Schools Week wasn’t the only new kid on the block in September 2014. To little fanfare, eight regional school commissioners (RSCs) were appointed to oversee academies on behalf of an overwhelmed government.
Then academies minister Lord Nash spun the new commissioners – advised by headteacher boards – as the sector’s opportunity to “get control” of the academies system so “your future is in your hands and not some local bureaucracy”.
But ten years later, that control has gone full circle – mirroring a similar shift across academies too.
How did that happen? What can we learn? Schools Week chronicles the rise of the regional school commissioners…
Regulatory turf war
Tory education secretary Michael Gove put the rocket booster under New Labour’s academies programme after he took over in 2010.
Alongside academising failing schools, he opened up the route for all ‘good’ or better schools. There were 200 academies educating 192,000 pupils in 2010; by January 2015 that had grown to 5,000 academies educating 2.7 million pupils.
It was an “unexpected and … unmanageable pace”, says ex-Department for Education adviser Sam Freedman.
Gove had described his academies programme as “letting 1,000 flowers bloom”. But ministers were dragged into the weeds, making minor decisions on schools now under central government control. They needed help to do the gardening.
It was awkward for the Tories to introduce a new layer of bureaucracy. It didn’t fit with devolving power to the frontline.
They had also not long triumphantly abolished the nine government offices for the regions.
This meant commissioners covered bizarre areas such as “south central England and north west London” (the capital was split into three different patches).
The commissioners’ role was also unclear. Were they box-tickers, regulators, improvers? They were tasked by DfE to accelerate academisation, but also expected to make wise decisions about quality.
By 2016, the education select committee flagged the conflict and said commissioners should be judged on “outcomes” instead of “volume of activity”.
Seven of the first eight RSCs had schools experience. Nash said this would “create a truly autonomous, school-led system owned and run by the people that work in it”.
Commissioners saw their role as not just making decisions when schools failed, but intervening to try and stop it.
But it led to a “turf war between different parts of the regulatory system as they tried to make sense of an evolving landscape”, says Freedman (see ‘Clash of the Knights’ front page).
By 2018, then education secretary Damian Hinds had to admit there was “real confusion” for schools and ordered the commissioners to stick to commissioning.
‘The academy programme is explicitly designed to let 1,000 – or rather 1,529 – flowers bloom’
Take back control?
Former national schools commissioner Sir David Carter says it became a “process job, rather than a quality of analysis of what needs to be done”.
The bureaucrats have taken back control. Just three of the now nine regional directors (rebranded in 2022 to follow the government regions, with London getting its own commissioner) are former school leaders. Most, as Carter says, are “dyed-in-the-wool civil servants”.
Carol Dewhurst, who worked in the DfE’s academies team until 2014 and is now chief executive of Bradford Diocesan Academies Trust, says: “We’ve seen a full circle. The original ambition was about enabling more sector voices to influence the shaping of the structure of the system and the academy programme.
“But we’re back to a system where civil servants occupy the highest roles.”
Despite wider Whitehall spending cuts, the new middle tier’s costs have ballooned from £4.1 million in 2014, to £34 million last year.
The nine teams now employ 571 staff – the equivalent of £3,000 for each academy – as more responsibilities have been shoved their way.
What enabled the shapeshift?
Ex-government adviser Jonathan Simons, now a partner at Public First, says there has “never been a clear theory of change for why [RSCs] were invented – which is why they are still controversial. Nobody wants to claim credit for inventing them and take responsibility for their massive sprawl.”
Leora Cruddas, the chief executive of the Confederation of School Trusts, adds commissioners were established “without any attempt to develop a theory of regulation, or to articulate what regulation would look like if it was working well – something the sector still doesn’t have.”
The consequence, says Mohsen Ojja, the chief executive of the Anthem Schools Trust, is “regional inconsistencies, it’s too bureaucratic. Directors seem to be making things up as they go along, hindering trusts’ ability to make necessary school improvements.
“It can feel like it’s more about who you know rather than doing what’s right for the schools and the children they serve.”
Too fast, too furious?
Regulation is not the only casualty of pursuing policy at breakneck speed.
Lucy Heller, chief executive of Ark Schools, describes the early academy expansion days as the “Wild West”. There “wasn’t capacity in the system for people to do it well”.
Carter, one of the first RSCs before taking on the national role, says the steer to officials was “grow more academies, and let’s not worry too much about performance as school leaders will take care of this.”
In 2018, Schools Week found at least 91 trusts had closed in the previous four years after receiving at least £6 million in start-up funding. And millions more have been paid out to wipe off the debts of high-profile academy scandals.
“We didn’t think about how accountability wraps around an autonomous system, and the challenge of leading more than one school,” Carter told the EDSK think tank podcast.
“It created opportunities for people to make decisions that didn’t work at scale or were ethically unsound. It’s a legacy we still deal with today.”
Laura McInerney, Schools Week editor from 2014 to 2017, says the secrecy around academy decisions meant there was “no public learning” from failures.
She also believes the commissioners were on a hiding to nothing. “They had to try and get the trust of people and make great decisions with no procedures, no trust – and hiding everything from people.”
Should we have gone slower?
“I think there was a point, as it were, we were going over the speed limit,” recalls Gove.
“Some multi-academy trusts grew too fast. But [going so quickly] was necessary to generate momentum… it was an absolute necessity.”
If things aren’t perfect, you “refine as you go. We wouldn’t have reached the point of maturity that we’re at now [if we hadn’t gone as quickly].”
An ex-government adviser agrees. “If you don’t move at extraordinary breakthrough speed, and have people panicking that you’re going to break things, you just don’t do anything. It’s not the way it should work, but it’s the way it does work.”
Autonomy is a very expensive model if you get it wrong
The great autonomy con?
The bigger problem, they say, was the reforms “not having an end goal in mind”.
But, unlike the RSCs, there was always a clear driver behind the changes. Gove said his 2010 Academies Act “grants greater autonomy to individual schools, it gives more freedom to teachers”.
But, like the RSCs, this has gone full circle too.
Ex-advisers say the original aims butted up against the instincts of others in the DfE, such as Nick Gibb and Lord Agnew, former schools and academies minister respectively, who were uneasy with such freedoms.
“The idea was to get good heads in – and then let them run the system,” says Carter. “But in 20-odd thousand schools there just aren’t enough leaders who understand system or multiple school leadership…. And autonomy is a very expensive model if they get it wrong.”
And as each secretary of state “got more angsty about ‘what are these academies doing?’”, the promise of autonomy “morphed into ‘do what you like, but we’re going to check up on you disproportionately for what you do. Decisions single school leaders had made for decades were now being scrutinised at scale by the DfE.”
McInerney says it shows “the more liberal you are at the beginning, the more likely you are to end up with an overreaction in the end – because the only political reaction to things going wrong is to start stacking rules on top”.
And it’s much easier to police those rules when there are fewer, larger organisations – explaining some of the government’s lurch towards favouring multi-academy trusts.
Nadhim Zahawi’s 2022 schools white paper – the last attempt by ministers to set out an end state for academy reforms – wanted “every child to benefit from being taught in a family of schools” by 2030.
One former adviser likened the wider shift as “going from ‘a thousand flowers blooming’ to the language of factory mass-production”, as the argument of “efficiencies” in MATs began to dominate.
“This constituted a 180 degree turn in the logic on how the policy was intended to deliver better outcomes.”
Jonathan Slater, DfE permanent secretary from 2016 to 2020, says: “Everybody was talking about us having a ‘school-led system’. But it wasn’t – it was a MAT-led system. And the power MATs had over schools was incredible. But it was also pretty unmanageable because there were just so many.”
Freedman has admitted the academies policy was “mis-sold. [it was] never about school-level autonomy, it was about trust-level autonomy.”
Recreating the LA wheel?
Sir Jon Coles, chief executive of the country’s largest trust, United Learning, says public sector organisations, with independent and autonomous governance who are highly accountable for what they do, is “a good model” for running a public service.
“But what government got wrong was equating autonomy with autonomy of schools, and what they meant was autonomy of heads.”
This “takes you into unaccountable power: ‘big beast’ headteachers free to do what they want is not attractive. It sets up a model in which bad things can happen, which we saw.”
McInerney is also worried that autonomy moving from heads and upwards into the MAT will recreate “some of the excesses of local authorities before 1988, where schools had to write to their council to get exercise books or windows changing”.
“Academy trust teachers tell Teacher Tapp they have to fill in a triplicate form to order pens, or it takes several phone calls just to give a child a paracetamol. Trusts aren’t doing it for bad reasons, they want to manage risk. But they are now in charge of every decision.”
Another development is the new world of academy management: MAT central teams.
Trusts say sharing experienced school improvers across their schools is a key asset. It also opens up more career opportunities and pay progression.
But Becks Boomer-Clark, chief executive of the Academies Enterprise Trust, says it is vital the role of the school principal – “the most significant role in the sector – is not denuded.
“Many principals feel they exist under these layers of management, bureaucracy and accountability. What we do is create the conditions and the levels of resourcing to hopefully make that job a bit easier.”
Was it all worth it?
While many trusts have become “expert at transforming previously underperforming schools… it hasn’t been as transformative as hoped,” Freedman wrote in his book Failed State.
“Schools that didn’t become academies perform roughly as well. There is as much variation between academy trusts as there was between local authorities when they controlled all schools.”
But some in the sector point to the near-eradication of “sink” schools as evidence of academy success.
Education Datalab analysis found nearly 90 per cent of the “persistently low attaining” schools of the 2000s that stayed open were rated ‘good’ or better by the end of 2023. While some merged, most became academies.
Carter says continuing to academise underperforming schools for a few more years in 2010, while letting just the best set up trusts to support them, would have “been a lot less toxic.”
“It would have also been easier to show that this structure worked as a school improvement strategy had the number of academies been limited to the most challenging 2,000 in the system.”
Boomer-Clark adds that the original programme had “some remarkable successes, and some absolutely abject failures – but before we had the opportunity to learn from either, we changed course”.
Instead, Gove let ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’ schools choose to convert, with financial incentives that Freedman admits were probably too high.
Carter says the move seemed “more about dismantling the local authority school improvement functions”.
Starving councils of cash has also left their schools without access to the wider support they need, adds Caroline Barlow, head at Heathfield Community College. “Collaborative maintained schools are now left contemplating what their future holds.”
Heller also suggests the “main improvement” among converter schools “was principals’ salaries, rather than outcomes”.
Pay certainly has improved. At least 44 trust bosses are now paid £200,000 or more, up from at most a handful ten years ago.
Given a print-out of Schools Week’s most recent CEO pay league table, Gove says: “The chief executive of Thames Water gets, what, £900,000 a year – doesn’t deserve a penny of it. These people are heroes and heroines and so deserve every penny.
“Dan Moynihan [whose £485,000 salary puts him top of the pay table] deserves £1,000,000 a year for what he’s done.”
ACADEMIES: THE NEXT TEN YEARS
Half of schools are now academies, rising to four in five at secondary level. Although there is big regional variation – 31 per cent of schools in the north west are academies, compared with nearly two-thirds in the south west. Ninety per cent of academies are in MATs.
Labour is “agnostic” over school structures and will instead look to smooth the differences between the two school types.
While most in the sector agree it’s messy, opinions are mixed on what next.
On academy regulation, Cruddas says it should be done by an independent regulator, similar to Ofqual.
But Freedman suggests devolution could help. “Handing oversight over schools to combined authorities would relieve pressure on the DfE,” he writes. “[And] it would allow authorities to build links between schools and other services like policing and housing.”
Boomer-Clark adds devolution would also provide a route to ensure there are democratic “mechanisms by which we can be held to account for what we’re doing on behalf of those communities.”
Despite the government ditching its MAT target, trusts are consolidating. One in five trusts running schools in 2019 is no longer in operation.
Coles says Labour should make it an “objective to proactively” drive “fewer, larger and more capable trusts. This can be done by skilful, careful implementation – and with the sector and supportively.
“The big lesson – that government keeps failing to learn – is that implementation is much more important than policy.”
Most agree the role of councils needs clarifying. Labour plans to strengthen local authorities’ hands in relation to admissions, place planning and SEND.
But trusts are here to stay. Carter says their role should be the “vanguard of education and delivery. The best trusts are already rethinking and reconceptualising how education can be delivered. More need to do the same.
“Do we just want them to carry on delivering education in the same way we did in the 1990s, or should we be incentivising them to utilise their scale and capacity to think differently.”
Examples are starting to emerge, with United Learning planning to offer teachers a different pension and Dixons Academies Trust giving staff a nine-day fortnight.
But Freedman says making MATs the “bedrock of the education system… requires clear direction from the education department to move away from the drift and confusion of the status quo.”
One ex-adviser says the problem isn’t “how do we get everyone into a trust… It’s how do we bring everyone working together in a local ecosystem which has good incentives?
“People say ‘you just need to finish revolution’. But no one’s described what that end state looks like. And as soon as anyone does, they get absolutely destroyed because even the most fervent supporters of the academy movement don’t agree. It’s like a Brexiteer saying ‘this is not real Brexit’.”
