What is the personnel policy of Sponsor-led academies? Does it help explain their effectiveness at improving student performance?

Low-performing, disadvantaged schools notoriously struggle to attract and retain high-quality teachers.

In England, since the beginning of the 2000s, the management of low-performing, state secondary schools has been transferred from the local authority to external organizations, including educational charities and businesses.

A consolidated literature shows that Sponsor-led academies - as schools experiencing this management takeover are defined - have been successful at improving student performance and educational attainment, but little is known about the mechanisms explaining this success.

A new report, Sponsor-led Academies and the Teacher Labour Market, presents initial findings from a study funded by the Nuffield Foundation and led by Professor Victor Lavy investigating the impact of Sponsor-led takeovers on teacher turnover, composition and pay.

The study found:

• Sponsor-led academies typically appoint a new headteacher upon conversion.
• The new head is, on average, better paid and more likely to have come from an OFSTED-graded “outstanding” school than their predecessor
• Older (lower-achieving) teachers tend to leave the school before (after) the conversion.
• After the takeover, teacher turnover declines, while new teachers joining the Sponsor-led school are more likely to come from outstanding schools.
• Sponsors typically restructure teacher pay scheme, abandoning a pay scale entirely based on seniority.

To find out more about this piece of research, please, read the non-technical report, available here, or the academic paper, available here.

Notes:

The Nuffield Foundation is an independent charitable trust with a mission to advance social well-being. It funds research that informs social policy, primarily in Education, Welfare and Justice. The Nuffield Foundation is the founder and co-funder of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, the Ada Lovelace Institute and the Nuffield Family Justice Observatory. The Foundation has funded this project, but the views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily the Foundation.