Analysing The ‘Self-Improving School-Led System’ Agenda In England And The Implications For Schools

The four-year study evaluated the government’s ‘self-improving school-led system’ (SISS), which has become an overarching narrative for education policy since 2010, making schools more autonomous and accountable for their own improvement. 

The reforms have included an expansion in the number of academies and the development of Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs), the roll back of Local Authorities (LAs) from school oversight, and the development of new school-to-school support models, such as Teaching School Alliances (TSAs). 

The report asks whether our multi-faceted middle tier is working, and whether the autonomy, accountability, competition and collaboration that policy-makers have sought to promote is generating the desired system improvement. 

The researchers found that despite the government’s claims to be moving control to the frontline and giving schools more autonomy, the reality is very different. Schools are more tightly regulated than ever, facing pressure to get good exam results and Ofsted grades or face being taken over by a MAT. Many schools have felt the need to narrow their curriculum and focus relentlessly on test outcomes in response. 

The government has encouraged schools to collaborate with each other to share expertise and to support schools that are struggling. But the competitive pressures in the system have made this challenging, with schools also incentivised to prioritise their own interests in order to attract pupils and funding. 

The research also found that the school system has become less equitable since 2010, with higher-performing schools admitting relatively fewer disadvantaged pupils. 

Main Findings: 

• Any increase in operational autonomy for schools is more than balanced out by changes to the accountability framework, which have allowed the state to continue to steer the system from a distance and to increasingly intervene and coerce when and where it deems necessary. Schools report a constant need to focus on national exam results and to prepare for the possibility of an Ofsted inspection. Many argue that this now demands greater consistency and self-policing. 
• 60 per cent of survey respondents working in academies agreed that academisation had had at least some positive benefits, 69 per cent of respondents working in maintained schools reported there were no benefits to becoming an academy, especially when weighed against the additional responsibilities. 
• The threat of forced academisation had created a sense of fear that if their performance were to drop they would be ‘taken over’ by a MAT, which would impose standardised systems and a narrow curriculum. Some schools were choosing to form or join ‘local MATs’ to pre-empt external take over. 
• With academisation, powers of school oversight are moving from local to national government. This process has been uneven and often fraught. There are sharp differences between national and local government over how policy changes should be enacted locally, particularly where LAs have resisted academisation. 
• There are differences between different parts of national government around aspects of strategy and attempts to ‘implement’ policy. The picture that emerges is of chaotic centralisation, characterised by competing claims to authority and legitimacy but diminishing local knowledge about schools. 
• Due to funding cuts, a common trend was for LAs to become part of a more commercial middle tier. However, LAs also sought to sustain oversight of maintained schools and to retain influence in order to co-ordinate school improvement services and support. 
• As support from LAs has reduced, schools have had to become more proactive in identifying and addressing their own improvement priorities. ‘Local clusters’ of schools were reported as the most common source of external support for schools. This was true for secondary as well as primary schools. 
• School ‘system leaders’ often faced conflicting and unreasonable demands from central government while being perceived by their peers to be an increasingly ‘co-opted elite’, working as part of the managerial state and accruing a range of personal and organisational benefits as a result. 
• The SISS agenda contains policies that simultaneously seek to make schools more responsive to parental choice, more diverse and more entrepreneurial. 
• The majority of headteachers perceived that their school faced local pressures to compete for students, staff and/or status. There was broad recognition that schools are organised by choice and competition into local status hierarchies. Improving a school’s Ofsted grade was the most immediate strategy for improving its reputation and position in the local status hierarchy.
• Importantly, school status was rarely as simple as ‘school quality’. Wider factors such as the school’s context, history and student intake all combined to position it relative to others. 
• Schools that sustained or improved their Ofsted judgement to Outstanding in the 2010–15 period saw, on average, a reduction in the percentage of students eligible for free school meals (FSM), while schools retaining or being downgraded to a Requires Improvement and Inadequate judgement saw, on average, an increase in FSM eligibility. 
• There was a consistent view that the SISS agenda is furthering the creation of ‘winners and losers’. While higher-status schools were seen to be benefiting in terms of new opportunities and resources as a result of policy reform, the lower-status schools faced a concentration of challenges often including under-subscription, higher mobility and disproportionate numbers of disadvantaged, migrant and hard to place children. 
• The vast majority of schools reported collaborating with other schools. In the survey, two-thirds (67 per cent) of primary leaders and two-fifths (40 per cent) of secondary leaders stated that their school’s strongest partnership was a ‘local cluster’. Around one in five secondary schools described their strongest partnership as a TSA (20 per cent) or a MAT (22 per cent). 
• In the face of growing DfE pressures on Teaching Schools to secure short-term improvement through ‘school-to-school support’ and the need to generate income, many Teaching Schools in our sample were forming MATs, as they saw this to offer greater financial security and clearer lines of accountability and authority over other schools. 
• MATs have been encouraged to grow or merge by the DfE, in search of efficiencies and ‘economies of scale’. However, statistical analysis of MAT impact on pupil attainment and progress shows there is no positive impact from MAT status for pupils in either primary or secondary academies when compared to pupils in similar standalone academies. 

Conclusion: 

• Rather than ‘moving control to the frontline’, the SISS agenda has intensified hierarchical governance and the state’s powers of intervention, further constraining the professionalism of school staff and steering the system through a model we term ‘coercive autonomy’. This suggests hierarchical governance is more influential than market or network co-ordination in England. 
• There are now multiple sub-systems, with different, partially overlapping organisations in the bureaucratic hierarchy holding diverse views on how the school system should be organised. This has created new pressures and contradictions for school-level leaders as they try to make sense of and navigate a new emergent landscape.

• The report identifies four themes that merit further focus: 
  • A new economy of knowledge: in the context of the findings that highlight the incentives for higher-status schools to codify and sell ‘best practice’ knowledge geared towards the demands of the accountability system, could the system be reshaped to encourage more inclusive and professional forms of knowledge development and mobilisation? 
  • Fragmentation: How could changes to the existing model of hierarchical and market governance, including changes to the ‘middle tier’ above schools, reduce the trend towards a system of ‘winners and losers’? 
  • Equity: in the context of the concentration of vulnerable children in deprived schools, how could the policy on admissions and fair access be reformed and how could services for the most vulnerable children be reshaped to redress the trend towards further stratification? 
  • Legitimacy: in the context of the findings on an increasing local democratic deficit, how can the school system secure trust among professionals as well as parents and students, and what might be required to create meaningful engagement for these core stakeholders? 

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