Is it sponsorship, philanthropy or a voluntary tax?
In theory, any school wishing to obtain Specialist status from the newly renamed Specialist Schools and Academies Trust (SSAT) needs to raise £50,000 in sponsorship. This is why so many businesses across the country receive sponsorship solicitations from their local secondary schools. Many businesses are more than willing to contribute, although a large number receive multiple requests that amount to little more than a request for a donation. The problem here is that there is a significant difference between sponsorship and philanthropy, which the DfES and much of the education community seem oblivious to. When a business engages in sponsorship, it does so because it believes (or should) that by partnering with a specific property, they will be able to achieve some sort of quantifiable business goal. If the investment is not driven by any such commercial considerations, it falls into the philanthropic category.
So if a business sponsors a Specialist School or Academy what quantifiable business goals can they achieve? The short answer is few if any. If you are someone like Microsoft (a major Specialist Schools supporter) the ‘sponsorship’ is in-kind (donated software) rather than cash, although the commercial link is clear enough to probably be defined as sponsorship. If on the other hand you are someone like the Garfield Weston Foundation (sponsors of 500 specialist schools), your investment is quite clearly philanthropy.
To complicate matters further, many schools don’t actually have to raise the £50,000 in sponsorship that everyone claims is the bedrock of the SSTAC programme. What they need to do is to say that they have tried, but failed and then apply to the SSAT Partnership Fund for a grant of up to £25,000 along with funding available from the DfES. Businesses and lobby groups are beginning to despair at the constant requests for sponsorship, whether from Specialist Schools, Academy Schools, Skills Academies, or any number of DfES programmes.
Spending on basic skills training in the private sector is already at record levels and the constant chorus of requests for sponsorship that are actually philanthropic contributions has created a climate of compassion fatigue and cynicism that these are little more than voluntary taxes to support the governments disjointed approach to education. Investment by organisations like the Garfield Weston Foundation are vitally important for education but clarity is needed to differentiate sponsorship from philanthropy.