Restructuring Education

In the run-up to the Government’s planned white paper on education, I hope to be publishing a few brief blog posts on the landscape of education leadership and management in England. This post focuses on the summary findings from the ESFA review led by Sir David Bell and published this week.

Summary: this review is very welcome and I am supportive of all the key recommendations.

My perspective is one of governance: I have been a long-term member of Essex Schools Forum, first as an elected representative of maintained primary schools, then as an elected representative of secondary academies. Throughout this time (and beyond) I have been involved in helping Essex shape its local funding formula and respond to the national funding formula. I have governance experience both in the maintained sector and in a single academy trust, and work with a new post-16 multi-academy trust through my workplace.

From the perspective of accountability of academy trusts, I think such a review has long been overdue, in particular over clarity of roles between the offices of the regional schools commissioners and the lines of accountability through academy funding agreements.

The findings suggest retaining ESFA’s funding delivery function as an Arms Length Body (ALB) while moving a considerable number of responsibilities to the DfE. This seems sensible. In particular, from a governance perspective, I wholeheartedly endorse the finding that “The Regional School Commissioners (RSCs) and ESFA work together to provide oversight of the school system; the RSCs focus on educational performance, ESFA on financial management, with both contributing to governance. This sometimes creates points of friction internally and a lack of clarity externally”. The proposal, to move all governance oversight not required to be at ESFA to the new regional DfE structures, also seems entirely reasonable. The review also recommends clarifying the relationship between Ofsted, the DfE and ESFA – my experience of this is that there is already clarity over the different roles of Ofsted versus the DfE and ESFA, although admittedly this knowledge is not widespread, even amongst school leaders.

In line with this move to the DfE, the proposal to move ownership of the Academy Trust Handbook to the DfE (unless scaled back to a purely financial management document) is also to be welcomed by governors and trustees.

The final sensible proposal I would highlight from the review aims to achieve greater alignment in dealing with complaints between the maintained and academy sector. As part of this process, I would urge the DfE to consider mandating a more uniform complaints policy at trust level for academies: although the model DfE policies are entirely reasonable, they are not statutory, and academies minimally complying with legislation set out in the Education (Independent School Standards)(England) Regulations 2014 essentially force complaints to be dropped or escalated to Ofsted or ESFA which could be dealt with at trust level under better procedures.

Of course there are bigger questions relating to the role of multi-academy trusts and local authorities and their interaction with the department for education, and I hope to cover some of these issues in future blog posts. But within the confines of our current system, these reforms seem very much worthwhile.