NewsBreakingOnline

Speaker orders minister to explain reports of errors which led to some councils being overfunded by £300 per pupil The ambitious plan by the education secretary, Michael Gove, to announce a fresh wave of academy schools was temporarily derailed when his junior minister Nick Gibb was forced into the Commons to answer charges that his department had misallocated funds for academies. Gove travelled to Birmingham to speak at the annual conference of the National College for School Leadership, where he announced plans for 200 more sponsored secondary academies in poorer areas, and the establishment of 200 academies in under-performing English primary schools. The reforms were broadly welcomed by Labour. Gove now expects one-third of schools to be academies by the end of the year, freeing them to set curriculums and arrange budgets, staff pay and working hours. Little extra cash is attached to academy status. Citing Barack Obama, Gove said: “Education reform is the civil rights battle of our time. In Britain, as in the USA, access to a quality education has never mattered more, but access to a quality education is rationed for the poor, the vulnerable and those from minority communities.” But his initiative was, for part of the day, overshadowed by the Commons Speaker, John Bercow, ordering the junior education minister to the Commons to explain reports that many existing academies had been given excessive funding by the department. The Financial Times said errors in funding had led to some councils being over-funded by as much as an extra £300 per pupil, worth around £300,000 a year to the average secondary academy. The department admitted there had been errors submitted by councils, but said the culprit was an over-complex funding system that led to councils making errors in funding applications. That system was being urgently reformed, the department said. Gibb said that the system over which the Labour government had presided meant that “schools in some local authorities received some £4,000 more per pupil than other schools with the same problems”. The shadow education secretary, Andy Burnham, said at the weekend that Gove had “caved in” to a legal claim by 23 councils that too much money had been taken from their budgets to pay for academies. Burnham told MPs: “We hear he [Gove] will pay the councils’ legal costs. “In the past year, the secretary of state has spent more money on solicitors’ fees than Ryan Giggs and Fred Goodwin put together.” Away from Westminster, Gove pressed ahead with plans to speed up the academy programme. As the Guardian has reported, Gove announced he will open more sponsored academies this year than the last government did in the first eight years of the programme and more than in any year of the history of the academy programme. Eighty-eight schools have been identified and will open in the next academic year. The weakest 200 primary schools in the country will become academies in 2012-13. Local authorities with particularly large numbers of struggling primaries will be identified for urgent collaboration with the department to tackle a further 500 primaries. The current average results performance will become the new “floor” for secondaries – all schools should have at least 50% of pupils getting five good GCSEs including English and maths by 2015. Gove told the Birmingham conference: “If we are to aspire to a world-class education system then we need to raise our sights beyond 35%. So next year the floor will rise to 40% and my aspiration is that by 2015 we will be able to raise it to 50%. There is no reason – if we work together – that by the end of this parliament every young person in the country can’t be educated in a school where at least half of students reach this basic academic standard.” He went on: “I realise that in stating this aspiration some will criticise too strong a focus on testing”. But he argued “A GCSE floor standard is about providing a basic minimum expectation to young people that their school will equip them for further education and employment.” Critics claimed that changing the formal status of a school did not necessarily improve the quality of teaching. Martin Johnson, deputy general secretary at the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said: “Once again the Department for Education has been found wanting. Quite how the education secretary thinks his department will be able to cope with running hundreds more academies when it has managed to mess up the funding for 704 is unclear.” Christine Blower, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said: “It is with breathtaking ignorance that Michael Gove believes compelling primary schools to convert to academies status will improve standards. The evidence does not support this. “This is a totally unacceptable experiment to undertake with our primary school children. These plans are being sold as the government’s vision of state funded education but are transparently not state education as there will be no democratic accountability.” Chris Keates, general secretary of the NASUWT, said: “Unfortunately this is just more of the same from the secretary of state: obsessively focusing on academies, invidiously name-checking the favoured few, substituting anecdote for evidence, misleading the public and misrepresenting the impact of his reforms. “Schools are being bullied, bounced and bribed into becoming academies.” The cash conundrum The government has admitted that the way in which it funds all schools – including academies – is “opaque, full of anomalies and unfair”. However for many education officials the resources given to academies are particularly unjust. Academies are funded by central government while maintained schools are given funds by their local authorities (LAs). In theory, academies receive the same amount per pupil as local authority maintained schools. But they are also given the additional money their town hall would have spent on related services such as transport and special needs provision. Academies also receive about £25,000 from the government to cover the costs of setting up a charitable trust and negotiating complex land transfers. In addition, academies that replace failing schools are given an extra sum of up to £400,000 to cover changes in leadership and new teachers. It is not these extra sums that critics see as unfair. They take issue with how the government deducts the money from LAs’ funds. Schools are turning into academies all year round. So how does the government know the amount by which it should reduce LAs’ funds for the whole year? The solution the government came up with last September was to cut LA funds by at least £148m in expectation that many schools would turn into academies and be out of LA hands. The LAs, were furious. They said ministers had calculated the cut by adding up how much it cost individual academies to provide services, not how much LAs actually spent on the schools that have now become academies. One council – Portsmouth – claims it is losing £500,000 through the cut and that its one academy is receiving double the amount per pupil of its other schools. Some 23 LAs have lodged claims with the high court for judicial review to have the calculation changed. Now another problem has emerged. It appears that too much money has been given to some academies and too little to others. The Department for Education says this is because LAs report their spending in different ways and may have made errors. Perhaps this is why the government is now carrying out not one but two consultations on how schools should be funded. Jessica Shepherd Academies Schools Primary schools Secondary schools Teaching Michael Gove Education policy Patrick Wintour guardian.co.uk