The co-ordinated voice of maintained schools has been missing from recent educational discourse. This is a shame; we have plenty to say and much from which others can learn. In fact, our exclusion from policy thinking is at least partly to blame for the proliferation of sector-wide crises.
In contrast to the narrative of previous governments, maintained schools express the compelling vision for children and young people that is implicit in this government’s opportunity mission: education in the service of the people.
There are, as Bridget Phillipson has deftly asserted, many academy trusts that have done excellent work over the past ten years. But so too has the maintained sector, without being wedded to corporate models of school improvement.
Take the school I lead. We have travelled the hard road from ‘requires improvement’ to ‘good’ with the support of our local authority and a fellow local Catholic maintained school.
All those who have navigated this protracted and labyrinthine journey will know well the difficulties of balancing sustained, ethical improvement against relentless, sometimes hostile accountability that incentivises quick, shallow wins.
For years, the level of threat linked to this accountability has been existential. Perform or be academised.
Faced now with a fevered consultation on Ofsted reform, maintained schools that have met the spectre of forced academisation are better placed than many to respond. Our profession cannot risk being supine on this matter.
The truth is that most, if not all maintained schools don’t need to shapeshift any more than academies need to revert to maintained status (although some have legitimate reason to argue otherwise). This thinking focuses our energies in the wrong place, prizing ideology over outcomes.
The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill adopts a much more cautious approach to involuntary academy conversion. About time too. Threatening one part of the sector with being converted into another is a nonsense that has nurtured one of the many false dichotomies with which education is bedevilled.
We represent the essence of place-based public service
Academisation is not the medicine that sick maintained schools need. Schools and their successes are made by people, not structures. Moreover, collaboration between schools, without coercion, is where effective school and system improvement work occurs.
Some like to claim that the past 15 years have been an unmitigated success. They have not. Any gains have long been overshadowed by a gargantuan omni-crisis worsened by systemic fragmentation and incoherence. Complex problems demand solutions of equal sophistication and there is strength in diversity.
Maintained schools have a unique place in our system; one that needs to be celebrated rather than diminished. We embody the sense of civic purpose and virtue that trusts’ representative bodies are increasingly keen to claim for academies.
Our schools radiate the visceral warmth of linked arms, not the chill of isolated fortresses. We represent the essence of undiluted, place-based public service – embedded local leadership in which generations place their trust.
This is the model that exists in Salford, for example, where a muscular commitment to addressing disadvantage has evolved out of the challenges of the pandemic. Secondary academies and maintained schools in the city are bound together in networks that examine issues unflinchingly and take action, including the allocation of resources.
Cooperation like this exemplifies how the maintained sector articulates partnership between schools, families and communities. This is vital to safeguarding important values that underpin social cohesion, values that are needed now more than ever.
Such stewardship does not require that schools exist within a group that is ‘a single legal entity.’ Instead, schools of all types work in transparent and determined concert for the good of local people, as democracy demands.
At the heart of Salford’s city-wide approach is a genuine respect for difference that appreciates all schools as net contributors to system capacity. It is notable that as this strategy has developed over the past three years, the city’s educational metrics have gone in the right direction.
It seems connection and collaboration without coercion are good for all. We need a lot more of them to meet the challenges we now face – and that means valuing voices from every part of the sector.
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