Academies, as CoffeeHouser knows, are booming. There were around 200 of them when Michael Gove became Education Secretary last May. Now, just a year later, and steaming well ahead of expectations, there are over 600. This is, as Benedict Brogan suggests in his Telegraph column today, one of the great successes of the coalition era — albeit one that owes a debt to Andrew Adonis, Tony Blair and all the school reformers that came before them. And it is a triumph of quality, as well as of quantity. The simple, overwhelming truth is that academies are, on the whole, better than the schools they replace. Just look at the table released by the Harris Federation, comparing their academies to their LEA predecessors:
And there is even more supporting evidence doing the rounds at the moment, thanks largely to Julian Astleand and John Rentoul. Both have highlighted a recent report by the LSEwhich finds not just that academies improve standards within their own exam halls, but also that — crucially — they improve standards in surrounding, council-run schools too. Here is the concluding passage from that report, although it is worth sifting through the nuance on pages 40-44:
“We also find that it is possible for neighbouring schools to experience significant improvements in their pupil performance despite the reduction in the ‘quality’ of their pupil intake. This seems to occur (mainly) in the neighbours of academy schools that experience large significant improvements in their pupil performance. We do not believe that this is a
coincidence: it suggests that it is possible for performance improvements in an academy to generate significant beneficial external effects on their neighbouring schools.”
This shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. For starters, there are the effects that the LSE report mentions, and which you could have guessed at: “That is, the beneficial performance effects, which stem from increased choice/competition and also from the sharing of academy school facilities (and expertise) with the wider community.” But there is also data on what happened when other countries liberated their schools systems. For instance, one immense study of over 28,000 school pupils, by the Swedish reformer Mikael Sandstrom, suggested that a 1 per cent increase in free school pupils produces an overall improvement in standards equivalent to a 5 per cent increase in schools spending.
Recent studies of American charter schools have found similar. It is a point worth remembering as the number of academies continues to rise: competition isn’t necessarily about killing the underperforming schools, it’s about improving them.
Comments