Another week; another seven days in which the politics and substance of Brexit have dominated government business to the exclusion of everything else. It continues to be the black hole that sucks up any available political energy. It has become the issue through which the ongoing internecine Tory conflict must be understood. Other issues surface only as sideshows: solutions to the NHS funding crisis briefly featured in the run-up to Tuesday’s cabinet meeting, but only as a result of Boris Johnson using a call for more cash to try to undermine Theresa May politically.

Quick Guide The Observer Show The Observer is the world's oldest Sunday newspaper, founded in 1791. It is published by Guardian News & Media and is editorially independent.



While Brexit continues to absorb political focus, a series of serious challenges facing the country continues to go unaddressed. Growing numbers of cancelled operations and longer waiting times for A&E have propelled the NHS funding gap to the most visible foreground. But plenty more lurks behind. Everywhere you look, the story is the same: any prospect of urgently required solutions stymied by the stasis at the heart of Whitehall. This week, the Observer reveals six out of 10 of the biggest academy trusts have raised serious concerns about a lack of school funding. Schools in England are facing an average 6.5% fall in real per-pupil funding by 2019-20, the steepest cuts since the 1970s. They come on top of the £3bn of annual savings schools need to find in order to counteract the impact of the rising costs of inflation, pensions and recruitment, which the National Audit Office says amounts to a further 8% reduction in per-pupil funding: a massive, under-the-radar decrease in school resources. Little wonder, then, that last year 5,000 headteachers wrote to Philip Hammond with a “desperate” plea for more cash.

But the alarm bell being sounded by these academy trusts suggests questions that go beyond the funding challenge facing schools. It raises the spectre of what would happen if a major academy chain were to go bust.

Since 2010, the main thrust of government schools policy has been to convert council-run schools into academies run by independent trusts. More than half of secondary schools are now academies, a huge structural reorganisation that dwarfs anything that has gone before. The basis of the government’s school improvement policy is that poorly performing schools should be taken over by high-performing academy chains.

But converting huge numbers of schools into academies has not achieved anything other than removing them from local democratic accountability. There is no evidence that, on average, academy chains do any better at managing schools than the local authorities they replaced. Instead, the reforms have created a structural mess, opening up profound gaps in accountability and governance.

Academies are directly accountable to the Department for Education, through an opaque network of regional school commissioners who are civil servants unanswerable to local communities. Perceived conflicts of interest abound at every level. Lord Nash was for years a schools minister while he chaired an academy trust that is accountable to the government department he helped run. Martin Post, one of eight regional schools commissioners, is a member of one of the academy trusts he is responsible for overseeing.

There is also a shocking lack of accountability for the way public funds for educating children are spent. This has manifested itself in excessively high salaries for academy chief executives at a time when teachers have faced real pay cuts, while spending on services from companies with which academy trust directors have close links has risen. For example, the EMLC Academies Trust paid more than £1.5m in consultancy fees to its chief executive’s family company, of which she is a director and shareholder.

The government’s strategy that high-performing trusts should take over failing schools isn’t working. It cannot force them to take over schools, leaving 40,000 children stranded in “zombie” academies that have been abandoned by or stripped from an academy chain and are waiting for a new sponsor.

The tough financial situation facing schools will only compound this. In schools, financial failure invariably goes hand in hand with failure to provide quality education, as pupil rolls – and hence funding – fall. Last week, one large academy chain said it will only take on schools that are financially stable.

In the next few years, we will likely see a sharp increase in the number of academies that, lacking the leadership capacity to improve, stagnate for years while they wait in limbo for a new sponsor, affecting the education of hundreds of thousands of children. The education select committee has also raised concerns about the potential for failing academy chains to strip their schools of assets before folding: Wakefield City Academies Trust has been accused of transferring millions of pounds from its schools’ reserves into its own accounts before it collapsed last year.

So schools policy needs not just an injection of cash, but urgent reform to the governance and accountability of academies. Without this, there’s no telling where taxpayer cash will end up as the number of academy chains bowing out of the system increases. But, in common with every other issue facing the country that is not directly related to Brexit, there is not even the faint outline of a solution on the horizon.