Up to 1,000 failing schools could be forced to become academies under the new Education Bill announced last week. And it seems no one is safe, as the DfE’s new powers to steamroll stakeholders and turn schools into academies extend to any school they class as ‘coasting’. Roger Inman examines the implications for school leaders.
The penalty for ‘coasting’
The first stand out item in the Bill is the obligation on the Secretary of State to make an academy order for any maintained school with a Grade 4 Ofsted report of ‘inadequate’. Although theoretically such an order could later be revoked, in practice this obligation removes any room for challenge or doubt regarding the routine academisation of such schools.
The Bill also introduces a new category of schools, namely ‘coasting’ schools, which will now be ‘eligible for intervention’. We have heard government and Ofsted tell us since at least 1999 that they will be cracking down on coasting schools, but this rhetoric has now become the keystone of new government policy. Regulations will now define what coasting means. Nicky Morgan has stated that the government will be ‘introducing a new measure in secondary schools looking at the progress that students make over the course of their time there’ as the basis for identifying a coasting school, and she has also confirmed that the Progress 8 measure will specifically play a part in determining which schools are coasting. Now, using their determined definition of coasting, the Secretary of State will simply be able to notify a school that it is coasting and therefore ‘eligible for intervention’.
Interestingly, the government has not decided to make schools that ‘require improvement’ automatically ‘eligible for intervention’. We can, however, expect those schools (currently over 3000 in number) to be first in line for potential compulsory academisation through the coasting process. Also, no school is safe from intervention because a school rated ‘good’ by Ofsted could still be defined as coasting. There is no date set on when the regulations defining coasting will be published, but that definition will be a critical new concern for school leaders.
What sort of intervention can we expect?
The Secretary of State will be able to force coasting schools to:
- enter into arrangements with external parties chosen by the Secretary of State for a range of advisory services, collaborative arrangements or even compulsory federation with other schools; or
- become an academy, although that is not compulsory (unlike schools with Grade 4 Ofsted reports).