My summary and personal reflections arising from my namesake, Jonny Uttley’s important ‘A New Settlement for Education: why England needs a theory of place, not just a theory of schools’  – Simon Uttley

As a school leader in Reading, the largest town that is not yet a city, the sense of ‘place’ is strong and proudly defended. This extends to schools, where local affiliation with the nursery, primary, secondary or FE provider is inextricably connected to long-term familiarity, friendship, kinship groups, family traditions and localism. At its best, all of these amount not to mere sentimental affection, but to trust, engagement and what I like to call neighbourhood investedness. Notwithstanding the reforms in English education that continue to be the topic od study and evaluation, I have yet to meet a parent who sends her child off to the ‘multi-academy Trust’ each morning… like it or not, the local school – whatever it formal designation – is both of those things: a school, and local. For nearly forty years, English education policy has run on a single big idea: that competition between schools, driven by parental choice and league-table accountability, is the engine of improvement. A new paper by my namesake, Jonny Uttley, Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Young Lives, argues that this idea has run its course. “A New Settlement for Education” makes the case that the problems now facing children — persistent absence, the SEND crisis, rising youth mental ill-health, child poverty and a growing NEET population — are not problems any single school or trust can solve alone. They are problems of place, and England, Uttley argues, has never developed a proper theory of place improvement to sit alongside its well-developed theory of school improvement.

The core argument

The 1988 Education Reform Act built a system around institutional competition, and it did genuinely raise standards. But Uttley contends that this model is now reaching the limits of what it can achieve — and is actively contributing to some of today’s problems. Schools are judged and rewarded individually, even though children experience health, housing, family and community services collectively. The incentives, he argues, push schools towards protecting their own results rather than collaborating to solve shared problems, which helps explain rising exclusions, worsening attendance and a fractured SEND system.

His evidence for an alternative is drawn, perhaps surprisingly, from the pandemic. When league tables and inspections were suspended, Uttley notes, schools didn’t become less accountable — they became more accountable to their communities, delivering food parcels, laptops and welfare checks. Freed from institutional competition, schools behaved as civic institutions. That, he argues, is a glimpse of the model England should now build deliberately rather than by accident of crisis.

Challenging the thinking on academy trusts

This is where the paper is most likely to unsettle received wisdom in the sector. Rather than attacking the academy and trust model outright, Uttley credits it with real achievements: professionalised leadership, stronger organisational capacity and genuine school improvement at scale. He is explicit that trusts should remain “the primary engines of school improvement.”

But he also identifies a structural gap that goes to the heart of the trust model’s design: trusts were built to improve institutions, not to hold democratic responsibility for a place. As local authorities have lost capacity and influence, nothing has stepped in to provide what Uttley calls “place stewardship” — the coordinating, accountable function that ensures a whole community’s children are served, not just those who remain on a given school’s roll. Trusts, however well-run, were never designed for that role, and he argues it is a category error to expect them to fill it.

This leads to one of the paper’s sharper critiques: an accountability system built around institutional performance measures, especially Progress 8, can quietly incentivise schools to move out young people whose needs are complex or whose results are inconvenient, effectively “exporting” disadvantage to become someone else’s problem. Uttley is careful not to frame this as bad faith on the part of leaders, but as a predictable response to incentives that reward individual institutional success over collective outcomes.

His proposed resolution is not a return to old-style local authority control, which he dismisses as “yesterday’s debate,” but a synthesis: trusts continue driving school improvement, while place-based partnerships — spanning trusts, schools, colleges, employers, health bodies, local and regional government — provide the democratic legitimacy and collective responsibility that trusts alone cannot. Regional mayors, following the model shown by figures like Andy Burnham, would take on a stronger convening role.

Rethinking accountability and the curriculum

The paper sets out a series of practical proposals, including:

• A Local Outcomes Framework that judges places, not just schools, covering attendance, exclusions, NEET rates, wellbeing, employer engagement and community connectedness.
• Replacing Progress 8 with a narrower “Progress 5” core (English, maths, science and a humanity or language), freeing up curriculum space from age fourteen for high-quality technical and vocational pathways.
• Statutory Local Education and Skills Partnership Boards, bringing trusts, colleges, employers, local authorities and health services together with a formal duty to improve outcomes across a community.
• Reformed Ofsted inspection that looks at a school’s contribution to its wider community, not just its own isolated results.
• Funding reform, pooling some resources around shared local priorities such as inclusion, SEND, attendance and NEET reduction.

Uttley points to the Netherlands as a comparator: with stronger regional structures and vocational pathways, Dutch NEET rates are roughly 2.5 times lower than England’s, a gap he suggests could be worth over £80 billion to the UK economy if closed. And, for our part in Reading, we are seizing the opportunity for greater local educational cohesion through a combination of an agile educational partnership board, together with ever-greater local accountability, decision-making and policy agility. What appears beyond doubt is that leveraging localism and shared experiences is no mere policy option – it is a recognition that our choice of where to ‘be’ and the meaning that this confers on us all – especially young people – is at the heart of what constitutes a flourishing life.

Why it matters

The paper lands at a pointed political moment, published against the backdrop of an anticipated change of Prime Minister and a devolution agenda already under way. Its significance for the academies sector lies less in any call to dismantle trusts than in its insistence that trust status and place-based accountability are not substitutes for each other — and that a system optimised purely for institutional performance will keep producing the very crises, in SEND, attendance and youth disengagement, that it was never designed to solve.

Whether policymakers take up that challenge, Uttley argues, will determine whether the next forty years of English education are organised around institutions competing, or around communities thriving.

Here is a link to the full paper