Tracey Cleverly, who co-founded and now leads the Learning Academy Partnership, has been at the trust through both successes and financial difficulties. Now, she’s an adviser on the government’s review of academy regulations. She tells Jess Staufenberg of her hopes for the sector
Tracey Cleverly had just made what was potentially her “worst career choice”. It was 2010 and she had become deputy headteacher at a failing school (Ellacombe C of E primary in Devon) while Ofsted inspectors were breathing down its neck.
Cleverly went in with all guns blazing.
“In my naivety I thought as deputy you can change the world. But you can’t, only the head can do that,” she says, shaking her head. “If you have different visions there’s only so much you can do.”
Six weeks later the school was plunged into special measures and the local authority said that they would probably shut it for good.
But at the end of the road was Ilsham C of E primary school. It was in the early days of mass academisation, unleashed by then-education secretary Michael Gove, and like many other schools the two organisations joined forces to launch the Learning Academy Partnership in 2012. Ilsham’s then head, Lynn Atkinson, went on to become chief executive.
The biggest difference as an academy, Cleverly says, was the ability able to stem the flow of consultants parachuted in by the local authority.
“It had had years and years of local authority support, but it was what I call ‘dollops of this, dollops of that’,” she explains. “The poor staff didn’t know which way was up.”
The importance of being an academy wasn’t “being able to set your own school day, pay, holidays – that wasn’t the important bit”.
“The bit that was important was that the money was coming directly to the school,” Cleverly says.
“It was about the ability to put a blanket around the school and stop four million people coming in and confusing the teachers. It was about being able to say, ‘it’s ours, thank you’.”
In other words, aademisation allowed Cleverly and Atkinson to build a large, permanent team of expert support. By 2014, Ellacombe C of E academy had achieved a ‘good’ Ofsted. “Being an academy mattered hugely”, she adds.
The trust has grown steadily in the decade since its launch. It has 12 primary schools and by Christmas there will be 16. Every school with an inspection grade is now ‘good’.
You could argue that this academisation story – one with professional development of teachers at its heart, rather than hype or growth – shows the best side of academy trusts. It is a success from the ashes of local authority failure that reads like a blueprint of the 2010 Academies Act.
There is another side to the story though, one that might explain why ministers want more powers to intervene when things go wrong.
The government investigated the trust in 2020 following “wide-ranging” allegations, rapping it for spending £2,400 on a spa break for staff. The trust had an in-year deficit of £185,000 in 2017-18.
Officials also scrutinised nearly £20,000 spent on hospitality (including a hotel stay booked in the name of the then-CEO’s husband) and several other breaches of the trust’s own financial policies and academy rules. Atkinson resigned in April last year.
Her successor tells me: “These events were regrettable and as a trust we have learned from the breakdown in processes at the time.” Cleverly adds “a vast amount has changed” since 2018 and she is upholding high standards.
Then, earlier this year, the schools white paper arrived, proposing new “academy standards” and wide-ranging powers allowing government intervention.
Like many academy bosses, Cleverly was alarmed. “It felt like a threat of losing that independence,” she says.
Politicians in the House of Lords – including those among the government’s own party – agreed.
As Baroness Estelle Morris said: “We’re giving them all the restrictions that applied to maintained schools, but leaving them with the name of academy”.
At about the same time, Cleverly was asked by the Department for Education to join a 12-strong panel of advisers for its planned shake-up of academy regulation, alongside six other academy trust bosses.
The panel hadn’t even met before under-fire ministers rowed back on their own bill – slashing many of the more controversial clauses and promising to replace them once the academy regulation review had concluded.
But the review panel has met six times since, according to Cleverly. She cannot divulge the content, nor whether the schools bill will be passed before or after the review is complete.
However, she notes: “What I’d like to see from the schools bill is that the very best of what we do in the sector is able to be sustained, but that there’s that safety net for when the wheels come off.”
There needs to be a safety net for when the wheels come off
Understandably, perhaps, she doesn’t want to be drawn on the details. “It’s going to sit, isn’t it, in how trusts are regulated, how they are commissioned, how they are inspected. What is the measure of a successful trust?”
Cleverly strikes me as a very children-focussed chief executive. She becomes most animated when she discusses her passion – strengthening education for primary school children in the south west.
She stepped up from director of education to take over from Atkinson as chief executive in September last year, and says her goal now is “ensuring that we are looking at everything through an advantage lens.
“It’s about ensuring that for our most disadvantaged children, we are levelling the playing field.”
It’s about ensuring that we are levelling the playing field
Cleverly is driven by her own experiences. She grew up on a council estate in east London and, after her parents divorced when she was young, was supported by her extended family. Without them, she doubts she would be sat here now.
“My grandad used to take us to museums and tell us stories, and do all those additional things it’s easy not to have otherwise. And my uncle adopted a more fatherly role. It meant there was always someone around to read a book with you.”
This extended family also “scooped up” Cleverly when she was losing her way as a student. She had messed about in secondary school (including hiding from teachers behind centuries-old gravestones in the graveyard near school, giggling away with friends) and failed most GCSEs. “There was no sense of belonging in the school,” she tells me. “It was more fun to mess about!”
Eventually a family member invited her to Devon, where the 20-year-old Cleverly re-took her GCSEs and then sat A levels in history, psychology and sociology at South Devon College. After that she studied her B Ed degree at Middlesex University.
“If you don’t have that family support, the role of education is even more important,” she reflects.
Her convictions were further confirmed by her first boss, Diane Hatherly, headteacher at Eden Park primary school in Devon. “Those children left with a really good deal,” Cleverly says. “It was a school where it didn’t matter as much what was going on at home.”
She has also been spurred on by evidence from her own region. Rural poverty is rife in Devon and Cornwall, partly because of the high proportion of minimum wage work in hospitality and the lack of on its two coastlines.
A single organisation culture allows you to take collective responsibility
Academics at the University of Exeter revealed in April that the south west has the largest attainment gap in the country by the end of primary school, with disadvantaged children in Devon 10.8 months behind compared to 9.3 months nationally.
Pre-pandemic, the trust had no gap at all, according to Cleverly. Now, she says, the gap is nine per cent and she aims to close it by the end of 2023.
There is a tough slog ahead. But Cleverly is in a unique position to make the case to ministers – as leader of a trust which has experienced successes, as well as problems – that academy independence should be protected.
“It is that single organisation culture that allows you to take collective responsibility for the children,” she concludes. “That is the best of the sector.”
Your thoughts