By Stephen Brierley
ASCL Vice President

Ageing.

Granted, it’s not a popular subject, but bear with me; as someone who’s nearer 60 than 50, it’s something I have to think about from time to time.
 
I learned on Monday that the three things that deteriorate with age are your knees, your eyes, and your confidence. I can relate to at least the second of those, despite being married to an optometrist; thank heavens for varifocals! But if my physical sight is not as good as once it was, my hindsight is definitely getting better with each passing month…
 
…and in particular, I’m beginning to understand — 36 years on — just how important one of the lectures I had in my initial teacher training was.
 
If I remember correctly, the lecturer deviated from the syllabus to tell us about a new Education Bill that had been published. That Bill, which became the Education Reform Act 1988, introduced a number of deep changes to ‘the system’.

• It introduced the National Curriculum. I remember thinking back then that ‘key stage’ was a funny name for a few years of education — how could they all be ‘key’? It introduced national end-of-key stage tests too, including at key stages 1, 2 and 3. (The key stage 3 versions survived until 2008; the key stage 1 versions became optional in 2023.)
• It created city technology colleges, and grant-maintained schools — the precursors of academies today.
• It introduced local management of schools. Schools were given their own budgets (before that, the LA did all the purchasing!), and a number of other responsibilities besides (like appointing staff).
• It liberalised school admissions, giving parents more choice in the system, and basing school admission numbers on physical capacity instead of on a local authority plan.
• It introduced league tables.

 
These things are such a part of the furniture nowadays, it’s hard to imagine life without them.
 
But taken together, the effect of these reforms was transformational. Competition was introduced into education. Local authorities — so the argument went — had been ineffective (or at least, inconsistent) at driving up standards in their families of schools, so, give more power to headteachers and hold them accountable by testing students more and publishing the results nationally. Armed with the information about which schools were getting good results, parents could choose where to send their children, and every school would be funded individually based on the number of children on their rolls.
 
Good schools would flourish. Bad schools would go to the wall. The whole Bill presented a coherent vision of a market-driven (Thatcherite — indeed, Josephite) education system.
 
It was a revolution. With hindsight I can see why our lecturer took time out to tell us about it. The Act was arguably the biggest educational legacy of the 1979-1997 Conservative governments (though Ofsted runs it close!).
 
In that context, it’s really surprising that arguably the biggest educational legacy of the 2010-2024 Conservative-led governments has been the undermining of competition and its replacement with collaboration. I’m talking, of course, about the rise of multi-academy trusts. I think we’ll look back with hindsight in another 36 years' time and argue that the growth of MATs was just as transformational as the 1988 Act, even if it didn’t come about as the result of direct legislation. 
 
Now, cards on the table: I’m a fully paid-up collaborationist. I’ve set up a number of joint ventures during my time in leadership, and I’ve seen first-hand the power of working collaboratively. I firmly believe we are “stronger together” – a great strapline that's often used by the MAT for whom I now work.
 
ASCL is of the same view. Our latest blueprint puts it like this: partnerships “are a key mechanism for supporting struggling schools to improve, and for the development and dissemination of high-quality teaching and learning.”  Notice we say “partnerships,” though; we don’t say MATs because “there continues to be a role for other forms of strong legal partnership, with shared governance, such as ‘hard’ federations of maintained schools.”
 
Some people would prefer to see a fully MAT-ified system. But to coin a phrase, I’m pretty “structurally agnostic.” I like MATs because they hard-wire collaboration into the very structure of schools, which to me makes it easier to ensure it happens; but how collaboration happens is less important than ensuring that it happens as much as possible. It’s effective, it doesn’t cost the earth; I think it’s the closest thing we have to a silver bullet.
 
Which brings me to last week’s announcement that the government is withdrawing Trust Capacity Funding and, especially, the £25k grant to pay the legal fees of schools that join a trust for the first time.

I suppose, if you're “structurally agnostic” (as the government say they are), and if money is tight (which it undoubtedly is), there's a certain logic to cutting those two – why have incentives to push schools in a particular structural direction if you don't have a view on what those structures should be?

But for me, system-wide improvement has to be mediated through the structural labyrinth that's now in place. Structural agnosticism can't be a reason to avoid thinking carefully about how best to plot a path through; indeed, if anything I'd argue structural agnosticism requires us to think more carefully about the way through, not least because the option of partially rebuilding the maze, or even steering its development, is presumably off the table.
 
And taking the long view, I wonder if making collaboration that bit harder might eventually be seen as a mistake.
 
Maybe I’m wrong, but I sincerely hope this moment isn't one that, 20 years from now, other hindsightful near-60-year-olds identify as the beginning of the end for collaboration. If that's what these cuts turn out to be, they would become – in my ageing eyes – the very definition of short-sightedness.

Stephen Brierley is ASCL Vice President 2024-25. You may also be interested in attending our Collaboration Conference in London on 4 December 2024, where we will be examining the future of school collaboration and leadership. Find out more here.