Having another local outstanding school as an academy sponsor

[Perriwinkle]

Our secondary school was placed in special measures recently and we've just found out that an academy sponsor has been decided upon.

It's going to be an outstanding school in the next town, which is much sought after by local people who fight tooth and nail to get their children in. It's a school that converted to academy status voluntarily and apparently any school that converted to academy status voluntarily can become an academy sponsor. As far as I'm aware, we're the first and only school that this outstanding school is sponsoring.

To be honest I was expecting it to be one of those faceless chain sponsors so I'm really happy that it's going to be this wonderful school up the road instead. However, I'm left wondering how this sort of relationship works in practice...

How does a school that must surely have all its time taken up in running itself find the time to effectively manage another school?

Has anyone got any experiences of having another outstanding local academy school acting as its sponsor?

I'm hoping that the outstanding sponsor school will have a lot of input into the strategic management of our school and that it will soon become the mirror image of it. I'm also sincerely hoping that our school won't be left to make too many of its own decisions and fall back into its old ways. I'm led to believe though, that if our school fails under its sponsorship it will reflect badly on the sponsor school so it's absolutely in its best interests for it to succeed. I hope this school won't find it's bitten off more than it can chew with this arrangement.

I'm really quite excited about it because this sponsor school has such good results and such a fantastic reputation locally but am I being a little too optimistic in my expectations?

Can anyone out there give me a bit of a reality check?

One of the outstanding schools in our town took over another failing secondary school. They did a lot of PR to change the social mix of kids who went to the failing school. They supposedly share all their skills and expertise and they say that if you go to the outstanding school you will get exactly the same education as you get if you go to the "failing" school.

However, the reality has been quite different. The "failing' school is now 4 or 5 years into it's take over and has continued to fail quite spectacularly. It featured as one of the 200 worst performing schools in the country in the BBC summary of GCSE results. And this is in an very affluent town, amongst a potentially very academic cohort. I think the sponsor school kind of missed the point by saying the different schools will get exactly the same. The problem is that challenges in each school are just different and each needed a more focused individual approach, which they didn't get. Also the sponsor school put in a bid to take over the running of a new school and I suspect the management became so interested in building their own empire they forgot to effectively manage the schools they had. All in all, I think it's been pretty disastrous.

Following their recent shocking exam results (and shocking value added scores) the "failing" school has headhunted a "super-head" who looks very impressive and I'm sure will change things significantly. If they had got someone like this in 5 years ago when they took over, it may have been a different story. I suspect, however, the outstanding school thought they knew it all and there was no way they could fail so they didn't really bother to put in the measure they should have done.

In 2008 we had an outstanding secondary school form an academy alliance with 2 other failing secondary schools and another has since been added to the group.
The performance of the other schools has improved greatly and they have become pretty desirable schools to apply to. The other secondary schools in the city have also become academies in the last couple of years but none have formed a partnership like this.

Oh, so a mixed bag from these two responses. It's good to hear others' experiences of this type of arrangement.

neolara it is very much my hope that we will get one of those dynamic heads that you're talking about who are very driven and no nonsense and will have the skill set required to turn things around quickly. I truly believe our school has the makings of a good school. It just needs the right leadership and to be led in the right direction. I'm hoping that this outstanding sponsor school will provide a template for success. My DS has three years left after this year so fingers crossed that there will still be enough time for him to make the most out of his secondary education.

Two of our local outstanding secondaries have done this. Both have exec heads who manage across the 2 schools and newly recruited heads underneath (both former deputy heads) responsible for day to day running. Both made leadership changes in the partnered school (eg Head and governor changes, with 1 or more governors from lead school asked to join partner school). Financial management is normally also run across the schools. The 1st secondary has been in this partnership arrangement for 5 years, the partner school was out of SMs in around a year and is now one of the most improved schools in the country. The 2nd school has been in this arrangement for less than a year and the partnered school has already had a much improved ofsted.

The lead school will generally boost its senior management team with additional staff so it has the capacity to support the other school. Academies can get funding to do this so that they are not robbing Peter to pay Paul... It is a hard sell to governors and parents for the lead school and is not taken on lightly as failure would as you say damage reputation of lead school and its head. So the Exec Head will have a lot of skin in the game to ensure that results don't slip in the lead school and improve in the partner school.