Last week, Michael Gove marked an important moment in the coalition government’s school reforms. The number of academies — that is, state schools granted independent status — reached 407, twice the number created in almost a decade of Labour’s academy programme. Since September, schools have become academies at the rate of one a day. But then the later stages of a reform are often easier than the first.
The man most responsible for the early stages of this reform was Andrew Adonis, a former journalist, policy adviser, Labour peer, minister and now director of the Institute of Government. His new job involves helping Whitehall improve the policymaking process. And one of the more successful coalition policies is the academies agenda which he nurtured, first as an adviser to Tony Blair and then from 2005 to 2008 as education minister.
Academy status was seen at first as a remedy for failing schools. They would be made independent, put under new management and with the help of external sponsorship provide opportunity for students from some of the poorest and most deprived neighbourhoods of England. But local education authorities were still able to frustrate the development of academies, and maintain their overall control of state schools. Gove’s Academies Act, passed last June, was intended to remove that veto.
I asked Lord Adonis whether, if he could have his time in office again, he would have pushed harder to do the same. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I would have done a lot of things differently if I had my time again.’
Ed Balls has declared Gove’s plans for academies as ‘a total perversion of Labour’s policy, which was about turning round under-performing schools in disadvantaged areas’. Adonis’s response is rather different. ‘Neither I nor Tony Blair believed that academies should be restricted to areas with failing schools. We wanted all schools to be eligible for academy status, and we were enthusiastic about the idea of entirely new schools being established on the academy model, as in Michael Gove’s free schools policy.’
He says that, for Labour, it was a question of sequencing. ‘The most urgent challenge facing English education is the replacement of failing and underperforming comprehensives. We focused academies accordingly, and the coalition would be wise to do so too. Eradicating the tail of failing comprehensives is what will transform English education — and English society.’
Looking back, does he feel that the academies programme lost momentum when Tony Blair left? ‘I couldn’t possibly comment on that one. The fact is that we have more than 400 academies which are either open or on the way to being opened. That’s a phenomenal achievement for state-funded education. The coalition is taking the academies movement further, it is making it possible for more successful schools to become academies too and I support that.’
Much attention has fallen on ‘free schools’, academies that can be set up by new providers and run independently under the state system. What does Adonis think of them? ‘I support them. I have no problem with free schools at all. As you know I am a strong supporter of diversity in the state system and independently managed schools. Provided the schools are funded fairly and they don’t have unfair admissions practices, then I think having greater diversity of schools is a good thing.’
Even in today’s era of coalition politics, Lord Adonis is unusual in having supporters from all parties. At the time of his controversial move to the Department of Transport, David Laws, then the Lib Dem education spokesman, described his departure as ‘a disgrace’. Gove said that he had been ‘kicked out of the Education Department’. I asked Adonis if this was, indeed, what happened.
‘I would rather not rake over the internal politics of the last Labour government. In policy, what matters is that the academies continued, the number increased and we now have a very powerful and positive movement for change in the state education system.’
The widespread support for the academies agenda, from across all political parties, can certainly be seen as the fruit of Adonis’s diplomacy. ‘I always aimed to promote a consensus about worthwhile educational change,’ he says. ‘I worked very hard to create that consensus as I believed that we should put education first, and politics second. I hope that can continue.’