Even some of the heads of new academies declared themselves surprised at the amount of money they had gained through the move. As one head teacher in Cheltenham told the Guardian, ‘The increase in funding has been dramatic.’ The Guardian was shown a number of documents by newly converted academies, including four grammar schools; all showed that the schools had become significantly better off as a result, with net benefits ranging from £150,000 a year to £570,000 in one case. The schools were supposedly being given money that would allow them to buy back the additional services, including behaviour support, school improvement and central administrative staff, that they would have received from the local authority, a funding stream known as Lacseg (local authority central spend equivalent grant). But once the schools had calculated how much it would cost them to buy the services back, some found they were incurring a clear profit of up to six figures.31
Over the course of a year, I talked to several head teachers, many of them leading outstanding inner-city schools. Most were opposed, in principle, to the policy of taking good schools out of the local authority, but with severe cuts looming, the government offer was a poisoned chalice. The word used most often was ‘bribe’. There was also considerable uncertainty over conversion financing, and how long it would last. Schools interested in converting to academy status were encouraged to use a ‘ready reckoner’ on the DfE website to see how much better off they would be if they chose to go down the academy route. According to a governor of an ‘outstanding’ secondary in the north-west of England that has chosen to convert, ‘the figures are very unclear, but it seemed from the ready reckoner that at first the school would get an extra two million over five years, which was very tempting. Then it went down to 1.5 million. And then down to a million … The problem is, we don’t yet know the extra costs. We are going to have to hire a finance director, more staff. We are going to have to buy in office services that were provided by the local authority and get an audit done, sort out our own pensions liability.’ According to Peter Downes, a former head teacher, funding expert and Liberal Democrat councillor, who tabled a successful motion against the academy and free school programme at the party’s annual conference in 2010: ‘The dice are massively loaded in favour of academies, in terms of funding. But my thesis is that this is simply not sustainable.’
The long-delayed implementation of the pupil premium in December did little to allay schools’ fears. For each of its pupils on free school meals—that is, from a household with an income of less than £16,000—a school was to receive the ‘pupil premium’, an annual additional amount of £430 per pupil, with head teachers deciding how it was to be distributed. Gove promised £625 million in 2011–12, increasing to £2.5 billion by the end of 2014–15. ‘It’s not going to mean anything for us, once you take the rest of [the cuts] into account,’ one head teacher told me, shaking his head despairingly. Andy Burnham called the premium ‘a con … what was meant to be additional money for the most deprived, will simply recycle funds from one school to another. It is robbing Peter to pay Paul.’
Into this anxious and uncertain atmosphere over school funding, the government decided in January 2011 to release a mass of figures into the public domain—in the name of transparency in government—on individual school budgets in England. While this revealed that the average figure per pupil per year is £5,547.13, it appeared that some boroughs and schools were spending far more, and some far less. Ryeish Green School in Wokingham, which had closed in August 2010, had spent a staggering £32,937.91 pounds per pupil in a year, while All Saints Catholic Centre for Learning in Knowsley, Liverpool, had spent only £1,529.81. The local authority with the highest average spending per pupil per year—£8,528.50—was the East London borough of Hackney; the local authority with the lowest—£4,310.05—was Knowsley in Merseyside.32 While some heads protested at the dumping of what they thought to be dangerously undifferentiated data into the public domain, presenting school budgets out of context, the Coalition used the publication of the figures to argue that it was not government funding that mattered so much as how schools used it.
By the close of its first year in government, the full extent—if not yet the full implications—of the schools revolution was becoming evident. It was clear that one of the principal aims of the Tory-dominated Coalition was dramatically to dismantle the role of local authorities in relation to education. A democratically accountable public service, nationally directed but locally administered, was fast being replaced by a state-subsidised and centrally controlled quasi-market. Under proposals published in late May 2011, successful schools were to be allowed to expand—despite serious questions concerning the practicability, not to mention desirability, of such a plan—and so-called ‘poor’ schools were to be allowed to wither and die. In July, the Guardian confirmed that civil servants privately advised ministers that schools should be allowed to fail, if government was serious about reform.33
Schools policy was increasingly rigged in favour of the academies and free schools, that were granted a range of special freedoms and funds. While six local authorities awaited the government’s verdict on its earlier decision to axe their school building programmes, Michael Gove announced £800 million worth of capital funding to refurbish dozens of academies around the country. A footnote to the new draft admissions code intimated that academies and free schools—but not maintained schools—were to be allowed to prioritise children on free school meals in their admissions policy. Predictably, this proposal was represented in the media as a bold and innovative move towards greater fairness. But if implemented, it would not only hand the ‘new’ schools valuable extra revenue—via the pupil premium—but might open the door for some schools to ‘cherry pick’ higher-attaining children on low incomes, further destabilising the intake of neighbourhood maintained schools. By May 2011, the Department of Education website did not even list community or comprehensive schools as one of the chief school types in England. Only faith schools got a mention. From being the great reviled, they had become the officially disappeared.
At the heart of the new schools revolution was a canny political con trick: the swift but steady transfer of resources from the needy to the better-off, in the name of the disadvantaged. While the government was not yet facing the kind of opposition that its proposed changes to the NHS had by now provoked, there were many, including some from within the Coalition’s Liberal Democrat partners, who were angered and dismayed by the speed, range and brutal consequences of the government’s education policy. These included Councillor Peter Downes who declared of the new funding arrangements for the academies: ‘This is directing resources to the most privileged. In this way, life gets harder for schools at the bottom of the heap.’ Faced with reductions in both central government grants and with further money clawed back from the Dedicated Schools Grant, now used to fund academies, Downe’s own authority, Cambridgeshire County Council, had to make significant reductions in services to black and ethnic-minority groups, disabled children, early years services, teenage pregnancy programmes, special needs teachers, and sports and hobbies grants for vulnerable young people; further cuts were planned in music programmes, services to disabled children and early years work. Cambridgeshire’s share of the ‘top-slice’ cut was £1.7 million. The Cambridgeshire Cabinet took the decision to protect funding to the Children and Young People’s Services area for the year 2011–12. According to Peter Downes, ‘Had they not done so, the service reductions would have been even more severe. But we hold our breath for next year when the Cambridgeshire top-slice rises to £3.1 million.’
‘Savage’ was the summing up of former Children’s Commissioner Sir Al Aynsley Green, who claimed that society’s most vulnerable—those in care, disabled children, young carers, young offenders and those with mental health issues—would bear the brunt of a decline in services that were already inadequate, following further cuts to the Connexions career advice, Future Jobs fund, Youth Opportunity Fund, Youth Capital Fund and Working Neighbourhood fund. His conclusion was chilling. ‘We are witnessing the destruction