English schools and Covid-19: the perils of weak centralisation

by Richard Brooks

There were howls of protest in early June when parents in England discovered that zoos and pubs were set to reopen, but not their schools, or at least not for their children. Over the following weeks attention shifted steadily towards the impact of protracted school closures on children’s learning. After three weeks and a U-turn on free school meals, the government announced a £1 billion fund for one-to-one and small group tuition. There is still no clarity over how schools will reopen after the summer holidays.

Covid-19 has revealed deep weaknesses in the structure of the English education system. It has thrown new light on old issues of educational inequality and the impact of the home environment on children’s development. It has also tested to destruction the current model of ‘centralisation plus school autonomy’ and answered the question of whether we need a capable middle tier between the Department for Education and individual schools. In a world that requires rapid innovation at scale: yes we do.

The UK, and indeed much of the world, is in the middle of the biggest ever experiment in interrupting children’s learning. Many children will spend five and a half months out of school between March and September and it is not clear what kind of education they will return to. The impact on educational inequality is likely to be severe. It is not just that the disadvantaged children will directly suffer the most learning loss by being away from school. The same families have seen a disproportionate impact on their health and economic security and are least likely to return to school. This makes perfect sense if you are worried about the vulnerability of members of your own household to the disease.

How to out rocket boosters on educational inequality

The long-term educational impact of the loss of schooling for millions of children cannot be known at the moment (although the Education Endowment Fund’s rapid review gives us some indications). We do know that the lengthy summer break each year sees many children slip back significantly in terms of their learning. The research in this area fits pretty well with intuition: children fall back furthest in the things they do not naturally do so much of outside school (like maths and spelling), and less in what they do more of (like speaking and reading).

These summer studies also show a big socio-economic gradient to the learning loss. Many advantaged children actually get better at reading over the summer whilst disadvantaged children can lose the equivalent of a whole term’s learning. When school starts again in the autumn some children spend the next months getting back up to speed, whilst the lucky ones move further ahead. Disadvantage, just like learning, is cumulative.

The parallels with the extended lockdown under Covid-19 are obvious. A small minority of children will have had a great developmental experience curated for them over the past months, with lots of personal attention and a mixture of reading, activities, structured play, and some schoolwork. Parents with more resources tend to have more space and privacy in their homes, more outside space, and good technology and connectivity. Some have paid for online one-to-one tuition. Those who were privately schooled seem to have received more input from schools keen to justify their fees, and private schools seem to have expected more of both parents and pupils: some have been sitting at home in their uniform for live lessons over the internet. The same private schools are now pushing ahead further and faster with plans to re-open in September.

Meanwhile many families have struggled, the remote learning offer has been very patchy, and many children do not appear to be engaging meaningfully with the home learning materials provided by schools. Lots of children will have been bored and under-stimulated during lockdown, but it is the most disadvantaged and vulnerable who will suffer the greatest loss.

One thing we have definitely learned from Covid-19 is the limitations of ‘EduTech’. It is not that online learning is useless, but most online resources (especially for younger age groups) require an adult to intermediate between the device, the child and the content. Parents can’t just hand their children over to their computers and expect them to learn. They end up stuck, or doing something repetitive, or finding a clever means of frustrating the intention of the programme, or generally off-task in one of a myriad of ways. My own children have found a game development app buried in their online homework platform.

Now that schools are partially re-opening, only a small proportion of the overall capacity is being taken up, and disadvantaged children are least likely to be returning. Teacher surveys in early June suggested that far fewer than half of children in the returning year groups were back at school in the most deprived areas. Meanwhile state secondary schools are only opening for a day or two a week of face-to-face teaching, and only for the GCSE and A Level exam year groups. All this is putting rocket boosters on educational inequality.

The road back to learning

Some of the immediate and short-term responses should include:

• Reopen more school capacity now and encourage more disadvantaged children to take advantage of existing capacity;
• Mitigate the impact on learning loss over the summer with a big push on targeted small-group tuition and continued school to home support; and
• Design the new model for school operation from this autumn to get all children back in as quickly as possible, with an ongoing focus on inequality.

Increasing take up of existing capacity must be about building confidence and the desire for school provision in key communities. The government has totally sold the pass on this issue: there has been no clear ‘send your children back to school’ message, no advocacy from the Secretary of State about the benefits for children, and a total lack of clarity around what schools are expected to provide for their pupils. In the absence of national leadership it will be down to stretched local authorities and schools themselves to do the heavy lifting of outreach and community engagement. This is much easier for federations that can share resources across a group of schools.

Increasing capacity is mainly a secondary school issue: it is more complex here than in primaries because older students switch between subjects rather than sticking together as a year group, teachers are subject specialists, and there is more setting and streaming (so ‘bubbles’ are much harder to operate). Nonetheless the current situation is clearly way below what is safely and physically possible. For example, the subject choice issues do not apply to learners in the first two years of secondary school; it would be possible to enforce social distancing for adults (both teachers and parents) more than for secondary school pupils; and there could be more use of PPE within schools and shielding of vulnerable adults. Other countries are already applying similar approaches in order to restart their schools.

Over the summer we do have an opportunity to address the learning loss. There is plenty of evidence about the effectiveness of even basic summer activities, student resource packs and sending books home. But this year we should think at a different scale of ambition by keeping school facilities open wherever possible, by speeding up the roll out of small group and one-to-one tuition, and by maintaining school-to-home support for learning right over the summer.

This is not the year for long foreign holidays, so let us make it the summer of learning. This will obviously require additional central resources such as the new tutoring money to be released quickly. Many school staff will need a break after months of disorienting hard work. But arguments that ‘it simply can’t be done’ or ‘we can’t afford it’ will hopefully be less mesmerising given what has actually been done in the NHS and for the rest of the economy.

New models of schooling

However, the biggest and long-term challenge is finding a sustainable model of schooling from September that is safer (it can never be perfectly safe) and serves all children. It is very hard to predict the evolution of policy in the face of Covid-19 and social distancing regulations are highly likely to change over the coming months. However, we can safely say there is no prospect of doubling the size of the teaching profession and the size of the school estate to allow a halving of classroom densities (which is effectively what has been done in primary schools at the cost of halving capacity). It also seems very unlikely that schools can simply go back to ‘business as usual’ until a combination of accurate and timely local information about cases, plus more effective testing, tracing and treatment make the disease much less dangerous.

New models of schooling will have to be developed, and this is an opportunity to improve the overall quality of provision, not merely to address safety issues. We will probably need to blend many elements including:

• A high baseline of school hygiene and deep cleaning;
• Increased separation of groups of children within schools, with different break and meal times, and more carefully controlled movement between designated areas;
• Smaller average class sizes and more variability of class sizes than pre-Covid, ranging down to very small groups for some learners;
• More outdoor learning and better ventilation of indoor spaces;
• An extended school day linked to different arrival and departure times;
• More focus on separating parents and keeping them off the school premises;
• An extended school week (Saturday school);
• Reduced face-to-face instructional time (which implies more careful thinking about where it is most important);
• Increased online and independent learning (despite caution about EduTech);
• Shielding of pupils who are either vulnerable themselves or have vulnerable family members;
• Shielding of staff who are either vulnerable themselves or have vulnerable family members; and
• More effective testing and tracing of school staff and learners.

Weak centralisation, innovation and the return of federalism

As we think through each of these issues, the same structural problems that have made Covid-19 so difficult for the English education system surface again and again. Each of these challenges is too complex and demanding for most individual schools and the centre of government does not have the capacity to provide adequate support. Local structures have been swept away and have only partially been replaced by school federations.

One of the great strengths of the English education system is that it gives school leaders responsibility and authority for the things that matter most. We use the term headteacher (usually not director or principal) partly in recognition of teaching being the key activity in schools and the head being a leader of teachers first and foremost. School autonomy plus school accountability is a powerful driver of system performance.

However, England over the last 10 years has taken this principle and used it to justify stripping away almost all of the capability of the ‘middle layer’ of local education authorities, albeit allowing the development of powerful multi-school academy trusts. The result is a strange combination of centralisation and devolution, where the Secretary of State for Education is supposedly responsible for thousands of academy schools but has nothing like the capacity or appetite to support such a system.

In times of stability this ‘weak centralisation’ and the absence of a middle layer is not critical. The best multi-academy trusts do a great job of combining innovation with organisational consistency: they serve their own children really well and act as laboratories and system influencers. But many schools are essentially on their own, either because they are in small or poorly-performing federations, or because they still rely on their denuded local education authority. Three quarters of primaries and around a quarter of secondary schools are not academies.

When Covid-19 hit, schools suddenly found themselves having to innovate at a scale and pace they have never experienced before. Every school or trust had to invent its own online curriculum and resources, develop a new educational offer in the absence of any standards, work out how to support its pupils remotely, and then implement and communicate all this. This was frankly bonkers but also inevitable given the design of the system.

Now they face an even more difficult challenge for September. If you are not a school leader yourself, just try to imagine making your own set of decisions about the bullet points listed above, with your staff, hundreds of pupils and all their families on the line. Again, large multi-academy trusts are much better able to make these decisions, because they have central capacity. But again, they account for only a small minority of all schools.

Meanwhile the Department for Education has found itself completely overwhelmed and apparently paralysed; not able or willing to provide effective leadership. Thus the absence of positive messaging for parents, the lack of any quality focus in the lockdown offer, the slow and partial start to schools reopening, the lack of a positive national offer for the summer, the absence of a plan for September, and the inescapable sense of simply not being in control. Schools that want to do the right thing feel exposed, and schools that want an excuse have one to hand. As a high-profile free school head told the BBC World at One: “I’ll do what the government tells me.”

Perhaps Covid-19 changes the calculus somewhat within national government about the merits of the current system. Perhaps the bogeyman of ‘left-wing local authorities’ no longer seems quite so potent. At the moment blame is moving steadily upwards. But if local authorities had a more significant role in supporting schools to open, to increase attendance, and to ensure that all local children were receiving learning, then we might have made more progress on these issues. The great advantage of a federal system of government is usually that local institutions can act as a check and balance against over-powerful national government. At the moment England needs a more federal education for the opposite reason; to fill the void. However, the other great strength of federalism is to facilitate innovation, often in response to local conditions, but also frequently in response to global challenges.

Covid-19 is far from a unique case. It is just one — albeit exceptionally compelling — driver of the need for rapid education system innovation at scale. We may face very different challenges with similar consequences in the near future, for example caused by changes in technology, or by the need to radically confront climate change, or by demographic, security or other social changes that are hard to anticipate. Responding at scale is not best done by an atomised system but by one with intermediate institutions, which can take advantage of specialisation, make professional interaction more productive and create economies of scale. This is true in other fields like health, advanced research and industrial policy for exactly the same reasons.

The rebuilding of intermediate institutions and a more federal system of education in England does not mean a return to local education authorities as they once were, let alone the nostalgic mirage of ‘de-academisation’. Multi-academy trusts and a high level of school autonomy are here to stay and that is a good thing. However, it does feel like we are at one end of the pendulum swing now. Covid-19 has forced innovation upon us. One of its unexpected effects may be a positive evolution of our education system.

Richard Brooks is a former Adviser at The Department for Education, and former Director of Strategy at Ofsted.