Academies fail to make grade on good GCSEs, study shows

Crunching exam data: Henry Stewart. Photograph: Miriam Stewart

League table data released this month by the Department for Education have shown that academies, which have been at the top of Michael Gove’s agenda, have not achieved better results than ordinary state schools despite being injected with extra funding from central government.

Self-confessed ‘data geek’ and Hackney resident Henry Stewart crunched the numbers. Stewart is a founder of the Local Schools Network, a pressure group that advocates for local authority controlled education. Stewart’s analysis of the data shows that  60% of pupils in non-academy schools attained five A* to C grade GCSEs in 2011, while only 47% did so in the 249 sponsored academies.

Under Michael Gove’s education reforms, more academies are opening around the country, with some schools forced to convert to academy status to boost their results. Gove said in a speech last month that his reforms, which will not allow the opening of any new local authority schools, are “an evidence-based, practical solution” to a failing system in which “futures are being blighted. Horizons are being limited. Generations of children are being let down.”

The academies programme prides itself on providing top quality education to the most deprived students. But when comparing like for like schools, Stewart found that among academies and local authority schools with similarly deprived intake — those with 40% or more of students on free school meals — local authority schools still performed better.  44% of students in such state sector schools achieved five A* to C grade GCSEs in 2011, including English and maths. Academies with a similar intake received 38%.

The data shows that among schools with more than 40% of students on free school meals, a higher proportion are meeting progress targets in non-academies than in academies. Last year, 60 of these schools achieved 70% expected progress in English — only 13 of these are academies.

Stewart’s findings add to suspicions that Gove’s staunchly pro-academy stance is all bark and no bite. “The government believe their own PR statement. This is policy by anecdote,“ says Stewart. “Not every academy is like Mossbourne.”

Top-performing academies like Hackney’s Mossbourne Community Academy have served as the unofficial mascot for Gove’s reforms because of their focus on discipline and academic rigour.

But even the academy’s much-lauded former head teacher Sir Michael Wilshaw, now chair of Ofsted, has set out to dispel myths about academy status rescuing state schools. The visionary head teacher wrote in The Guardian:

“Last year alone 85 schools serving the most deprived communities in our society were judged to be providing outstanding education.”

“Let me be clear: the vast majority of these schools are not academies. They are simply schools with heads and staff focused on the right things.” Ofsted’s 2011 annual report rated 53% of academies as ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’. 57% of all schools received the same rating.

And that’s the good news: schools are improving across the board. “London used to be the place where people would move away from,” says Stewart. “Now, if you want a good education, you stay in London. You have parents fighting to get their kids into Hackney schools. That was the first genuine surprise for me. All schools with lower results were improving massively.”

“The big surprise for me in the data was the extent to which all schools with lower results were improving. It is simply not the case that there is a set of failing schools with permanently low results. Of schools with under 35% getting 5 GCSEs (including English and maths) in 2008, the academies did go up by 18% by 2011. But the non academies went up by 19%.”

But what bothers Stewart is that government policies have not reflected these successes in state education. The academies provision will continue to expand and the state sector, despite its successes, will continue to shrink. Despite improvements across the board, no new local authority schools can open under Gove’s reforms. Thriving state schools are encouraged to convert to academy status, while many lower-performing state schools can be forced to convert.

Though academy status is being strong-armed through the education system, Gove’s policies have been criticised for a lack of transparency, making it a challenge to evaluate their progress in one direction or another.

But, Henry Stewart points out: “Now that we have the data, we can make comparisons we wouldn’t have been able to before.”

The data, explains Stewart, is a crucial tool for parents trying to wrap their heads around a myriad of options, and campaigners against forced conversion who would find it difficult to fight their corner without it.