If only life were simple

I hate to begin a blog with an anecdote. Nothing less than rigorous research for me in my real job, but as part of my commitment to try to blog more than once in a blue moon, I offer these thoughts today. As I have been preparing two sessions- one for Masters students, filling in the background to SESI (School Improvement and School Effectiveness), and one for our EdD, on similar lines but asking more critical questions. Amongst all this preparation, anyone who is an avid reader of my Twitter fed (who is this poor lost soul??) would have noticed a reference to academies. Not academies in general, not even old style Labour sponsored ones, but a particular case. I happened to think, when it was suggested locally that one of the secondary schools become an academy, that it was wrong. Wrong because it was not a failing school, but one which for complex reasons (catchment area, long term underinvesting in buildings etc) was good but not good enough despite a dedicated staff. So, I told a journalist back in 2005 and he investigated. He also happened to be an old boy of that school. Here's what he found:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2005/jun/14/schools.politics

As he and the Head predicted, forces bigger than them were at work and the school became an academy with a lovely new building, new staff and a sponsor. Now, I am not, for the purposes of this blog saying that all these things don't have an impact for the good in some cases. In this case though, an established community school which could have improved was lost, and a new one is floundering. Here are its latest stats from the DES:

http://www.education.gov.uk/establishments/urn/135665/the-milton-keynes-academy/performance

Look at these and remember that its predecessor school had 21% of students  achieving five A*-C grades at GCSE and was therefore viewed as needing assistance. What is the answer to academies in difficulty?

What does this tell us? At one level it is anecdotal evidence of one school in one area. At another level, it is not good news for the students locally, and anyone would wish the staff well in their task. However, as I prepare the sessions for my postgraduates, I would just like to reiterate to Mr Gove and any others listening that academy status (old or new) is not the answer, per se, to even standard measures of improvement. As decades of research has shown, there is much more to SESI than that.

http://www.icsei.net
www.belmas.org.uk