Our 11,000 local authority-maintained schools command yearly budgets of £24.9 billion, educate 3.3 million pupils and employ 528,000 people, including 185,000 teachers. Yet they have had next to no voice for the past ten years. That’s why we are setting up The Maintained School Collective.
The push to academise and join academy trusts driven by the previous government was concerted, intentional and relentless. During that time, it seemed that participating in policy-making was contingent upon being the CEO of a large trust.
Today, policy advisory groups for the department for education, Ofsted and key political think tanks are dominated by these leaders, with minimal representation from the maintained sector.
I am not anti-academy. Academisation has introduced numerous strengths to our educational landscape, including robust partnerships and collaborations, high-quality professional development and innovative leadership ideas.
However, it is not a one-size-fits-all model. Maintained schools still comprise nearly half of all schools, yet they currently seem to lack any significant voice in policy discussions.
Over the past ten years, our own maintained school has gone from the brink of closure to becoming one of the most popular schools in the country.
We have garnered national attention for innovative initiatives such as creating an online school analytics platform called Lighthouse, implementing an extended school provision dubbed a “12-hour school day”, introducing flexible working to significantly reduce workload and enhance wellbeing, and employing graduate academic support assistants to improve special educational needs provision and establish a long-term teacher recruitment pipeline.
How? The simple answer is autonomy: the ability to make decisions that are right for our school community and to execute them effectively.
Financial autonomy is a crucial factor too. The average top-slice fee in a trust is approximately 5.3 per cent. For us, this would amount to a whopping £470,000 a year. By contrast, our de-delegation to the local authority is £70,000.
Our under-representation is a political oversight
Having the autonomy to allocate these funds allows us the flexibility to run our school in a manner that promptly meets the needs of our pupils, minimises bureaucracy and expedites delivery and implementation.
This flexibility has been instrumental in my development as a headteacher over the past decade. It has enabled me to cultivate outstanding senior leaders too. Coupled with support from a strong local authority and an experienced director of education, we have the ideal conditions for success.
The under-representation, not to say marginalisation, of the local authority-maintained sector is a political oversight. The government’s role is to govern for all, not just for the segments that align with specific policy positions.
This approach has led to a broader and more profound issue. Many education leaders I have encountered (within and outside the academy system) have expressed frustration over the policy paralysis we face.
We need policies that make a significant and lasting impact on school standards and enhance the opportunities we provide to children. It is possible that those occupying seats at the policy table have become too detached from the daily realities of post-Covid school settings to contribute pragmatically to the conversation.
Returning to maintained schools, our sector needs a voice because we constitute nearly half of the educational landscape and have leaders who, despite challenges posed by previous governmental policies, have delivered high-quality education to the children we serve.
Often, we are the ones championing and sustaining local collaborations and partnerships. The concept behind The Maintained Schools Collective is to replicate some of the great work of the Confederation of School Trusts but on a smaller scale.
Over time, we want to be able to provide these schools with a supportive network outside of their local authority so that they can collaborate with others, have critical friends to sound out their innovative ideas and also a platform of professional development they can tap into, locally and nationally.
Key to this will be harnessing the data we have analysed in Lighthouse around “dynamic” schools to ensure we can help to build and grow a self-improving school system.
Maintained schools have proven their resilience and innovation. It is imperative that their voices be included in policy-making to ensure a more equitable and effective educational system for all.
To find out more about The Maintained School Collective, click here
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