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

Oral evidence, 19 March 2014.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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