Good principals are also more likely to make personnel changes in grade levels where students are underperforming. Argument: Schools work best when there is one leader in charge, and most teachers just want to teach and be left alone.
How do we know distributed leadership will even work? Rebuttal: When the objective of a good distributed leadership model is improving instruction, researchers have found that the model strengthens the professional community and helps educators demonstrate instructional practices that are strongly associated with student achievement. One key reason? Distributed leadership eases the burden for principals and provides important opportunities for great teachers to develop and practice leadership skills while remaining in teaching roles.
The United Kingdom is way ahead of the United States in this area, having redesigned school leadership positions to create specific, substantive responsibilities for teachers at different levels within schools. Rebuttal: We know that principals have a big job to do, and they know it too. One problem is that less than half of principals surveyed feel like they have control over the things that facilitate success.
Principals often lack control over how to build and manage staff, even though it is one of the most important elements of principal effectiveness. And many have little say in how they can use their funding ; they often encounter inflexible and outdated district procurement rules that make it difficult to spend quickly, efficiently, and creatively.
All of these issues matter because research shows that leaders in schools that have autonomy to determine their needs, goals, and programs do the best job of identifying approaches to change.
Both are inspected by Ofsted. Ultimately, DfE is accountable for the overall performance of the school system in England. Regional Schools Commissioners RSCs were established as an extra layer of oversight in September with the responsibility for deciding which applications for academies would be taken forward, monitoring academy performance and also for taking action when an academy is underperforming.
They are also meant to champion academy freedoms, alongside Headteacher Boards in each region which work with the RSCs to support struggling academies. Their role has been expanded since then to include tackling underperformance in local authority schools. There are currently eight RSCs, each of whom face a very different task in terms of the number of existing academies and underperforming local authority schools in their region.
The two main ways used to assess the success of academies relative to other schools are looking at Ofsted inspections, and examination results. One way to compare the performance of converter academies with other maintained schools is to compare those which started out with the same Ofsted rating. But there may be other underlying differences between the schools that became academies and schools with the same Ofsted rating that did not become academies, which are likely to have influenced both whether the school became an academy and subsequent Ofsted grades.
The other—less informative— comparison is to look at the most recent Ofsted grade of each type of school. On this basis converter academies are the most likely to be good or outstanding, and the least likely to be graded as requires improvement or inadequate.
Conversely, sponsored academies are more likely than maintained schools to be graded requires improvement or inadequate. Again, this is not necessarily surprising: transition to sponsored academy status has become the automatic recommendation following school underperformance.
Some have suggested it is too early to tell whether maintained schools that turned into academies since have improved compared to other maintained schools, and most of the research so far has considered secondary schools only: little work has been done looking at primary schools. But, again, the differences mostly reflect the fact that converter academies were relatively high-performing before they became academies and sponsored academies relatively low-performing before they became academies.
In order to properly understand how academies have performed we need to compare them to similar schools still in the maintained sector. One analysis by NFER comparing the performance of 7 to 11 year olds in primary academy schools in to their peers in non-academies found being in an academy made little difference to their exam results in the short term. For secondary schools, the evidence is mixed. One such analysis found generally little difference in GCSE performance between both types of academy and similar local authority schools for academies that had been open for two to four years.
The coalition wants all schools to have the chance to become academies, including primary and special schools, as part of an "education revolution". In its Academies Bill, which will make the legal changes needed for this academies expansion, the government says becoming academies will "give schools the freedoms and flexibilities they need to continue to drive up standards".
Its says it aims to raise standards for all children, narrow the attainment gap between the most and least advantaged, and create a "world-beating system".
However, in contrast to Labour, the coalition is focusing first on the top end of schools. It wants to enable schools judged "outstanding" by Ofsted to convert into academies by September, although it then wants successful schools to mentor struggling ones.
Education Secretary Michael Gove sees academies as a way of cutting bureaucracy and giving more control to schools. The changes could mean thousands of schools opting out of local authority control and a much-reduced role for local councils in education.
The Bill removes the need for local authorities to be consulted about the setting up of an academy. How fast will academ y numbers grow? This will mean that some schools - those judged outstanding by Ofsted - can convert in September, if they are able to overcome the necessary legal hurdles in time.
The government has not yet said how many schools will be in a position to become academies in September. More than 1, schools have expressed interest in becoming academies, it says. Labour questions this number, saying the schools were merely interested in getting more information. Free schools are schools which will be set up by groups of parents, teachers, charities, trusts, religious and voluntary groups.
They will be set up as academies and will be funded in the same way - directly from central government. The Academies Bill will make it easier for such groups to set up schools by removing the need for them to consult local councils. The Free Schools programme attracted a lot of attention in the run-up to the general election.
The scheme is similar to the Charter School system in the United States and the situation in Sweden, where non-profit and profit-making groups can set up schools - funded by the government - but free from its control. Essentially not, because free schools will be established as academies. But the free schools programme will give parents and teachers the chance to initiate in the creation of a new school if they are unhappy with state schools in a particular local area.
The day-to-day running of free schools will often be by an "education provider" - a group or company brought in by the group setting up the school. The provider would not be allowed to make a profit from running the school. Labour and the big classroom teachers' unions are the chief critics. Labour says the changes will benefit more privileged neighbourhoods and that the best schools will be able to "suck the best teachers and the extra money", leaving those left under local authority being regarded as second best.
Critics also say that the ability of local councils to provide extra services for schools such as help for children with special educational needs will be weakened if a lot of schools in an area become academies.
There have also been fears that the changes will give too much freedom to faith schools or fundamentalist agendas - for example that they would allow the teaching of Creationism.
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