an easy story to make.  It may be that some were freed from protecting the producer interest and have become more active champions of local people and education quality, even without large staff.  I am not saying it is the case, but have we got any evidence to sift that out and find out whether there is a correlation between the resource and the effectiveness?

Henry Stewart: It is a very interesting question.  I do not know about the local authority, but I know in the schools there is evidence of the link between the resource and the effectiveness, and that is another one of the reasons for London’s success.  That is a good question.  I do not know. 

Dame Sally Coates: I was just going to say that I have always had good relationships with local authorities but, in my previous school—I was a head before in another school, which was a good school—I always used to feel that all the money and resources used to go into the underperforming schools.  Maybe that is right and proper, but I did not really gain anything from the local authority, because they did not treat all their schools equally. 

Q352   Neil Carmichael: The question at the heart of your answer there is: did all the money going to the underperforming schools actually make those schools any better?

Dame Sally Coates: No, it did not—not in my understanding.

Q353   Neil Carmichael: That is the core of this debate, is it not?  That is useful evidence for us, because the question that is lurking around here is: are academies making a difference?  You are saying that, in the situation you were in before, underperforming schools in your local authority were not doing well.

Chair: Let Sally say it first. 

Dame Sally Coates: Very quickly, you can pump in loads of resources, but sometimes what you need to do is get rid of the head and move on a significant amount of teachers.  Just throwing in money does not make any difference.  You have to have the difficult conversation, and that is about the capability of the leadership quite often.  That is what local authorities did not do, in my experience. 

Q354   Alex Cunningham: We have had a very stimulating conversation this morning, but it has been very focussed on secondary education.  Less than one in five primaries have opted for academy status, so why aren’t these freedoms and autonomy attractive to them, when they actually have the basic problems that everybody else has?

Dame Sally Coates: It is too scary.  They are smaller institutions.  They do not have the amount of resources that a secondary school has in the school themselves. 

Alex Cunningham: There are chains.

Dame Sally Coates: Some of them are joining chains, but they are a bit more worried about going alone.

Alex Cunningham: That is where the challenges are for the children.

Dr Silva: It is a very important point, because we know that the most important cards the children can play are basically those that they play at the early stages of education.  If academies are effective, and once again it is probably a bit too early to judge—only Labour experiences have been properly evaluated—I see no reason why primary schools should not be incentivised to join.  To undo some of these worries and this concern, maybe enter the most effective groups.  It would be important because, if children are underperforming at primary school, the chances for a secondary school to close the gap are very slim, so we need to act fast.

Chair: Can I thank all four of you very much for giving evidence today?  Could we switch as quickly as possible to the next panel?  Thank you very much. 

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Professor Anne West, Director, Education Research Group, LSE, Sam Freedman, Director, Research, Evaluation & Impact, Teach First, Christine Gilbert, Chief Executive, London Borough of Brent, and Mike Cladingbowl, Director of Schools, Ofsted, gave evidence.

Q355   Chair: Good morning.  Welcome.  Thank you for joining us today.  I think you have had the opportunity to hear the discussion with the first session.  Can I ask you about children with special educational needs?  Are the interests of children with SEN being forgotten in the scramble towards academy status?  Would anyone like to say something about that?

Professor West: I think it is very encouraging what has been happening with academies and the legislative changes that have recently taken place with the Children and Families Act.  It is an excellent idea to override some of the funding agreements.  It is something that could be generalised further across academies too so, where there is a need for there to be similar practices in place, this is a way to go.  Their position will be that children who have statements of special educational need will be in a different and better position than they would otherwise have been.

Mike Cladingbowl: From our evidence from school inspections, there is nothing to suggest that different types of school, whether they are maintained schools, academies or free schools, are doing any better or poorer with special educational needs children.  As you know, it is one of the key things we look at when we do a school inspection.

Q356   Chair: Different topic: conflicts of interest.  We had a brief discussion in the last session about trustees perhaps having links to companies that then contract with schools.  Are there other areas of risk for conflicts of interest?  For instance, CfBT and Serco are both contractors to Ofsted, and are then involved in sponsoring academies.  Are there potential conflicts of interest there?  Has there ever been an inspection by an inspector of a school with which it is associated, for instance?

Mike Cladingbowl: No, categorically not.  It is right that some of the contractors are involved in different ways with other bits of the education system.  In the past, for example, they have run Local Education Authority services and they have taken them over and so on.  Similarly, there have been instances over the years when some contracted inspectors have acted as consultants, and sometimes that is a good thing for schools, particularly struggling schools, but they always do it outside their own jurisdiction.  There are very clear and strict rules contractually about who is allowed to do what, and they are not allowed to mark their own homework or park their own cars in someone else’s back yard.

Chair: Christine, any thoughts on conflicts of interest, wherever they may be found within the academy system?

Christine Gilbert: I do not think I have much to add.  When we were doing the Academies Commission report, which was probably about 18 months ago, and things do move on, the key issue was governors’ lack of understanding about their new responsibilities and their legal responsibilities as part of that.  I have not seen much evidence of conflict of interest as I have gone around the country.  Certainly when I was at Ofsted, there was clear demarcation in roles and responsibilities, in terms of the contractors who were doing inspection provision.

Q357   Caroline Nokes: No doubt you heard most of the evidence from our previous panel, and there was quite a lot of discussion about raising the tail.  Some of the evidence that we have shows that attainment levels in academies might be achieved by further improving the results at the top end.  Can you provide any specific evidence that disadvantaged children do better in academies?

Mike Cladingbowl: It is a complicated story this and, of course, early days in many ways.  The last panel rightly distinguished between sponsored academies and converter academies because, in many ways, they are very different things, although there is some crossover, and then of course maintained schools.  We know that, in converter academies, headline success rates—GCSE results and so on—are generally better and attainment is higher in those schools, as is attainment for free‑school‑meals children.  However, the gap between free‑school‑meals children and the rest in those schools can be greater than in other schools.  Of course, that is partly because the schools that have converted to become academies were “good” or “outstanding” schools, so they are generally good schools, so everybody is doing better there, but the rate at which people are catching up we think needs to improve, as it does in all other schools. 

For sponsored academies, interestingly, although overall attainment is poorer, the gap is smaller.  That is partly because nobody is doing very well, certainly not at the top end.  Having said that, our evidence is that, for those sponsored academies that have been around for some time—and I remember going into some of the early ones and inspecting them personally—they have made a significant difference to all the children, including those with free school meals.  We are increasingly gathering evidence, which we will say a bit more about in next year’s annual report, about individual examples of where schools are doing some remarkable things.

Christine Gilbert: Could I just add to that, with the caveat that I gave you at the beginning, Chairman, about the research being 18 months ago?  When we looked at this in the Academies Commission, we were surprised not to see more improvement from academies.  We could find, as Mike has just said, individual examples.

Chair: Sponsored or converter, to stick with the distinction?

Christine Gilbert: Sponsored.  We could find individual examples of schools.  We could not find at system level much, as we looked, of that sort of difference coming through.  When we found improvement in sponsored academies, we could find similar improvement in groups of schools in other local authorities and so on.  It is what you are doing that is the key, not just whether the designation is X or Y.

Sam Freedman: It is important to distinguish not only between sponsored and converters but different types of structure within the sponsored academies.  The University of Southampton just had a report that shows that centralised chains do better than other types of academies.  If we are saying that sponsored academies do roughly similarly to other schools overall, that would suggest centralised chains doing better than the average.

Q358   Chair: It would also suggest that those that are not part of those chains are doing worse than the average.

Sam Freedman: Yes.  That begs the question about the organisation within the concept of sponsored academies and whether we should be thinking more about chains.

Q359   Bill Esterson: In his written evidence to us, Henry Stewart told us that when academies are compared with maintained comprehensives with the same level of disadvantage, their results are worse, especially when there is a like-for-like comparison on GCSE equivalents.  Does that tie in with your own research and experiences?

Sam Freedman: It is quite dangerous to completely strip out equivalents when you are doing that kind of analysis, because the sponsored academies took over schools that were heavily reliant on equivalents and it takes quite a long time to change your curriculum, because obviously you have a couple of year groups who are already following that path.

Bill Esterson: It is including converters though.

Sam Freedman: I am talking about sponsored academies only.  If you include equivalents, they do slightly better.  If you take out equivalents, they do roughly the same or fractionally worse.  We can say that, overall, sponsored academies are doing pretty similarly to other schools but, as I say, there is a group of those sponsored academies that are doing better.

Q360   Caroline Nokes: A couple of you have referred to specifically remarkable things being done in academies and to what is happening in them.  Can you give any examples of specific initiatives that are taking place to narrow the gap?

Mike Cladingbowl: There are lots and they are diverse.  We have done a bit of work looking at schools in the North East, which I will share with the Committee if that would be helpful, following today.  We looked at a number of primary schools in particular, which were doing some different things.  One was focusing on some basic literacy teaching and going hammer and tongs at that.  Another was adopting an approach that was more about ensuring that each child was supported and that the families were being supported well, and so on.  I think different schools are doing very different things, depending on their circumstances. 

I am glad you asked about what individual schools are doing because, in the previous session when you asked a question about the big innovations that are happening out there, what we are finding is that it is less big innovations or big single ideas, but people doing lots of little things right, so changing 100 things a small bit rather than trying to change one thing 100%.

Christine Gilbert: I would endorse that to some degree.  I was fascinated—I was not there for the whole session—to hear the example from Sally Coates about Maths Mastery, which is exactly the one example we used in the Academies Commission report.  There are no great innovations going on in that particular way.  Where I would probably disagree with Mike is that I do not think people are doing different things.  Success is not really rocket science; it is just how they are doing it and the consistency with which people are doing it, and the moves to which the learning from one another is routine within the school and across schools.  It seems to me that is the big innovation you alluded to in the earlier session, Chairman, about how you really get a self‑improving system going and sustained.

Q361   Alex Cunningham: I am delighted that Mike mentioned primary schools.  I just whispered into the Chairman’s ear that we are in danger of getting into a secondary conversation instead of an academies conversation.  I am just interested in whether there is real evidence that primary converters are making the difference and performing better than primary schools otherwise?

Mike Cladingbowl: Ofsted’s inspection evidence would say that it is too early for us to say that.  We know that around 58% or so of secondary schools are academies, the bulk of which are converter academies.  They used to be “good” and “outstanding” schools, but only a little more than 10% of primary schools have converted, so it is really just too early for us to say.  We are certainly not finding any big difference in terms of the inspection outcomes when we inspect a school that is a maintained school or a school that has converted.

Alex Cunningham: There are ones that have been academies for about three years now.

Mike Cladingbowl: There are very few of them.  In exactly the same way as we would not want to use our evidence to support a view, one way or the other, that free schools were doing a great job or not overall, as a system change, in the same way nor would we want to say whether or not converting to academy status is having that big impact in primary schools. 

One of the points that Sally made earlier on was that there has been, over the years, a very different culture in secondary schools and in primary schools.  Secondary headteachers, for example, and I know you will want to focus on them—I was one, as were others here—were used to exercising a degree of freedom and autonomy, recognising that the two things are not always the same, way back when I left secondary headship in 2002.  That was not the case, certainly not at that point, in primary schools.  There was a very different kind of relationship that they had with local authorities. 

Q362   Caroline Nokes: How would you respond to the suggestion that sponsored academies are improving their results by attracting more able children?

Professor West: There is some evidence to suggest that was the case.  Whether it still is, I do not know, but certainly there is some evidence to suggest that.  That is not necessarily a bad thing, because the schools were initially schools that were failing and had very disadvantaged intakes.  Seeking to get more of a mix is likely to be beneficial all round. 

Q363   Alex Cunningham: Are you sure it is not a bad thing?  They end up getting displaced.  The children who might have been destined for that particular school are displaced and end up in a poorer school 

Professor West: That is an argument, yes.

Mike Cladingbowl: Before you jump in, on that particular one, certainly my experience of schools that have become a sponsored academy because they were performing really poorly beforehand is that they rarely are so full that they turn anyone away.  You are right that, certainly outside of London, the better the school gets, the more popular it becomes.  There comes a tipping point in all schools where that becomes problematic but, in the main, sponsored academies spend a number of years—certainly outside of London—filling up their pupil places. 

Sam Freedman: The first point I wanted to make is that sponsored academies have higher proportions of children on free school meals than other schools in their area.  That is still very much the case.  Also, a change in balance, as Anne was saying, is not a bad thing if you are looking for a comprehensive system.  You do not want schools that are dominated by particular socioeconomic groups; you want it to be as representative of the area as possible.  If that is happening, that is an improvement, I would say.

Christine Gilbert: Sometimes when the reputation of the school improved, it attracted back parents who would have moved their children out of the area.

Q364   Mr Ward: I have a couple of questions on regional variations.  I looked at the regional variations that exist in terms of the attainment gap.  Are there any reasons why those gaps exist, in your own view?  What is happening?

Mike Cladingbowl: We have reported quite extensively on this in the Access and Achievement 20 Years On report, which I am sure you know of.  We talked about regional variation.  We talked, as you know, about coastal towns and about how the shift in under‑achievement, particularly for free‑school‑meals children, has occurred from what were in the main inner cities—a generalisation, I know, but they were inner cities—to coastal towns and, in some instances, more advantaged areas. 

It is also interesting, when you look at the distribution of academies—of which the bulk are secondary, of course—across the regions too that, for example, there are far fewer converter academies in the North West of England than there are in the East Midlands or in the North East, Yorkshire and Humber.  Conversely, those that do convert in the North West tend to do much better, so the picture is pretty mixed.  I am not sure we have got a full handle on it.  It is one of the reasons why Ofsted moved to a regional structure: so that we could work more closely with those schools and those who represent schools in each area, so that we can challenge more to be “good”. 

In the end, the key question here for us is not whether or not an academy is necessarily doing any better than a maintained school.  The key thing for us is that children, whether they have free school meals or not, will do better in good schools.  There are still too many schools in this country that are not good.  That is where a lot of the effort that we are putting in is going. 

Q365   Mr Ward: There is obviously regional variation in maintained schools across the piece, but specifically in terms of the converter academies there is no clear evidence as to why there are variations across the piece.

Mike Cladingbowl: It could just be a feature of the schools that have decided to convert, I guess.  Again, I do not think that the schools that have converted have been converted long enough for us to be able to argue that there are particular features or characteristics that determine that school’s performance against another region’s school, apart from the quality of leadership and teaching.

Sam Freedman: The areas that tend to be underperforming around the country conform to a pattern of being smaller towns with 50,000 to 100,000 people that have bad transport links and often do not have a university or anything like that as a cultural centre.  One of the reasons those areas are struggling—they can be coastal, but not necessarily—is firstly they find it very difficult to recruit high‑quality teachers.  That is something Teach First is very interested in doing more about.  Also, they do not have any existing outstanding schools in those areas around which to base a hub—a nucleus of either an academy chain or a different type of federation.  That is probably why it is harder.

Mr Ward: It mirrors the variations that maintained schools would have.

Sam Freedman: In London, if you have a lot of outstanding schools already, you can get them to take over other schools and become chains.  You can build up around hubs.  If you do not have those schools to start with, it is much harder for that kind of policy to work. 

Q366   Chair: Could academisation be yet another urban, metropolitan‑based model that gets imposed everywhere, works in the urban areas, but could even be counterproductive in the rural and coastal areas, where you just physically have not got enough other institutions proximate to it?

Sam Freedman: There is a model of chain that can work outside an urban area, but there are not very many of those types of chains yet.  That is an area where a lot of work needs to be done to work out how that can function.

Mike Cladingbowl: There are two things I would add, if I may.  One is that you need a stock; you need something on which to build.  There are too many parts of England where, as we have said, there are too few “good” or “outstanding” schools on which you can build the kinds of things that Sam and others are talking about.  That is why, for me, the main thing has got to be to get the schools to be good, first of all, and then at least we have something to work with.

In terms of the overall variation, it is striking that most of the sponsor‑led academies in London are “good” or better, at 86% of them, compared with only a third of similar schools in the East of England.  I do not think that supports fully the argument that you were putting forward, because similarly you have got 94% of converter academies in the North West at “good” or better, compared with 79% in Yorkshire and Humber.  I do not think there are any firm conclusions you can draw from any of that.

Christine Gilbert: We found no evidence at all that academisation did anything unless you did a number of other things at the same time.  The point about the issues in coastal towns is the same for academies or schools that are not academies.  It is really interesting to hear you talk so positively and warmly about the chains, because we did not find, even with a centralised model, the impact that you are describing at all.  We saw some really good chains, such as ARK.  We saw some really poor ones.  I could have told you a year ago what would happen to some of those chains, because their focus was not sufficiently on learning.  It was very managerial and the focus was not sufficiently on teaching. 

Sam Freedman: I think that is the important distinction.  If you centralise, it means they have a pedagogical and talent‑management focus, and where they are just doing back‑office services, there is nothing to drive education improvement.  The ones that have done less well are, like you are saying, the ones that did not focus on those things.

Q367   Chair: Andreas Schleicher last week said to us that, internationally, they have found evidence that where autonomy made a difference was when it came down to school level, which suggested that, rather than the KIPP or chain model, school‑level autonomy was the common factor, combined with accountability and various other system design issues.  It was school‑level autonomy that appeared to be most often linked to improved outcomes for young people.  I thought that was very interesting in the light of the positive evidence here about chains.

Sam Freedman: All of the PISA evidence shows that autonomy from government around finance seems to have a positive effect, but it does not actually say anything about the organisation of schools, because not very many countries have something like chains, so you could not draw conclusions.

Mike Cladingbowl: I can see why that might be the case, because it is the exercise of autonomy presumably, rather than autonomy itself, that makes the difference.  That is then down to the people and down to the people who are leading those schools.  If you have good strong leaders in schools, regardless of the type of school it is, they will do better.

Q368   Pat Glass: Can I ask you about teachers, teaching and their impact on closing the gap?  The Harvard School of Education evidence on the value added from teachers suggests that there is no relationship between the value added by a teacher and a higher degree—a masters degree, etc.—but there is a very strong relationship between the value added by a teacher and if they came from a highly selective university.  Sam, we know that most Teach First teachers are in and out of the classroom and gone within five years.  Should Teach First not be focusing more on attracting teachers from selective universities, rather than teachers with better qualifications?

Sam Freedman: Qualifications do not play a big role in the selection process.  You have to have a 2:1 degree, but actually we test on a set of competences in an assessment centre that we think are linked to teaching.  Just to challenge on the point around coming and going, in more recent cohorts over half have stayed beyond five years and two-thirds stay for a third year after the programme.  We are seeing staying in teaching going up, which is quite interesting.  You have to expect, if you are going to bring in people from selective universities, that they are going to be sought after, but actually they tend to be staying in the classroom.  If they are not staying in the classroom, a lot of them are working in education, setting up their own charities and so on.  I do not think we differ that much from other routes. 

Q369   Pat Glass: Is Teach First a long‑term effective means of raising teacher quality?

Sam Freedman: Yes.  We have only been going 11 years, but we have evidence that the participants themselves have a very positive impact.  The Institution of Education study last year showed that.  We also can see that a lot of them who have stayed in the classroom are going into middle and senior leadership now.  There are 10 headteachers now who have been through Teach First; they are about 500 heads of department, so you can see a longer term impact.  It is not just about those two years. 

Q370   Pat Glass: Is Ofsted seeing the same?

Mike Cladingbowl: We are not tracking those particular teachers in any way.  We look at newly qualified teachers.  When we visit schools, we gather evidence about how well they are doing and we use that to inform the next inspection of initial teacher education from which they have come.  We have not done that yet and we do not inspect in that way at the moment.

Q371   Pat Glass: Do you think it might be a good idea to have a look at that?

Mike Cladingbowl: We have quite a lot on at the moment, but it is something that we are very interested in and that Sir Michael Wilshaw has spoken about.  The importance of getting good teachers into schools is probably only second to the importance of getting good leaders into schools.

Q372   Chair: Do you have any reflections on this 2:1 bar?  To get a bursary now, you have to have a 2:2; it does not matter from what institution.  Is there a correlation there?  If the Harvard evidence is to be believed, then a third from Cambridge might be rather better than a 2:1 from an awful lot of other institutions. 

Mike Cladingbowl: In terms of what we have seen in schools, we do not have any data, but my instincts and my experience tell me that teachers need to be able to do at least two things.  One is they need to know the subject that they are teaching.  That is pretty important, and that depends a little where you teach and the age range you teach.  That is not about knowing more or understanding deeper; it is knowing different ways of teaching that knowledge. 

That brings me to the second thing, which is that they need to be able to teach.  There is a variety of different ways that people get that.  I have seen teachers who are absolutely fantastic but who do not have great academic qualifications.  Similarly, I remember a teacher I worked with—I hope he does not recognise who he is—who had a brain the size of the planet but was not very good at teaching. 

Increasingly people are realising, though, that you must have specialists in most instances.  I will give an example of that.  If you are talking to a teacher or a group of teachers about their performance, it is not difficult, if you visit a lesson—and I know that some people are not keen for us to do so—to know if the lesson is going well or not.  It is not that difficult to know if the children have got their heads in their hands or if they are scribbling in the books they are looking at or whatever it may be.  It is much harder, unless you know something about the subject and you know something about the craft of teaching that particular subject, to explain to that teacher how you improve.  I think specialism is important, but you do not need to get it by going to Oxford, Cambridge or Harvard.

Christine Gilbert: In terms of the first question about Teach First, it is absolutely clear, certainly at secondary level—probably primary is taking a bit longer to come through, but I do not have the same evidence of that—that Teach First has had a terrific impact—a phenomenal impact, I think. 

Q373   Pat Glass: Is it a long‑term impact, Christine?

Christine Gilbert: When you talk to schools that have really seen a dramatic increase, it is amazing the number of them that point to Teach First as being a key element of that improvement.  I would expect it to have a long‑term improvement, and I think it is in the way that the selection has been described, but I also think it is the support, development and training they get, as they are learning on the job.

Q374   Pat Glass: In this Committee, one of the things we consistently return to is how we get the specialist teachers in core subjects—those committed, motivated teachers—from the more selective universities into the most challenged schools, because that is where our problem is.  We stress about what is happening at the top, but that is not our problem; our problem is what is happening at the bottom.  Given that we are about recommendations, have you got practical solutions that you can share with us about how we get those committed individuals from the most selective universities into our most challenged schools?

Chair: And how that fits into academies.

Pat Glass: I am asking about closing the gap. 

Sam Freedman: Actually, the reason why certain sponsored academy chains do well, as has been discussed a bit in the last session, is because they can do talent management.  They can do what single schools cannot do and find career pathways for people that they want to keep hold of.  That is probably the main reason why they are able to be successful.  That can go all the way through to training them up to be heads in their schools.

Mike Cladingbowl: I am sure that is right.  The issue remains, though, of where it is going to start.  Where is the seed going to be planted?  Where is the rootstock?  For that model to work, you would need to have enough multi‑academy trusts or groups of schools in the right places, not focussed all in a narrow and specific geographical area to the exclusion of the areas that we cannot get the best teachers to go to.  It is a combination of things around using teaching schools and developing partnerships, including multi‑academy trusts, in those poorer performing areas, but you have to get the schools to be “good” or “outstanding” in the first place, because that is the first thing that needs to happen. 

Q375   Pat Glass: That is happening in chains of academies and that is possible simply because they are chains.  It did used to be possible to do that, to some extent, in local authorities, but that changed some years ago and schools became responsible for their own employment policies.  Do we need to look at those schools that are going to remain within the maintained sector and look at some way of having those kinds of career pathways and that talent management across a group of schools in the maintained sector?  This is not about offloading your worst teachers.

Mike Cladingbowl: I would not think we would want to have one system for one set of schools and another for another.  That would not make much sense to me.  As cited often in the French system, for example, teachers are sent, frankly, wherever they are needed; they have some choice in that, but often they will end up in one bit of France and they come from a different one.

Chair: As Teach First does now.

Mike Cladingbowl: Indeed.  That then starts to sound a bit like the call that Sir Michael Wilshaw made some time ago for a national service for headteachers or the notion that you would deploy headteachers in some of the poorer performing areas.  Now, that is something that he has said before.  If you were to adopt such a policy, there may well be many problems with it but, if you were to do so, similarly you could do the same for teachers, but you would need to incentivise it in some way.  You have to make it attractive.  People do not go to work in these schools, I think, because they do not want to work in these schools.  They are exercising some choice. 

Pat Glass: It is not working now, so anything that improves that is worth exploring.

Christine Gilbert: One of the virtues of Teach First is that you are almost joining a club.  There are opportunities across schools to work together.  I think more opportunities for teachers to work across schools in the way that you have described would be good.  Certainly in the primary sector, it is really important that schools are working together, but in a very focussed way, so that they are developing practice together—peer review and peer inspection across schools.  Even English teacher to English teacher working across is helpful in that way.  I was stunned by the debate on professional development earlier.  There is not a single school that I know that is a “good” or “outstanding” school that does not consider professional development as the core of their work, so I would see professional development as absolutely key, and innovating for young teachers and developing teachers working across schools.

Mike Cladingbowl: On that one, your point about doing something different or trying something, we have said before, and it remains the case, that we are concerned there is a lack of strategic intent, or so it appears, to make sure teaching schools and so on are in the right places.  We are very much calling for somebody to take a good long, hard look at that, including the National College, if needs be, to make sure there is some good thinking about how we can use the levers that exist already to make sure that we are training and developing teachers in the right places.

Sam Freedman: Another recommendation, if you want one, would be to be encouraging federation that does not necessarily have to be through multi‑academy trusts.  You have a lot of primary schools out there that, for whatever reason, do not want to become academies but they could federate.  If they federated, they would be able to do some of the things that academy trusts can do.

Pat Glass: I worked for a while under the London Challenge and it was not an easy place to work, for all kinds of reasons, but one of the things that I recall was the families of schools and the way in which there was peer‑to‑peer support across schools.  Something like London Challenge and Teach First, if we can take the best of those things and spread it across the maintained schools as well as the academies, would help with getting teachers into the best schools and the most challenged schools.

Christine Gilbert: In fact, yesterday evening Toby Greany, at the Institute of Education, gave his inaugural lecture and gave a number of really practical suggestions for working across schools.  One of his suggestions, for instance, was that, instead of teaching schools being designated individually, teaching school alliances might be designated.  There were a number of very practical suggestions in that lecture, which it might be helpful for the Committee to look at.

Q376   Bill Esterson: Mike, you make this point that schools would need to become “good” or “outstanding” first, before you could attract the better teachers to work in the most demanding schools.  Some of the comments since then may have indicated how you do that, but it seems to me quite hard to do unless you get the best teachers in.  It is quite hard to get to “good” or “outstanding”.

Mike Cladingbowl: Our experience of inspecting schools over the years—we have been doing between 6,500 and 7,000 school inspections each year for the last 20 years or so—absolutely shows us that there are plenty of teachers in our schools who are not flourishing; they are not being well led, which was Christine’s point about their not being provided with sufficient training, continuous professional development and so on.  Too often, we are finding still in “requires improvement” schools behaviour is getting in the way.  The schools are not the orderly places that they need to be.  Now, once heads start to tackle some of those basic issues, then they create the conditions in which teachers can flourish and where good teaching can flourish too.  It is not all doom and gloom.  There are plenty of good teachers out there.

Bill Esterson: It is about the leadership. 

Q377   Neil Carmichael: The question needs to be explored in terms of GCSE equivalents.  Do you think that academies have actually been making use of the equivalents to upgrade their overall performance in league table terms?

Chair: Sponsored academies in particular. 

Christine Gilbert: We found that they were using equivalents but, in some ways, it was understandable that they had been looking for qualifications and programmes that were particularly relevant and would engage the students.  I know that this was a criticism.  We were working at the time that the baccalaureate had just been introduced.  My feeling was that, where they had used it well, it had raised self‑esteem and confidence, and you would probably have seen good performance also at GCSE.  The move away from equivalents generally has been a good one.  It has been positive, but I would not say necessarily there was a feeling that these schools, therefore, would do really badly.  I felt that, where academies and maintained schools had used them and had the confidence, and the achievement of the children had engendered a success, it would continue into the new system.

Chair: Does anyone else want to pick up on that over‑reliance on equivalents?

Sam Freedman: As I said earlier, they took over schools that were very reliant on equivalent qualifications.  It takes quite a long time, because you have a workforce; the curriculum is designed around those qualifications.  It takes time.  Actually, a lot of academies, including Sally’s, have been on a journey where they have moved from being quiet about most qualifications.  As they have improved, they have become less reliant on them over time.  Now of course, as of this year, no one will be able to be reliant on them, because most of them will no longer appear in league tables.

Q378   Neil Carmichael: On the other side of the coin, on this reliance on GCSE results, is that not working against vocational training and vocational directions of travel?

Chair: Will we see a collapse in vocational education?

Sam Freedman: I think it depends on whether you think those vocational qualifications were actually vocational.  A lot of them were just less good academic qualifications.  You were still doing exams; they just were not as good as the GCSE.  Genuine vocational is quite hard to do at 14 to 16, I think, in a school setting.  We have some UTCs now that are set up to do that, but it is quite hard to do that in a normal school setting.  Post‑16 is obviously very different, and that is where you do need a very strong vocational offer.

Q379   Neil Carmichael: One of the other issues that lurks around is the lack of STEM subjects in certainly A‑levels and GCSEs.  Do you think the fact that, for example, only 28% of A‑levels this year are in STEM subjects is a commentary on the time it is taking to put more emphasis on those subjects, or do you think that there are other pressures here?

Chair: We will leave that in the air and move on, unless someone has something they burningly want to say about STEM and academies?

Q380   Pat Glass: Can I ask you about the impact of the EBacc in academies?  The DfE has told us that the number of children sitting GCSEs in EBacc subjects has doubled to 22% in sponsored academies but, when we break that down a little, we can see that, in converters, 43.3% of pupils have now entered for an EBacc subject as compared with 33% in maintained schools.  However, what the Committee has been told is that there is a great difference between entered and achieving.  When you break that down further, students in academies are less likely than those in maintained schools to get an A to C in subjects like history and geography.  Does it surprise you that children in maintained schools are actually doing better in EBacc subjects than children in academies—not in being entered but in achieving?

Mike Cladingbowl: I would be interested to look at that data, because it does surprise me, insofar as most converter academies were “good” or “outstanding” schools, and generally were high‑attaining and still are, following a range of traditional subjects, in many cases.  Why they would now be doing less well than those students who are at a maintained school is an interesting question, but I will have a look at it and can get back to you.

Chair: I think it is sponsored academies, rather than academies overall.

Mike Cladingbowl: That would absolutely make sense.  If it was sponsored academies, absolutely I could see why that is the case, because the children will have probably come from poor levels of prior attainment and half have got free school meals and so on.

Q381   Pat Glass: Does it suggest that sponsored academies are putting children in for subjects that they are just not going to succeed at?  Does that worry you?

Mike Cladingbowl: It would worry me if that is what they were doing, but we have not got any evidence that is the case.  I would be happy to have a look.  I am very happy to look at what you give and then give you a written answer, if that would help. 

Christine Gilbert: It depends on the teaching.  You can teach history well or badly, so I do not think the subject of itself means it should not be taught to a particular group of children.  I say that as an ex‑history teacher.  You may have already picked up the impact of modules going, but I am only picking it up on the ground now.  I have spoken to a number of schools in the last couple of months as they are approaching GCSE.  While many of them are very positive about the changes in terms of coursework, they are saying the impact of the demise of modules is really significant in terms of the children’s interest and confidence.  In particular schools where they have made great advances in recent years, the fact that the children have not got a couple of modules under their belt, as it were, by now is having a real impact.

Q382   Pat Glass: Do you think the pendulum is almost swinging too far?  It went too far over to this side with reliance upon equivalents, and now it is swinging too far in the other direction and children are losing out, because we are pushing them towards subjects that they are just not going to succeed in.  What is the impact going to be on their wellbeing?

Christine Gilbert: I think it is really important that children have a balanced education, so it depends on what those subjects are.  I am not an advocate necessarily of EBacc, but I do think they should have a balanced education.  I would endorse the points made earlier about the importance of focusing on the basics: unless children can read and write, they are not going to have access to a whole range of subjects.  A focus on the basics is important, but I then think it is really important that children have a whole range of knowledge and experiences in school.

Q383   Caroline Nokes: Turning to admissions, is not the easiest way to get better results to admit better children in the first place?  If schools are responsible for their own admissions criteria, will not the temptation to do this be overwhelming?

Professor West: Yes.  There is evidence to suggest that schools that do have autonomy over admissions are more likely to have more varied admissions criteria.  I would say that the major concern in the past has been about schools with a religious character, so not necessarily sponsored academies, for example.  Some of those have been at the forefront in trying to get a mixed, balanced intake, representative of the community that they serve.  There are some quite interesting findings about admissions to sponsored academies in terms of the proportion that are using bands, and the proportion that are using random allocation and so on.  Having said that, on the other hand, quite a high proportion comparatively—we are talking about very small numbers—also select a proportion on the basis of aptitude in a subject area.  I suspect that is likely to be related to the fact that, when sponsored academies first came in, they had to have a specialism, and so this was used as an opportunity to reinforce that specialism.

Q384   Caroline Nokes: You would say that there is more of an issue with the converter academies than the sponsored ones.

Professor West: It depends what sort of segregation you are talking about.  One needs to look at different types of academies.  You do need to separate it out.  Among the converters, you then need to look at those that have the religious character and those that do not because, when they first convert to academy status, they will by and large be retaining the admissions criteria they had previously as maintained schools.  What we do not know is whether there is going to be a move to change admissions criteria in the future for those that are now converters.

Q385   Caroline Nokes: Can I ask if you were surprised by your findings that it had not increased segregation?

Professor West: The converter academies?

Caroline Nokes: Yes.

Professor West: Not really, no, because they had only just converted.  You expect there to be some continuity in terms of the segregation that there was before and the segregation now.  The converter academies may well use their freedoms to change their admissions criteria in the future, but we just do not know.  We did have a quick look to see what was happening now, compared with what was happening when we carried out our research that was reported in the Sutton Trust, and there were some minor changes.  Some converter academies were now giving priority to the children of staff, for example, or making sure that children who have statements of special educational need were included.  Obviously, there had been some clarification and some minor amendments, but this was on the basis of just a spot check, to be honest, so we cannot say yet.

Q386   Caroline Nokes: Have you found any evidence that autonomous schools are more likely than maintained schools to exclude children or encourage difficult children perhaps that they might do better elsewhere?

Professor West: We have not carried out research on that.  There is anecdotal evidence that there have been some concerns raised about what happens to children in academies, but that has been anecdotal.  It might be possible to get at some of that, but it is hard to, because it is likely—and this would be the case in maintained schools as well—that some children are going to be eased out, so to speak, if for some reason the school does not want them to remain in the school, so it is a difficult one.

Q387   Alex Cunningham: In an earlier question I asked about children going into academies and access for disadvantaged children.  The panel said that there was not really a problem but, with free schools, it seems to be quite a different bag.  In 2012, research showed that, on average, they would have less than half the number of children eligible free school meals within their schools.  Any idea why?

Professor West: Which sorts of academies are you talking about?

Alex Cunningham: Free schools.  Academies seem to be okay; free schools seem to have done appallingly. 

Professor West: It is difficult to say without actually looking at exactly what is going on in those particular areas, but it could be to some extent tied in with the location of the free schools.  That is one obvious thing that one would want to have a look at, but I have not carried out research specifically looking at that.  There is a range of possible explanations.

Sam Freedman: In those particular figures, a lot of the early free schools were actually independent schools that had converted and become free schools.  They still had most of their children in them from when they were independent schools, so it is not a very good sample to look at.  If you still have that kind of metric in a few years’ time, when there are 200 or 300 free schools, that is a real worry.  Looking at the early group, they are not particularly representative of what has happened now.

Alex Cunningham: They are a relatively small number, the independent converters.

Sam Freedman: The first group was actually quite a large number.  Now they are a relatively small number.  We need to wait a couple of years to see what happens when we have a big enough sample to see if that is a general problem.

Mike Cladingbowl: We have inspected 43 as of 17 March now, and 29 of those reports have been published.  Certainly in the last week or two I have looked at a number of free school reports, and the proportion of children who are attending them who are eligible for free school meals is quite high, and higher than the national picture.  As Sam says, it is really too early to draw any broad conclusions.  Sam is right that some of the early schools—I can think of one in Cheshire and one in Yorkshire—were either independent schools or were operating as independent schools and converted to become free schools and so on.  It is certainly not the experience on the ground that we are finding when we are inspecting these places, but it is an interesting one to watch out for. 

Q388   Alex Cunningham: I think so too.  I think that Anne suggested that perhaps it was where they had been located.  Maybe free schools are not being developed—I know they are in some areas, particularly in London—to target disadvantaged groups; generally speaking they tend to be in more affluent middle‑class areas.

Mike Cladingbowl: Only yesterday I read a report, which has not been published yet, concerning a school not in London but outside, and it is clearly taking on children who have struggled in other schools, including large proportions who are eligible for free school meals, special needs and so on.  Again, for every bit of evidence here, there is another bit of evidence over there, so it really is too early, from our evidence anyway.

Professor West: It is too early to generalise.  You may never be able to generalise because of the nature of free schools and where their particular ambitions are, for example. 

Q389   Alex Cunningham: Bearing in mind that these are still early days, is there anything that Government should be doing or we should be recommending in order to ensure that this trend for the improvement in that proportion actually continues?  Have you any recommendations?

Chair: The question was clear, but the answers are not forthcoming.

Sam Freedman: If you have a limited amount of money to pay for free schools, and it makes sense to focus them on the most disadvantaged areas, where those bids come through.  That should be a focus of the programme, definitely.

Professor West: Where there is a shortage of places as well. 

Mike Cladingbowl: You would expect me to say this, but we need to continue to inspect that.

Christine Gilbert: A specific recommendation from the Commission was that there should be some level of independent recourse for parents.  We were suggesting that the appeals process should have a greater level of independence.

Q390   Chair: You talked about where you should put them.  The obvious place is where there is a shortage of places, but also there was some criticism of places where there are quite a lot of spare spaces because the education is so poor.  Therefore, it could be said that that is exactly the place you want to put a free school to put a bit of additional challenge and improvement into the area.  Any reflections on that?

Mike Cladingbowl: The only thing, which I think came up at a previous Select Committee hearing on this subject, was the question of whether free schools are being set up in the main by parents, by educational charities, by other bodies and so on.  Some of the evidence that was presented then gave a sense that there has been a bit of a shift in all of that, but that is not necessarily a bad thing.  Free schools will operate presumably where there is a need for places, but also where people are dissatisfied with that which is being offered.  The important thing is that what is offered is good.

Q391   Bill Esterson: Who should monitor admissions then?

Professor West: Do you mean in terms of what exactly is going on at a local level?

Bill Esterson: To make sure that there is not segregation or any of the other things we have been talking about.

Christine Gilbert: I think the Chief Schools Adjudicator.  We were very impressed by the work of that team, and she has a key role to play in this.

Mike Cladingbowl: Whatever the broader structures are or are not, surely it is the governing bodies and responsible authorities for each school whose duty it is to make sure that their own and agreed admissions policies are kept to.  That is something that we would be keen on.

Professor West: I would go further than that, because I would say, at a local level, there needs to be some coherence so that parents actually are able to make informed choices.  If you look at what happens in some local authorities, it is really clear.  In some, it is really hard for parents, because admissions criteria vary so much.  Children might have to do numerous tests.  Parents might have to understand a whole range of different criteria, even distance for example, so it does not seem to be made easy for parents.  I was going to go back to the example that was given earlier of Hackney and the really very interesting work that Hackney has been doing in relation to making sure that predominantly academies in that local authority are all working together when it comes to, for example, banding arrangements.  It does make it easier for parents.  The system is complex for them and it needs to be made easier.

Q392   Pat Glass: Can I ask you about directed children, generally not the kind of children that schools are massively welcoming of?  In terms of academies, it appears to be an incredibly complex picture.  If you are a parent, you object to the Schools Adjudicator, but the Schools Adjudicator has no power; it has to go to the school’s funding agency for compliance.  Local authorities are telling us that it is just not worth the bother, so directed children are being directed at maintained schools.  Should there not be a common system right across the country, so that academies, maintained schools, trust schools or whatever take their fair share of directed children?

Professor West: I could not agree with you more.  In fact, reference was made to Sweden earlier, and recent legislation in Sweden has tried to ensure that what happens in the friskola is similar to what happens in the alternative schools.

Q393   Pat Glass: Is that a recommendation that you would all sign up to—one system for directed children?

Christine Gilbert: Absolutely.  There is a fair access protocol that local authorities should be using, but I would absolutely endorse that, and I would use the Schools Adjudicator for that.

Sam Freedman: I agree.  Actually, I would also agree with Christine’s point about having independent appeals.  It is sometimes necessary for academies to be their own admissions authority, but having an independent appeals process makes a lot of sense.

Professor West: If you look at the school admissions code, that is the one area where there is still considerable variation, so yes.

Q394   Pat Glass: The outcome of admissions appeals is binding on headteachers because, at the moment, that is not the case.

Chair: Should it be binding?

Alex Cunningham: Yes?

Christine Gilbert: Yes.

Chair: That was a yes from Christine; it should be binding on headteachers.  Anne?

Professor West: It has to be the same across all schools, so yes.

Mike Cladingbowl: I do not think this is something Ofsted has any evidence on.

Sam Freedman: As long as it is equivalent between all schools, then yes.

Chair: There are only so many arguments you can have with the Government at any one time.  Thank you all very much indeed for giving evidence to us this morning.

              Oral evidence: Academies and free schools, HC 981                            21