attracted a lot of media attention, but increasingly free schools began to look like a distraction from the main show: the hundreds, and potentially thousands, of schools that were being enticed to become independent of local authorities. This was, indeed, the silent revolution, as one magazine article named it. The government’s initial offer to ‘outstanding’ schools to convert to academy status had been extended to ‘good’ schools; it was rumoured that conversion would soon be possible for those with ‘satisfactory’ status, if they were willing to work in partnership with other schools. Plainly, the aim was to create a majority of privately managed institutions, including many primaries, leaving a rump of struggling schools within the ambit of local authorities, themselves undermined by savage budget cuts.
The government was clearly playing up schools’ anxieties about funding in an age of austerity. And it seemed to be working. In April 2011 a survey of its members conducted by The Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) found that 46 per cent had either already converted or were planning to do so, with a further 34 per cent undecided. Only 19 per cent said they would definitely not go down the academy route. In May the government announced that over a thousand schools had applied to become academies since June 2010: 647 applications had been approved, and 384 had already converted. The total number of academies, including those opened under New Labour, now stood at over 650. As the government press release boasted, ‘schools are becoming academies at a rate of two every day.’
At the heart of the strategy was money. Opponents of the ‘conversion’ plans became increasingly suspicious of the government claim that the new academies would enjoy no funding advantages, and that the move to so-called independence was all about the wish to be free from the mythical stranglehold of local government. In early January 2011, every Local Authority suffered a top-slice from their general grant to help fund the academies programme, irrespective of how many academies they had in their area. The national top-slice for 2011–12 was £148 million, rising to £265 million in 2012–13. This reduction in the budget, in addition to cuts announced the previous year, was justified on the grounds that the schools would have received the money anyway, in terms of services provided by the local authorities; now they were merely being given the budgets directly, to buy in services themselves. But the decision left many academies far better off than they would have been if they had stayed with the local authority. The question was, for how long?
Nigel Gann, chair of governors at Stanchester Community School in Somerset, resigned when the school decided to convert to an academy. He wrote to his local paper in April 2011, ‘Why the rush? Well, it’s money, of course. There’s a substantial incentive on offer—a sum per pupil for secondaries that are able to convert before September this year; about half of that for those that follow shortly after … Since the only extra money available for schools that opt to become academies will be taken from money the local authority holds centrally for support services, how might the movement of secondary schools out of the authority affect funding for primary and special schools and others remaining?’ Gann was not a lone voice. There were growing protests at the high-handed, unnecessarily hasty manner in which academy status was being rushed through.30
Even some of the heads of new academies declared themselves surprised at the amount of money they had gained through the move. As one head teacher in Cheltenham told the Guardian, ‘The increase in funding has been dramatic.’ The Guardian was shown a number of documents by newly converted academies, including four grammar schools; all showed that the schools had become significantly better off as a result, with net benefits ranging from £150,000 a year to £570,000 in one case. The schools were supposedly being given money that would allow them to buy back the additional services, including behaviour support, school improvement and central administrative staff, that they would have received from the local authority, a funding stream known as Lacseg (local authority central spend equivalent grant). But once the schools had calculated how much it would cost them to buy the services back, some found they were incurring a clear profit of up to six figures.31
Over the course of a year, I talked to several head teachers, many of them leading outstanding inner-city schools. Most were opposed, in principle, to the policy of taking good schools out of the local authority, but with severe cuts looming, the government offer was a poisoned chalice. The word used most often was ‘bribe’. There was also considerable uncertainty over conversion financing, and how long it would last. Schools interested in converting to academy status were encouraged to use a ‘ready reckoner’ on the DfE website to see how much better off they would be if they chose to go down the academy route. According to a governor of an ‘outstanding’ secondary in the north-west of England that has chosen to convert, ‘the figures are very unclear, but it seemed from the ready reckoner that at first the school would get an extra two million over five years, which was very tempting. Then it went down to 1.5 million. And then down to a million … The problem is, we don’t yet know the extra costs. We are going to have to hire a finance director, more staff. We are going to have to buy in office services that were provided by the local authority and get an audit done, sort out our own pensions liability.’ According to Peter Downes, a former head teacher, funding expert and Liberal Democrat councillor, who tabled a successful motion against the academy and free school programme at the party’s annual conference in 2010: ‘The dice are massively loaded in favour of academies, in terms of funding. But my thesis is that this is simply not sustainable.’
The long-delayed implementation of the pupil premium in December did little to allay schools’ fears. For each of its pupils on free school meals—that is, from a household with an income of less than £16,000—a school was to receive the ‘pupil premium’, an annual additional amount of £430 per pupil, with head teachers deciding how it was to be distributed. Gove promised £625 million in 2011–12, increasing to £2.5 billion by the end of 2014–15. ‘It’s not going to mean anything for us, once you take the rest of [the cuts] into account,’ one head teacher told me, shaking his head despairingly. Andy Burnham called the premium ‘a con … what was meant to be additional money for the most deprived, will simply recycle funds from one school to another. It is robbing Peter to pay Paul.’
Into this anxious and uncertain atmosphere over school funding, the government decided in January 2011 to release a mass of figures into the public domain—in the name of transparency in government—on individual school budgets in England. While this revealed that the average figure per pupil per year is £5,547.13, it appeared that some boroughs and schools were spending far more, and some far less. Ryeish Green School in Wokingham, which had closed in August 2010, had spent a staggering £32,937.91 pounds per pupil in a year, while All Saints Catholic Centre for Learning in Knowsley, Liverpool, had spent only £1,529.81. The local authority with the highest average spending per pupil per year—£8,528.50—was the East London borough of Hackney; the local authority with the lowest—£4,310.05—was Knowsley in Merseyside.32 While some heads protested at the dumping of what they thought to be dangerously undifferentiated data into the public domain, presenting school budgets out of context, the Coalition used the publication of the figures to argue that it was not government funding that mattered so much as how schools used it.
By the close of its first year in government, the full extent—if not yet the full implications—of the schools revolution was becoming evident. It was clear that one of the principal aims of the Tory-dominated Coalition was dramatically to dismantle the role of local authorities in relation to education. A democratically accountable public service, nationally directed but locally administered, was fast being replaced by a state-subsidised and centrally controlled quasi-market. Under proposals published in late May 2011, successful schools were to be allowed to expand—despite serious questions concerning the practicability, not to mention desirability, of such a plan—and so-called ‘poor’ schools were to be allowed to wither and die. In July, the Guardian confirmed that civil servants privately advised ministers that schools should be allowed to fail, if government was serious about reform.33
Schools policy was increasingly rigged in favour of the academies and free schools, that were granted a range of special freedoms and funds. While six local authorities
