Experience, understanding and independence

This week the EFA launched a survey on how academies are taking up their new freedoms: 'We’re particularly interested in whether academies are using the freedoms and flexibilities available to them and what difference this has made to schools.



I wonder if this is related to academies not being able to leave multi-academy trusts and whether schools within MATs may have less freedom to act than they did with the local authority.

The issue was addressed by the Education Select Committee in writing and then put to the EFA's senior managers who said that academies and MATs were seen as a single legal entity - I'm not sure what that means in practice for individual school freedoms.

This piece from the Independent talks a bit about independence:

'Anthony Seldon acknowledges that he may have been a bit "naive" to think it was enough for an independent school just to sponsor a state-school academy and watch it thrive..."The only way you can do this is by being fully committed and being fully up to speed with the way that state schools operate"...'

Richard Garner (Education editor) then pointed to a column by Jon Coles, chief executive of United Learning Trust, in which Jon Coles says experience is not necessarily compatible across the public/private school divide: '...once you've spent 20 or more years of your career successfully leading one type of school, you have acquired a set of behaviours for school leadership that are well embedded and thoroughly learned. Changing those behaviours and habits to suit another context is not easy.'

He also said: 'The way to create useful, sustainable change is not to prescribe practice but to set schools free... the way to have more independent schools is to allow schools to be independent... when everyone is borrowing ideas freely, the barriers and the idea of a pecking order get broken down.'