I recently became chair of governors at a secondary school which has just been put into special measures. The Headteacher had left a month or so before the inspection, so there were a number of changes afoot.
I have been a governor in a number of schools in the past and worked in governor services with several local authorities. Up to now, a school in special measures has been a hotbed of urgent action, support and accountability. This often included the following:
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The local authority appointed additional governors, or replaced the governing body with an IEB.
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A local authority task group was set up, with meetings every 4 to 6 weeks, checking progress with the action plan and challenging school leaders about specific issues including underperforming staff.
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Ofsted returned with a series of Section 8 inspections, checking progress and providing published letters showing what improvements were happening.
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The local authority allocated school improvement officers to give close hands-on oversight to improvements.
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Subject or curriculum expertise was provided to support weak subjects or departments.
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Ofsted came back with a section 5 inspection and, hopefully took the school out of special measures.
The main feature of all this is a sense of urgency, of action and a determination to fix things. After all, the children have only one chance at education and we owe it to them to do the right thing.
The 2016 Education and Adoption Act has changed all that. Now the government has provided the solution to all our problems, the panacea of all ills. The Regional Schools Commissioner will, at some point in the future known only to him or her, issue an academy order. An academy sponsor will be found who will take the school into a multi-academy trust.
In our case, I am expecting this process to take over a year. This is the pattern I have seen in other schools in similar circumstances. I have no objection to this course of action, but the academy sector does not exactly have a brilliant track record of improving schools in trouble. We therefore live in hope that one of the better sponsors can be found who will improve the school.
My real concern however, is what happens in the meantime. We will have no Section 8 inspections, very little help from a local authority stripped of resources, no task group, no sense of urgency, and no additional governors unless we can find them ourselves.
The politicians of course will simply brush these problems off with an assertion that the academy sponsor will resolve everything. In the meantime the children in our school have been abandoned.
They are dependent on us – our hard working governors and acting headteacher – to do what we can over the next year to help them learn, with very little external support and nothing like the determination and urgency for rapid improvement that once was the watchword in circumstances like ours.
I have no problem in principle with schools becoming academies, although I do see a real slow down in numbers of schools converting. However, government ministers are delusional if they think the new arrangements are better than before, providing better education and a better future for our children who deserve so much more.
Phil Hand
May 2017