Academies have been “instrumental in raising standards” by delivering “brilliant results, particularly for the most disadvantaged children” Bridget Phillipson said this month.
But some of the education secretary’s colleagues, sat in the House of Commons to debate the schools bill, were less glowing.
One backbencher warned she had “seen academy trust after academy trust take on a failing school, with the most vulnerable children in our country, and fail to make improvements”.
That MP was Sarah Smith, Labour’s opportunity mission “champion”.
The Labour government appointed five champions last year for its national “missions”: crime, energy, growth, health and opportunity. They are tasked with promoting and helping to deliver the government’s policies in each area.
They will also act as ministers’ eyes and ears, providing feedback to government departments from the front line.
Labour gained 211 seats at July’s election. Like Smith, most of those MPs are new to Parliament. Is the new crowd more sceptical of academies?
“I think it’s not necessarily just about intake, it’s also about geography,” Smith tells me from her wood-panelled office in Portcullis House.
Academies not the only factor in ‘success’
She had challenged comments by Dame Siobhain McDonagh, the veteran MP for Mitcham and Morden, who expressed “serious concerns” about the erosion of academy freedoms.
Smith says: “It’s easy to come to the conclusion that the huge focus on academisation in London was a big part of that success.”
However, London “doesn’t fit that pattern altogether”. Camden, for example, has very few academies, but almost all of its schools are rated ‘good’ or better. The capital consistently records the best results in the country, and not just for better-off pupils.
Smith represents Hyndburn, a district in Lancashire where 40.8 per cent of disadvantaged pupils achieve a grade 4 or above in English and maths, 22.9 percentage points behind their non-disadvantaged peers.
‘Other schools pick up the pieces’
Again, most schools in the area are ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’, and Smith says leaders co-operate well. But in other places, she says the academy model means that rather than a school being seen as being “part of a community and a place, they’re part of an academy chain”.
She also fears a keen focus on getting an ‘outstanding’ grade means some make “decisions around, whether it’s off-rolling, whether it’s the level of inclusion a school offers, so that even if you’re not quite off-rolling, you’re making it uncomfortable and difficult for children with greater challenges to stay within that school system”.
Smith adds: “Where you [have] higher levels of exclusions from particular schools, then other schools have to pick up those pieces, and pay the price on Ofsted. That’s what some of the new intake are experiencing.
“They’re coming from the places where that’s their lived experience. And so their challenge isn’t necessarily an ideological one. Their challenge is: I want to see every child succeed.”
Happier children the priority
Smith says she “completely believes and agrees that academisation over the last 20, 30 years has been a driver of school improvement. Absolutely. That’s not the question here.
“But as we now decide what’s the priority going forward, [it is] to deliver happier children and everybody having a place for them.”
One of her key targets is the crisis in SEND. She articulates the problems well: the “adversarial nature” of the system and how delays to early intervention are wasting money further down the track.
We should reduce that wastage by “making early interventions simpler, by trying to take out the fight” for provision, she says.
And while it is “not the goal at all to reduce EHCPs [education, health and care plans], if they [children] are happy, thriving, keeping up to where you want them to get to, you won’t feel the need to keep going back and fighting the system again to try and get this, that and the next in place,” Smith adds.
The government says it wants to make mainstream schools more inclusive but has revealed little about how it plans to achieve this.
Smith accepts reaching that goal “means quite radical thinking in terms of the resourcing of schools, and moving beyond maybe just one SENCO, and thinking differently about how different agencies work together within that school setting”.
Doing so would “quite naturally mean that those with much more complex needs who do need multiple agencies and different approaches, there’s then the capacity in the system to better meet those needs”.
The problem is, the SEND system has waited and waited for reform, with the previous government spending years on a review that produced a plan that fell far short of what is needed.
SEND pressure is on
Labour now wants to look at the system again. Does that mean we’ll still be talking about distant reform in another three years?
Smith tells me: “As the champion, I will confidently say I don’t anticipate that being the problem, because the pressure is on the government.
“However, we’ve got to be wary of the unintended consequences of change and the policies we write.
“And so I absolutely support that we need to take some time, not just to pick up a slightly dodgy plan and implement it because it’s there, but very much both look at the evidence, what parents, carers, young people want and say, then move forward into action very quickly.”
She admits the £1 billion allocated for high needs at the Budget was “absolutely a stopgap”, but “I think they could have easily, still not [done that]. They could have let more people fall off the cliff.”
Parents driven to home education
As a former youth charity worker, Smith is concerned about soaring home education rates, and fears a lack of “suitable” school places is driving parents to withdraw children.
The children’s wellbeing and schools bill proposed a new register of children not in school, with councils expected to check on the suitability of the home learning environment.
Families of some pupils, such as those subject to child protection plans or in special schools, will need permission to withdraw their children for home education.
Smith believes that “most of your existing home educating community do not need to be worried”. But much of the public is “not aware just how easy it is to get your child home educated… there is a template letter that is on all the Facebook groups”.
This may include cases where a “headteacher might have known this child desperately needed to be in that school environment, because they were coming from sometimes quite difficult home environments.
“Often, unfortunately, it’s generations of parents who have been failed by education themselves.”
Pulling pupils back in
But can the government demand children are back in school when the system still isn’t offering what they need?
“I think timing is just so important on these proposals,” Smith says.
“We have to make sure that before we’re putting more pressure on parents to get kids back into school, that we are able to offer appropriate places for those pupils.”
She tells me she raised the issue of timing with ministers recently and “there is a recognition of that challenge, and trying to tread carefully and in the right way, to get the balance right”.
But there is an urgency to home education reforms, too.
Smith points to the “absolutely awful” murder of 10-year-old Sara Sharif, who was withdrawn from school twice.
A judge warned last year she was pulled out as a “ruse adopted for wholly selfish purposes”.
“I think the average person, member of the public, would be quite shocked that that carer, that parent, was able to take them out of school with no questions asked in order to hide their bruises. That absolutely has to stop immediately.”
A love for drama
Smith grew up in rural Aberdeenshire where she attended “the most incredible tiny village primary school”. She enjoyed secondary school and “loved drama, that was why I went to school”.
“That’s why it’s so important that we have that broad curriculum,” she adds, referring to the curriculum and assessment review, led by Professor Becky Francis.
She also warns that a third of children are “being written off” when they finish school because they don’t reach a grade 4 in GCSE English and maths.
“Whether we can make a difference to that should be absolutely critical to us assessing our success.”
Smith studied law at Queen Mary university in East London, ending up in the “amazing diversity of Tower Hamlets”, which was “hugely formative”.
She chose law because of poor careers advice at school, and because she had “watched loads of Ally McBeal”.
‘Something else for me to do here’
But Smith had also played football since primary school where there weren’t enough boys to make a team – and that led her to volunteer at a youth club in Tower Hamlets and then with the charity City Gateway, where she took a job.
“I just thought, actually, there’s something else for me to do here. I thought, I’ll do this for a couple of years. And that was a long time ago.”
Smith went on to work for Greenhouse Sports and then, after meeting her husband and moving to his native Lancashire, she worked for the charity Right to Succeed.
After serving for a short time as a councillor in Blackpool she was selected to contest Hyndburn, reclaiming the seat from the Tories.
In her new champion role, Smith says she wants school leaders to “write to me with specifics on what’s happening on the ground for them, or areas where they think we need to be tweaking, or things that they want to see in the future”.
On SEND in particular she has a “very open inbox” – and is keen to hear potential solutions.
“Don’t get me wrong, there’s a financial question here,” she says. “But actually, I think there are also lots of things that are quite detailed within the system that we could tweak and make a difference.”
One of the benefits of her role is that “mission champions exist because we can be political”. They are not constrained in what they can say, like ministers.
“We are free to get out and get some of that information back through, when it can be quite challenging for the ministers, when they’ve got so much on their plate.”
