Children of the revolution

This week, 47 new academies will open their doors to thousands of hopeful schoolchildren - and a barrage of criticism. Is this a bright new dawn for state schools, or a sinister step towards a two-tier education system? Geraldine Bedell reports
New School Academies
Sir Michael Wilshaw at Mossbourne Community Academy in east London. Photograph: Andy Hall Andy Hall/Andy Hall

orbidding red-brick estates line the streets. Children choose their routes nervously round here, knowing that there are certain flats, families, corners of gang territory best avoided. Yet in front of me walk three girls, impeccably turned out in what appears to be the uniform of a posh private school: grey blazers with red piping, neat skirts and black tights. They look affluent and confident as they turn through the gates of their school, a low-rise palace of wood and glass, splashed with primary colours.

But this is not a posh private school, although it was designed by the Richard Rogers Partnership: 40 per cent of children here are on free school meals, 35 per cent are on the special needs register and 55 of those are statemented, meaning that they have the most severe problems. The surrounding area is so rough that teachers escort the children on to buses at the end of the day and patrol the streets in pairs.

The school is Mossbourne Community Academy in Hackney, east London, one of the first of a new type of educational institution to open in Britain, and in the vanguard of a controversial attempt to galvanise state education by removing schools from local authority control. Forty-seven new academies will open their doors this week, bringing the total across the country to 130. The government intends that a further 100 will open in the next two years.

An academy is an independent school within the state system, backed by a sponsor who - if an individual or business, rather than a university or school - puts up £2m towards the capital costs (almost all academies are in brand new buildings). The running costs are supplied by central government at the same level as for any state school, although they include the sum that a local authority would 'top-slice' to fund facilities shared between its schools. The sponsor has the power to appoint governors and oversee the curriculum.

The academies' many critics object that they are unaccountable locally. They say that they threaten to create a two-tier system of education, and that if the early versions have been successful it is mainly because they have had vast amounts of money and government attention lavished on them. They point to high rates of exclusion, which seem to suggest academies may only be prepared to teach certain pupils. And they worry about sponsors' jurisdiction over the curriculum: a couple of high-profile sponsors are evangelical Christians.

They should be worrying, although they have made much less of this, about sponsors' roles in the design of school buildings. A number of academy backers are so in thrall to the idea of schools-like-businesses and, perhaps, to their starry architects (who include Zaha Hadid and Norman Foster as well as Rogers) that they have signed off buildings with no outdoor play space, inadequate dining halls and nowhere for the whole school to gather.

I visited one academy, designed by Foster and Partners, on a sunny day when all the walkways (the place is way too modern for corridors) were lit by electric light. The Thomas Deacon Academy in Peterborough has cost £50m to date: the principal, Alan McMurdo, says the final bill still isn't in. Following protests from the children about the lack of play space, there are now benches outside, but the dining room is still too small. There are no bells, which McMurdo presents as a positive, educational choice, but he couldn't possibly have all 2,200 children moving around the school together.

Critics also object that the academy programme is intellectually incoherent: if independence over budgets, governance and curriculum is such a great thing, why not give it to all schools? And they question the motivation of sponsors, who, for an outlay of around £1.2m when tax benefits are taken into account (against average new-build costs of between £25m and £30m, all supplied by the government) get their hands on a vanity project - a school they can name after themselves and run as they like. It did not help the academies' cause that in April 2006, Des Smith, a council member of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust, was caught out telling a journalist that honours could be lined up for backers. Smith was promptly disowned by the SSAT.

But academies seem unstoppable. David Cameron launched his schools policy at Mossbourne. It is widely believed that Tony Blair exacted a promise from Gordon Brown that the manifesto commitment to 200 academies by 2010 and subsequent decision to enlarge that number to 400 would be honoured. Mossbourne is the school that is said to have persuaded Brown to agree.

Inside this school, apparently the most popular in Britain - at least with politicians - the atmosphere is not what you might expect of a state secondary school in a challenging area. Clearly, it's nothing like that of the school that once stood on this site, the notorious Hackney Downs, once branded the worst school in Britain and one of the first to be shut in the school closures programme. There is an air of calm purposefulness here, and palpable success.

Mossbourne is the top school in the country for value-added results. If the Key Stage 3 results at age 14 feed through into GCSEs, which the school's first cohort will take this year, 80 per cent of pupils should get 5 A*-Cs. The principal, Sir Michael Wilshaw, insists this is not because the school massages its intake. Children are banded according to ability and those who live closest to the school in each band are given priority.

Mossbourne does not exercise its right to select 10 per cent of its pupils on ability. Wilshaw introduces me in the corridor to a boy who scored nothing at all in his Sats at primary school and two years later is achieving level 4, the national average. 'My central purpose,' Wilshaw says, 'is to show you can take children from poor backgrounds, with low prior attainment, and make them succeed.'

At Mossbourne, teachers do this through intensive work with children who are lagging behind. In a 'nurture' group of Year 8s (aged 12-13), there is one teacher to 15 pupils, plus three teaching assistants.

Mossbourne pupils are on a tight leash. A teacher (they all seem mysteriously young and good-looking here) stands at the school gates in the morning, correcting minor infractions of uniform before pupils are allowed to enter. I have never seen a school where the uniform is worn so exactingly. Staff stand on the stairs between lessons, watching the pupils move up and down. Minor offences such as rudeness to a teacher mean staying behind until 6pm to be taught by one of the senior staff and then being collected by a parent. For worse offences, children come to school on Saturday.

A week after I first went to Mossbourne, I returned for a concert. The standard was high, but the event was also inclusive (some of the school's 19 autistic children were involved). The music was divided into pop, soul, world and swing, and there was dancing, including a conga in which the principal participated. So it's strict, but not stuffy. Wilshaw claims that once parents realise the methods are working they don't object to the discipline. The staff have no hours-contract, as they do in most state schools; they are, however, better paid. The day I visited, they'd just been told they were getting a 20 per cent results-linked bonus.

The government has invested a huge amount of hope in Mossbourne, and similar schools. When Unity City Academy in Middlesbrough went into special measures, not long after being formed by the amalgamation of two predecessor schools, central government gave it £6m to sort itself out and parachuted in a proven management team. When I ask the principal at Unity City, Bob Dore, if this would have happened in any other kind of school, he says, 'It would depend on the local authority.' No, then.

So academies are getting more attention and, in some cases, more money. There's nothing to stop sponsors writing cheques beyond their £2m initial outlay, and they're free to raise funds through their networks. When Wilshaw walks me through the theatre at Mossbourne, he says casually that his sponsor, Sir Clive Bourne, 'got a mate' to pay for the beautiful, retractable red-raked seating. An academy like Mossbourne would be an attractive proposition to donors, combining success with being seen to be doing something about deprivation.

Yet where new academies are proposed, there is often extreme hostility, not least from teaching unions. A few days after visiting Mossbourne I went to Barrow-in-Furness to witness a protest against the amalgamation of three existing schools into an academy. The demonstration was directed at the schools minister, Lord Adonis, who had been visiting.

As a young tyke at Tony Blair's Number 10 Policy Unit, Andrew Adonis was the architect of the academies programme. Now ennobled and a schools minister, he had earlier that day met two of the four Barrow borough councillors recently elected on the 'Our Schools Are Not For Sale' ticket. They told him 6,000 people in a town of 60,000 had signed a petition against the proposed academy. Some of the objectors are ideologically opposed to what they see as the privatisation of state education; others are worried more practically about an overflow of children who won't get into the new academy, fearing it will create a sink school nearby.

This gets to the heart of concerns about academies. They seem, so far, to be working - not all as spectacularly as Mossbourne, but much better than most of the struggling inner-city schools they replaced. The question is, at what cost? There are persistent stories of high rates of exclusion at academies; fears that, in journalist and education campaigner Fiona Millar's words, 'the freedom they have been given is the freedom to engineer a more favourable context for education by taking the most easily educable and excluding the difficult'.

Academy enthusiasts insist education isn't a zero sum game; in showing how results and behaviour can be improved, they argue, academies establish a path for other schools to follow. Only time will tell whether they have this galvanising effect. As stand-alone schools, though, there doesn't seem to be much incentive for them to share their secrets with others in their area, especially as they are in competition with them for applications. (Mossbourne had 1,400 applications for 180 places last year; a lot of children in Hackney will be going to a school that was their second choice.)

When I put this concern about divisiveness to Adonis, he says Mossbourne and Hackney are a good example of his contention that academies can lead to a general improvement. Schools across Hackney have become more popular in the past five years: fewer children are leaving the borough for their secondary education, and the three academies that are now up and running (there are two more in development) have played an important part in that. (The other factor has been outsourcing the running of education in the borough to Cambridge Educational Associates, who should probably claim quite a lot of the credit.) 'I think I'm right in saying when I last looked at the statistics,' says Adonis, 'that the perception in Hackney is that secondary education has been transformed and the impact of the academies has been positive.'

The mistake that the anti-academies lobbyists often make is to treat all academies as if they were the same and, in particular, to imply that they are proto-grammar schools, offering a superior sort of education to a handful of children. What you quickly realise from visiting a few of them is that they are as individual and particular as any other schools. The circumstances they face, though generally difficult, are very different. The question then becomes whether their independence allows them to respond better.

Unity City Academy in Middlesbrough serves one of the areas of greatest deprivation in Europe: a white working-class area (very different from Mossbourne's multi-ethnic community) where it is now not unusual for families to have seen four generations of unemployment. There is little interest in education: when Ofsted sent out 1,100 questionnaires to Unity parents, it got eight back. More than a third of pupils have special needs, and principal Bob Dore claims many have never seen a beach, although they live only 10 miles from the sea. A substantial proportion have never made it into the town centre. At the age of five, the children on the local estate have the highest rate of fillings in Britain.

Unlike Mossbourne, Unity City Academy was formed out of two existing schools. The sponsors are Amey plc, project managers in public service; given their background, it is astonishing that the school - which even Adonis admits 'was not a well-managed building project' - is so poorly designed. Only 44 per cent of the building was originally given over to classrooms. The rest, Dore says, 'was for show'.

For some reason, the building was designed to resemble a Tuscan village - though, actually, you need to be told this. One side of the sports hall backs on to classrooms, which shudder when balls hit its walls; the other adjoins music rooms. There were high and treacherous balconies - very enticing to disaffected or bored pupils, especially ones, as here, with no outside play space. The original dining room was absurdly small. Nor does anything else seem to have been particularly well managed: the school had had three previous heads and was in special measures by the time the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) parachuted in David Triggs, the extremely successful principal of Greensward College in Essex, and now the executive head of five schools.

Triggs became CEO of Unity, and nine months later brought Dore in as principal. The two men had worked together on preparing two schools to amalgamate into the John Madejski Academy in Reading, and both live in Essex: Dore is a weekly commuter and Triggs works on Unity business three days a month.

Some of their £6m windfall went on making the building fit for purpose, or fitter - a number of classrooms still have no windows. The rest went on turning a separate block of 17 classrooms into a new East Middlesbrough Technology Centre, which will this week start offering qualifications in hairdressing and beauty, car maintenance, construction, digital media, engineering, catering and horticulture to students from Unity and beyond.

The term before the new team arrived there were 4,000 exclusion days. The Technology Centre, with its emphasis on vocational education, has been designed to make education more appealing to those who might otherwise fail to see the point of it. The school has also employed dedicated pastoral staff with a background in social services (in some other schools, ex-police officers have filled this role) who go and find children when they don't turn up, and take parents to buy washing machines to keep uniforms clean.

In the two years since Dore arrived the school has changed a fair bit, although he would say not yet enough. The first thing he and his colleagues did after building a bigger dining hall was teach the children how to queue. There were previously no school trips: last year there were 54, including one to Kenya. The level of crime and the number of Asbos in the area have fallen. Triggs and Dore have permanently excluded three pupils, but 35 who might otherwise have gone are in a special unit down the road, where they don't wear uniform and follow personalised vocational training.

I talk to three girls who are leaving at 16 to go on to sixth-form college. One of them expects to get 13 good GCSEs and they're all intending to go to university. But they are exceptional. The pupils' scores when they arrive predict that only 17 per cent will have even a 37 per cent chance of getting five A*-Cs at GCSE. Improving results will be a struggle. But at least most pupils are getting out of bed to come in now and parents are gradually becoming interested.

Some of the anti-academies people like to sneer that schools such as Unity are simply recreating the old secondary moderns. They would, however, probably be the first to argue that education is about more than results. If vocational education offers children an alternative to persistent, apparently hopeless unemployment, then it has to be a good thing.

None of what Unity is doing is unique. Like other academies, and indeed other well-led schools, it cherry-picks good ideas from elsewhere. I ask Dore what it is about being an academy, aside from the £6m, that has allowed him to get as far as he has, and he doesn't really have an answer. 'It would have taken much longer at a local authority school,' he says. 'There would have been a lot of forms to fill in.'

In fact, reading between the lines, the sponsors here seem to have been of limited help. They commissioned an unsuitable building and couldn't keep a head teacher. When Triggs was brought in by the DCSF, the Amey-appointed board of governors was also changed. Three Amey staff members, of whom Dore speaks highly, continued to represent the company, although when I visited the school one of them had left Amey and his place on the governing board had not yet been filled. This looks, at best, rather offhand. (No one from Amey would speak to me directly, although a month after I initially approached the company, the managing director supplied a rather general statement which spoke of 'challenges', 'four years of continuous improvements' and 'confidence in the board's ability to build on this good work', but didn't answer the key points about the terrible building, the succession of heads, or the delay in filling the board vacancy.)

The funding agreement between a sponsor and the DCSF is a seven-year rolling contract which could in theory be terminated at any time. But David Wolfe, a barrister at Matrix Chambers and an expert on academies, says the grounds for doing this are very limited. A sponsor couldn't, for example, be removed if an academy failed to meet Ed Balls's National Challenge of getting at least 30 per cent of pupils five A*-C GCSEs, including English and maths.

Sponsors are also a cause for concern insofar as they can dictate the curriculum. There have been persistent worries that evangelical Christians like Sir Peter Vardy, with his Emmanuel Schools Trust (three schools in the north of England), or Robert Edmiston, with one academy open and another in development in the Midlands, have too much control over what is taught and, in particular, that they promote creationism. The Royal Society was concerned enough about the Emmanuel Schools Trust to issue a rare protest. 'Creationism,' it pointed out crisply, 'is not consistent with the wealth of evidence for evolution, such as the fossil record. Similarly, a belief that the Earth was formed in 4004BC is not consistent with the evidence from geology, astronomy and physics.'

Gordon Brown and Ed Balls have now changed the rules to require academies to follow the national curriculum in the core subjects of maths, English and science. Adonis says independent control of the curriculum is in practice an ability to add on rather than reduce, and dismisses anxieties about the teaching of creationism: 'Ofsted has not found concerns about the teaching of science. The schools which have been most criticised by fundamentalist secularists have without exception been praised for the quality of education they are offering. And parents are queueing up to send their children to those schools.'

So how do the rest of the charges against academies stand up? Alasdair Smith of the Anti Academies Alliance objects that they lack democratic accountability. This is fair enough, but it's doubtful that many parents feel they have any democratic control over non-academy schools. Governors' meetings at council-run schools are often bogged down in bureaucracy, while local representation can mean little more than activists playing out politics at the level of the school. The objection also misses the point that academies usually replace local authority schools that were struggling and unpopular.

The programme does, though, seem to be intellectually inconsistent: if independence is so marvellous, why not give it to all schools? Adonis's response is that that's where he's heading: he envisages all 3,500 secondary schools 'moving towards greater autonomy and greater engagement with external partners ... The academies are at the leading edge of a trend that's been spreading across the whole state system. What do I expect to see happen? Progressively more schools having progressively more independence, and local authorities increasingly becoming commissioners of education, rather than providers.'

As far as exclusions are concerned, academy principals claim that the figures are skewed by the difficulties of amalgamating schools, but are not out of line with what might be expected in the first year, and that they quickly settle down. It remains to be seen whether the numbers do indeed settle. Much else about academies will also only be clear after some time. Thomas Deacon Academy, for example, has been formed from three schools, one of which - Deacon's - was highly desirable, while the others were less successful. Some 50 per cent of the pupils came from Deacon's and inevitably their dominance has affected the atmosphere. The new academy doesn't, for example, play football, because Deacon's had a fixture list against public schools and that, the director of sport says, grandly, 'lends itself to rugby and hockey'.

I am shown around by sixth-formers who enthuse about their International Baccalaureate courses, their spanking new building, the enormous numbers of computers, the amount of information that now comes to them by email, the extent of student representation and the range of activities on offer once school officially finishes at 2.30pm. They are charming, articulate and thoughtful. It turns out that they were all previously at Deacon's. Perhaps it will only be fair to judge the new academy when it's educating children from 11 to 18.

The only reasonable conclusion to draw from looking at a range of academies is that they're not homogeneous. They are affected by variables common to all schools - the quality of the management, the attitude and ability of the pupils and teachers - and by other things that don't apply elsewhere, like the involvement of their sponsor. At the moment, they are benefiting from new buildings and the feelings of specialness that the infrastructural investment implies. But the buildings won't be cutting-edge forever. Anyway, it is possible to have a brilliantly run school in scruffy buildings and a badly run one in a celebrity architect's dream. Relationships matter much more.

Some local authority schools have done radical things, such as setting up computers in thousands of pupils' homes, without troubling themselves to become academies. Taking on academy status may well allow heads and governors to move faster. Is that likely to have an adverse effect on other schools in the vicinity? Unless you think there is only so much success to go around (in which case you might as well give up on the education of all but a few) there's no necessity for it to do so, especially if academies are open about the secrets of their success. But the omens are not good: Britain has a grim history of divisiveness in education.

The government, it seems, sees academies partly as a means of jolting schools out of a torpid culture in which failure has become acceptable. 'It is an almost invariable rule,' Adonis tells me, 'that the greater the controversy over the setting up of an academy the more popular it is when it opens. That doesn't surprise me, because controversies are often driven by very strong local vested interests, and they tend to exist where educational standards are lowest and there's most to fear from the arrival of an academy.'

There are many dedicated and innovative teachers outside academies, and academies are far from being a universal panacea. To be really good they need, like any school, to offer inspiring leadership, to be efficiently managed, and to pay very close attention to all their pupils. Academy status can't guarantee those things, although it may make them more likely, not least because the government has too much at stake to let any academies fail. Adonis and Ed Balls cannot, though, be expected to pay the attention that the early academies have had to all 3,500 secondary schools, let alone the primary schools now increasingly being talked about as candidates for independence, perhaps as part of all-through academies. Sponsors - universities and federations of branded schools in particular - will become even more important. The message may well be to pick your sponsor carefully.

In the end, the positions of the pro- and anti-academy lobbyists were summed up for me by two teachers. The first, Carmel Totman, is an English teacher at Mossbourne. 'I have a lot of arguments with teacher friends about the fact I work here,' she says. 'They say it's elitist. But we take children of all backgrounds and abilities and have very high expectations of them. We don't make excuses on the basis of background or culture.'

The other was David York, branch secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers and an organiser of the anti-academy protest in Barrow-in-Furness. I asked him whether he thought an academy might not boost the results of the children who currently attend the least successful school in the town. 'You have to ask yourself why some children aren't getting five A*-Cs at GCSE,' he said. 'Some are just not capable of doing that.' Regardless of who I was, or where I came from, I know who I'd rather have teaching my kids.