We had a public meeting of 130 people, a rally, a picnic and a stand-up comedy night, but the most important element of our campaign was getting three parent governors elected. There were three vacancies because the school hadn’t held any elections for ages,” says Natasha Steel.
Steel, who runs her own PR company, is one of a group of East Sussex parents who fought and won a battle to prevent their local school, Hove Park, from being turned into an academy. Now they have widened their sights, including setting up a group, Hands Off Our Schools Brighton & Hove, in response to government plans to force all schools to become academies.
There have been campaigns against academies since the policy of freeing schools from local authority control was launched by New Labour, and the Anti-Academies Alliance has been around for 10 years. But the government’s latest push, signalled by its schools white paper in March – combined with evidence of poor performance at some multi-academy trusts and publicity surrounding high salaries and financial irregularities – has led to a renewed surge of activism.
“I went on the Iraq war march and I’ve done the odd thing here and there but this is the most direct involvement I’ve had in any campaign in my life,” says Steel. “It’s your children, it’s your school, it’s really personal.”
“People are starting to realise they aren’t the only ones with spine-chilling stories of how children are being treated,” says Madeleine Holt, one of the organisers of another group, Rescue Our Schools, whose focus is social media. Holt, a former journalist who also runs the social enterprise Meet the Parents, believes campaigns against academisation and the removal of the requirement for parent governors, protests against behaviour policies and Sats, and parents challenging the bar on termtime holidays, are all part of the same phenomenon.
“It’s a broader movement. It’s an emotional thing: parents feel they’ve been shoved aside over the years,” she says. “It’s like a Venn diagram – we have slightly different views on some issues but there is a substantial core of shared ideas.”
“We’re not just anti-academies activists any more,” agrees Alasdair Smith, a teacher and parent in east London who was active in the Anti-Academies Alliance before setting up Parents Defending Education. “It’s about cuts, special educational needs and the curriculum.”
“You’re seeing an amalgamation of all sorts of issues,” says Steel. “Sats and the growth of testing, mental health issues, the narrowing of the curriculum.”
Steel has what she calls a “gut feeling” against academisation. Smith says he feels “vindicated” that early fears about a policy launched under Tony Blair have proved justified: “What we’re saying to every parent is: try to stop your school becoming an academy because they are unaccountable businesses.”
Other parents with less obviously political views have found themselves in conflict with a specific school or trust. Fiona Forrest contacted Rescue Our Schools because she felt a new regime of punishments, including Saturday detentions, at her daughter’s south-east London school had made it “like a workhouse”.
Nichole Roberts was among a group of parents to receive a solicitor’s letter demanding they rename a Facebook group on which they had criticised rules about dress and behaviour at Morley Academy in Leeds.
If all these parents have something in common, it is that they object to what they regard as the new and unaccountable power of schools, and the corresponding decline in their own influence. Diane Reay, professor of education at Cambridge University and a researcher in the area of family-school relationships, says the Conservative flagship policy of free schools was built on a “fallacy of parental involvement” – in the latest batch of 22 free schools approved by education secretary Nicky Morgan, just one is run by parents. She argues that “growing disquiet about schooling” may be due to growing awareness of anxiety and unhappiness (shown in statistics as well as anecdotes) in children.
David James, professor at Cardiff University and editor of the British Journal of Sociology of Education, thinks parents were slow to realise the implications of a policy that took schools out of local control. “It changes the whole dynamic,” he says. “It happened slowly but inexorably, and people partly didn’t realise because New Labour were as responsible as anyone else.”
But more recent moves to reshape governing bodies along corporate lines and reduce the number of parent governors, or remove them altogether, seem to have woken fears among parents that their voices may in future be ignored. “There is an assumption that if you’re an accountant or a lawyer you have a better sense of what is needed,” says Steel. “In my opinion the lollipop lady and playground assistant know more about the children in a school than anybody else, but they are to be excluded because they can’t manage data.”
Asked whether the weight given to parents’ opinions by Ofsted has changed, a spokesperson for the regulator highlighted Parent View, the online questionnaire launched in 2011, while a statement from the Department for Education said: “we want parents to be more involved in their child’s education, not less”, and that the “expectation that academies listen to the views and needs of parents” will be strengthened.
But despite evidence from the outgoing chief inspector, Sir Michael Wilshaw, and others that many multi-academy trusts are underperforming, and the reasonable inference that their governance model is not better than the local authority one, the government seems determined to press ahead with reforms that value skills over stakeholders.
“Academy trust boards will always be free to appoint parents as they see fit,” a spokesperson said. “We are clear, though, that governors should be appointed for their expertise.”
Whether this promise will survive the turmoil created by the EU referendum remains to be seen. But the direction of travel, towards a skills-based model of governance and away from local authorities, seems unlikely to be reversed. Campaigner and journalist Fiona Millar, who co-founded the Local Schools Network in 2010 to promote an alternative vision to academies and free schools, says: “Unless there is a change of government I think parents are going to be cut out.”
If the awkward fact for the government is the poor performance of many trusts, with mounting evidence of academy weakness wielded by activists as a weapon, the awkward fact for supporters of the previous model is that evidence about parental involvement in schools is mixed. Research shows that “parental involvement can increase inequality”, explains Reay, who ran a research project on this subject with James and Gill Crozier, because despite the good intentions of parents who believe they are committed to supporting local education for all, “there is a sense that as a good parent you need to promote your own children’s interests ... What we found is that parents often ended up campaigning for their children to be promoted to higher sets.”
James says if this shocks us, it is because we are in denial about the effect of schooling: “Education does many wonderful things but it does generate inequality as well, and acknowledging that is a really good starting point. Most policy discourse doesn’t. Education is seen as an entirely positive force instead of a process that is really quite dangerous if one isn’t quite sharp-eyed about the inequality that is being created.”
Millar says that with two-thirds of secondary schools now academies and half of those in multi-academy trusts, there is in any case no way back. Instead, she would like to see greater openness, emphasis on local partnerships, and governing bodies that combine skills and stakeholders.
For parents, it is not just a question of a school’s results or effectiveness. For some, the bonds between a school and its local area have an intrinsic and social value not easily measurable. “It’s time for parents not to be party political but parent political,” says Holt. “It’s about schools being rooted in communities and localism.”
She and others welcome the government’s partial retreat on academisation. Whether their belief in local schools in which parents have a stake as more than consumers can gain any wider purchase in the face of the government’s standards-driven programme is doubtful. But they are trying.
