The Department for Education tables, published following lobbying by the schools minister David Laws, show some academy chains such as Ark and Harris improving results over the past five years. But the data, taking into account the prior attainment of students, shows only seven of the 20 chains measured have schools that are improving at a faster rate than other equivalent schools.
The figures are likely to put pressure on the government to allow the inspection of academy chains by Ofsted, something the education secretary Nicky Morgan has resisted. However, past elections show that the chances of public opinion moving enough between now and polling day to secure either Miliband or Cameron enough seats to form a majority government are extremely low.
On 280-290 seats both main parties would need to do a deal with other parties if they are to form a government that wins a confidence vote in the House of Commons. Ukip often cites an article by Andrew Neather, a former No 10 and Home Office adviser, who wrote that the Labour government embarked on a deliberate policy from late 2000 to “open up the UK to mass migration”. Yet where Farage sees a political conspiracy behind the numbers, others veer towards the theory of history identified by the great 20th-century historian AJP Taylor, who always stressed the significance of chance events.
Even the most ardent defenders of the New Labour government acknowledge that such a wave of immigration was not purely down to chance. But the key players of the time show in candid conversations that they were struggling to cope with a new world of rapid population movement across porous borders. At times they felt they were stumbling from one move to another, unsure of the present, let alone the future.
Leap in immigration threatens Labour lead
As the head of Tony Blair’s policy delivery unit during his second term in office, from 2001 to 2005, Michael Barber did not get many chances to lie in on the weekends. One Saturday morning in February 2003, he took the liberty of sleeping until 8.50am. Ten minutes later, his phone rang. On the other end of the line was an anxious prime minister. Blair was once again fixated on the issue that had plagued his first term in office. “He was worrying away about illegal asylum applications,” Barber wrote in his diary.
In his new book, How to Run a Government, Barber recounts how he delivered the bad news: there had been a big jump in asylum applications as refugees from Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Kosovo headed to Britain. By Monday morning, having read the 1951 UN convention on refugees, Blair cleared his diary for the entire morning to allow him to spend five hours “forensically” going through the asylum caseload. The following day Blair summoned the relevant ministers to a meeting of the government’s emergency Cabinet Office Briefing Room (Cobra) committee, where he ran rings round most of the people in the room. Barber was deeply impressed with the detailed way in which Blair handled the issue.
Labour feared that the failure to grip the asylum challenge risked making the government look incompetent and – more damagingly – out of touch. “Immigration per se, but non‑European immigration [in particular], was a huge, huge issue for Tony Blair,” recalls Sir Stephen Wall, who was head of the Cabinet Office’s European secretariat between 2000-04. “I remember him saying, very soon after the 2001 election, ‘The one thing that could lose me the next election is immigration.’”
From the first year in office, the issue had hit the Labour government like a whirlwind. In 1997 net migration had been 48,000, but it rose extremely rapidly over the next 12 months, almost trebling to 140,000 in 1998. It was never to fall below 100,000 again.
Ministers and officials from that era recall in painful detail the apparently impossible task of dealing with the surge in asylum applications, as refugees fled to Britain. Almost every day, newspaper headlines would sneer at chaos in Whitehall as the Immigration and Nationality Directorate, later described as dysfunctional by ministers, struggled to cope.
Charles Clarke, who took over as home secretary in 2004, says that from Labour’s first days in office, the system for assessing applications for citizenship, residency and asylum claims was a mess. “We developed a massive backlog, particularly on asylum where we had cases waiting literally five years to be solved,” Clarke says. “That was the core problem that had built up behind an unmanageable set of issues. It was a complete nightmare and led to a sense of complete ungovernability of the whole system and that I think has undermined confidence in it.”
Scotland is currently the focal point of the Conservatives’ “wedge strategy”, an approach aimed at focusing on a divisive issue – and the Tories’ attacks on a possible Labour-SNP deal are expected to intensify in the coming weeks.
The Conservatives claim that where they provide a stable government, a vote for Labour would lead to a chaotic mess of different parties. But the fact of the matter is that to stay in Downing Street, Cameron would probably need to rely on the votes of the Lib Dems, Ukip and the DUP.
The shape of the new government
We can call them coalitions, alliances, pacts, confidence and supply arrangements, but semantics and technicalities aside, it is looking increasingly the case that once all ballots will have been counted, the feasible scenarios will be between different combinations of parties – each with its own priorities, demands and ideas.
Miliband and Cameron are inevitably attempting to get the public to focus on the two main parties and who will lead the country after the election – and in doing so are ruling out all other options.
However, the polls say they are highly unlikely to do it on their own. Interestingly, there are suggestions that the country is fine with that. Fewer than two-thirds of voters want either side to win an absolute majority, according to a YouGov poll published in January.
In the fast changing education landscape, academy chains have become the latest feature, as a sponsoring body takes over the running of a group of schools in a similar way that a local authority used to be responsible for the oversight of schools in its geographical locality.
Laws hopes the new tables, revealed on Monday to the education selection committee following some coalition debate, will represent a new permanent feature on the education landscape and shine a light not just on underperforming local authorities, but underperforming chains of academies.
The data again underlines the extent to which improvements are being driven in inner city London – Hackney, Greenwich, Islington, Lambeth, Merton, Enfield, Waltham Forest – are scoring very high improvement marks, even alongside the best performing academy chains such as Harris.
By contrast the levels of improvement in the urban north and Midlands – Redcar, Blackpool, Barnsley, Bradford, Oldham and Salford – all show slower or no improvement,
A Liberal Democrat source said: “It is no secret that we want to make the academies more accountable and we have been pushing for Ofsted to be able to inspect schools. We want as much information about the performance of academies and local authorities published so we can get the debate away from the Conservative focus on the type of school to the quality of a school. There can be no way that we mollycoddle or protect badly performing chains of academies.”
In terms of improvement at GCSE key stage 4 and equivalent over the past five years, taking into account the background of the children, the tables suggest the best performing chain is Ark Schools (24.7%), followed by United Learning (12.2%), Harris Federation (11.3%), and then the Diocese of Westminster Academy Trust (9.2%).
The chains with the worst outcomes in terms of improvement are UCAT (-20.6%), Greenwood Dale Foundation Trust (-19.9%), the School Partnership Trust Academies (-13.5%), the CfBT Education Trust (-12.6%) and Diverse Academies Trust (-6.3%). All five are improving more slowly than the average,
The data attempts not simply to provide a measure of attainment by pupils or improvement on attainment, but also take into account prior attainment of the pupil,. The data only applies to chains that have at least five schools.