Our village Primary School wants to become an Academy

[LimburgseVlaai]

Last year, our CofE village primary school formed a federation with two other schools. Our school is the largest of the three with c160 pupils. It is heavily over-subscribed and gets very good results. The other two schools are not as good. The three schools are some distance apart so they could never merge.

This week we (parents) received a consultation document from the school on becoming an Academy (i.e. all three schools together into one Academy). The document has a fair bit of detail, but I was wondering if there are any MNers out there who have been through this process?

What was the actual process like? And have there been any changes since conversion? Would you say 'yes' to such a proposal?

Thank you!

We're considering becoming an Acadamy and I'm all in favour, because I'm not happy with the way our LEA treats our schools....

We are also in a similar position too, school high performing and is in a partnership with an improving school and some resources are shared across both. They are now considering becoming academies together as it will result in more direct funding, and more accountability for running the schools, with more control over functions previously supplied by council. Overall it looks like their will be a net gain for the school, teachers/staff and pupils. More work for leadership team, but worth it.

Only difference is we are two large secondaries, so we have well established finance etc functions and are less reliant on local authority for many things. Presumably your schools think that together they can replace centrally provided LEA fuctions (other than things like SEN coordination etc that remain LEA responsibility) without too much difficulty. Maybe worth a question, however, if you have strong leadership team and governors they won't be taking on this responsibility lightly, so will almost certainly have thought it through very carefully.

Limburgs,
I would be very wary of this. You had a federation last year and therefore have relatively little experience of whether that will work well.
Obviously different LAs have different funding formulas for their schools but in effect all federated schools were counted as single schools from a finance point of view. However the new Schools Finance Regulations allows the LA to now treat federations as one school, so the federation as a whole will be going to get less funding.
So whats the answer well we will jump to be an academy, so we get more money. Well in theory you do but in practice you have to buy in services that the LA was providing. Over three seperate sites I do not think there will be a financial advantage. So what other possible advantage is there. Well there is one that I can think of straight away. If you become one academy there is then nothing to stop one or more of the sites being shut down to make a more effective, efficient school. I personally would not have a problem with that but I bet the parents inthe schools being shut will have.

Admission - definately not that simple.

In our LEA you already have to buy all the services you want. As of this latest govt they have made the schools pay for most of the stuff we used to get for free.

There is no suggestion they want to close down a school. The LEA could do that any time they wanted to as well.

So what you are getting is two things - a slightly different budget and freedom from the LEA. Now it depends on your LEA on whether freedom from them is a good or a bad thing. But a parent definitely won't be privy to all the minor spats and disagreements that have been going on. And the school will probably not be so indiscreet as to air them in public.

The money difference is negligible. All the schools round me are considering becoming academies because we have lost faith in out LEA.

Thank you for your responses. Only just come online so have only just had a chance to read them!

I will raise some of these points at the consultation meeting.

Thanks again.