Academies must reveal all – and now – to prove success

Anastasia De Waal, 25 May 2010

2000 more Academies are to be opened, the coalition government has announced. It’s now even more important to ensure that they’re genuinely effective – and bringing them immediately under FOI is imperative to doing so.

With a new government and one committed to rapidly expanding the academies’ project, Civitas has reignited a crucial question hanging over the project: the current lack of transparency. Academies are extolled as the flagship model of improvement yet crucially enough isn’t currently known about what they’re teaching to make that claim. And just one thing is needed to change this: to bring them swiftly under the Freedom of Information Act.

Much has been of the rapid improvement in Academies’ headline GCSE results as compared to in mainstream maintained schools. Out of the 62 Academies which had GCSE results both this academic year and the last, for example, the percentage of students achieving five or more A*-C GCSEs (and the all-important equivalent) with English and maths was over twice the rate of last year’s national improvement.

It is this exam performance at GCSE which has incentivised both Labour and the coalition governments’ commitment to a rapid roll-out of the programme.

To date, however, there has been insufficient investigation into how Academies are achieving these higher results. Instead, assumptions have been made about what is generating the higher exam performance. These assumptions have tended to focus on the impact of the greater freedoms given to Academies, the harnessing of outside expertise in the form of the sponsors and the impact on student and teacher morale of a new building.

A key question is whether indeed curricula freedoms are at the heart of Academies’ rapidly improving GCSE results – but in a negative rather than positive way. Whilst the intention is that curricula freedoms allow for innovation and a greater responsiveness to students’ – rather than Whitehall’s – needs, previous research has raised concerns that ‘greater flexibility’ in relation to the curriculum may be resulting in Academies dropping academic subjects in favour of educationally weak but ‘statistically strong’ vocational courses because these courses carry high values in the league-tables.

Certainly this pitfall has been evidenced in results seen by Civitas. At the beginning of this school year, I carried out research on the subjects which Academies are doing at GCSE. Academy principals were asked for a breakdown of their latest GCSE i.e. how they had achieved their last raft of ‘headline’ figures, the numbers of students achieving five or more A*-Cs or the equivalent. The majority of principals who participated in the research were notably reticent to reveal this breakdown. The results which were released by other Academies shone light on the motivation for reticence: the substitution of highly questionable pseudo-vocational in the place of academic subjects – with the aim of ratcheting up headline GCSE league table figures.

The coalition government talks strongly of being committed to high standards and the equalising of opportunity through the education system. The academies programme is instrumental to the success of this aspiration. Full transparency is in turn instrumental to the true success of Academies.

As it stands, there will be a long and perhaps indefinite wait for Academies to be subjected to the scrutiny and call for openness required of other mainstream schools. Freedom to innovate is vital for higher standards – but that freedom must be accompanied by transparency, and immediately.