Don’t use the ‘Trojan Horse’ plot as a Trojan Horse against school autonomy

As the smoke clears around the Birmingham Trojan Horse investigations, a real sense of the scale and seriousness of the issues is finally emerging. With five schools being judged ‘inadequate’ and 11 more identified as ‘requires improvement’ there are substantial concerns that need to be addressed and lessons that need to be learned across the system.

But it is also clear that these issues are not unique to one particular type of school. Almost all of the 16 schools – academies and maintained schools alike – have been told to review their governance or safeguarding arrangements. With oversight of these schools spanning variously the local authority, Education Funding Agency, Department for Education and Ofsted everyone has serious lessons to learn.

Unfortunately though we are starting to see this case being used as a scapegoat by those that remain opposed to the growth of academies and free schools, even after 15 years in which governments of all stripes have sought to expand the freedom and autonomy of schools.