In April, the Department for Education published a list of facts that we need to know about academies. There’s been a good deal of lighted hearted analysis and conversation about this on Twitter, but my chief concern is that not a single source of the purported evidence is referenced (beyond the Schools White Paper itself).
Whilst the social media dust was settling on the above publication, the Number 10 Press Office (possibly to anticipate the Labour-led opposition day debate on the schools White Paper in Parliament), sent out the following tweet:
Quite apart from this tweet suffering from the same ‘lack of evidence’ flaw set out above (I’m sure references were omitted for the purpose of brevity), Laura McInerney (@miss_Mcinerey) deconstructed this argument in the following series of tweets:
‘Mic dropped’, as they say.
A recently updated analysis by Full Fact highlights the pitfalls of presenting these points as ‘facts’.
They state that ‘comparing the performance of academies and maintained schools is difficult’.
For example comparisons do show that secondary converter academies ‘previously graded good were more likely to improve...and more likely to retain…their Ofsted grade than previously good maintained schools’, but ‘conversely, sponsored academies are more likely than maintained schools to be graded ‘requires improvement’ or inadequate’; or that ‘Analysis of GCSE results suggests academies generally do not perform better, but we don't know much about primary performance’ - but by their own admission, this isn’t the whole picture, as there may be other underlying factors not taken into consideration.
All of this coincides with my Futures and Insight colleague Liam writing our submission to the Education Select Committee’s Multi-academy trust inquiry, in which, (and you’ll pardon the irony here) we have to provide evidence in support of our arguments.
Is it only fair to expect the evidence and rigour from the Department for Education? Or is this another example of ‘policy based evidence making’?
