ONE of the key arguments of “New Labour” was that ownership of public services didn’t matter.

Tony Blair spent a lot of political energy getting rid of the pro-nationalisation Clause IV of Labour’s constitution.

He argued that the state did not need to own public services. In fact, new market and quasi-market-driven providers would introduce “innovation.” The public interest could be maintained by contracts, targets, inspections and league tables.

David Cameron’s Tories built on this plan. Academy schools give one of the very stark examples of why this was wrong.

Labour introduced academies to break up the local authority monopoly of schooling. The Tories love the policy so much they massively increased the number of academies. Around six in 10 secondary schools are now academies.

School ownership has been transferred from democratic local education authorities to “multi academy trusts.” 

These new supposedly independent charities are only answerable either to themselves or to the Department for Education.

The recently published accounts of one of the larger multi-academy trusts, E-Act, shows what farming out publicly owned schools to private “trusts” looks like.

E-Act is getting a huge amount of public money. It has a £112 million income. That’s mostly money directly from central or local government, plus a smaller amount it can raise because it runs formerly publicly owned schools.

E-Act runs around 15 secondary schools and 14 primaries distributed throughout England, with around 18,000 pupils.

To be clear, this is a privatisation. Some try to argue it isn’t because academy trusts are charities. However, first, they are definitely private institutions. Second they act pretty much like other private firms delivering public services.

Thanks to the quasi-market model and the mix of politically connected businessmen and religious hobbyists running the multi-academy trusts, they’ve done what other privatisers do: they have “gamed the system,” cheated the targets, and sent the cash to their owners or their high-paid directors.

Michael Wemms is the chair of the E-Act board. He was an executive director of Tesco and chaired the British Retail Consortium, the political lobbyists for the shop owners.

David Moran is the E-Act chief executive. He was a deputy head teacher 11 years ago, but left to work in the US for private educational consultancy Tribal Group. The accounts say Moran is paid £155,000 a year.

That’s not as huge as some previous E-Act bosses’ salaries, but it is higher than the Prime Minister. E-Act is like a mini, private version of a local education authority.

The head of education in a local authority might earn similar pay, perhaps even a little more. But they would be responsible for four or five times the number of students.

Thanks to academies, there are more higher-paid executives running our schools.

E-Act was also previously involved in one of the other, hidden, privatisations of the academy schools: many academy trusts took money from the Department for Education, then paid it to their own private subsidiaries, related companies and consultants.

Back in 2013 a Department for Education audit found E-Act had made “irregular” payments to a subsidiary and there was a “flow of public monies” to companies which did not “directly benefit teaching and learning.”

E-Act has tightened up in this area, but it is a general and predictable financial “gaming” in academy trusts.

But what about performance? Have these slick business-like methods meant good schools? Not according to the latest Ofsted inspection reports. Four E-Act schools are “Inadequate” and two “Require improvement.”

In 2014 the government forced a “complete pause on growth” in E-Act and made the trust “give up 10 academies” because performance was poor.

A Department for Education official, regional schools commissioner Sir David Carter, had to regularly meet senior E-Act officials, attend its board meetings and meet all its heads in an effort to get better performance from the trust. 

Instead of bringing some kind of magic to education, E-Act has needed government intervention to get performance to even its current, uninspiring level.

Perhaps the most worrying development is the indication that E-Act is trying to get good marks by cheating the children. Critics worry that “competition” and quasi-market methods encourage schools to “game the system” by getting rid of pupils with lower marks, rather than trying to educate them.

It’s called “off-rolling,” where the “weaker” kids are just kicked off the school roll. Last October Ofsted inspectors examined E-Act’s Shenley Academy, a secondary school in Birmingham.

Inspectors found school leaders had removed eight Year 11 pupils on the same day in the autumn term in 2017 and were “not able to give a valid explanation as to why this happened.”

Half of the pupils had special educational needs or disabilities.

Ofsted said: “This practice suggests ‘off-rolling’.”

E-Act said it was “disappointed” and has “zero tolerance” for off-rolling and the head at the school had “moved on.”

What the academy schools experience shows is that ownership does matter. If you want schools to be committed to public education and locally responsible, they have to be publicly owned and have to answer to local voices.

Ownership and control of schools has more effect that contracts, targets and inspections. The academy trusts are private institutions that are only answerable to the national Department for Education.

The department doesn’t have the capacity to stop them going off the rails and doesn’t really want to.

While Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour is looking at stopping privatisation and increasing public ownership, the party has a very limited approach on schools.

Labour will not “force” any more “schools to become academies.” But nor will it try to take academy schools from the trusts and back into the public sector.

Labour is trying to develop forms of nationalisation that are not remote, that have democratic controls, and that have some social purpose.

But it is not committed to bringing schools back into local democratic control — even though schools could provide a model for public ownership. When it comes to education policy, I’d give Labour a mark of “could do better.”

Solomon Hughes writes for the Star every Friday.