Academy trust gives up - what does the future hold?

[GnomeDePlume]

The academy trust for my DD's school has thrown up it's hands and given up. Essentially all 12 schools in its control have been thrown back on the government.

It is the first time an academy trust has done this so not really looking for advice.

Not sure what this will mean for DD as she is in her final year of sixth form. Hopefully the school will continue to plod on with some sort of emergency measures.

My real sympathy is for the students and parents in earlier years. My DD's school is the only one in the town. No option to go elsewhere.

The school has been in and out of SM throughout the time we have been associated with it. I have lost count of the number of Heads the school has had. For a while there was no Head at all.

Now the academy trust has given up on it and 11 other schools.

Shocking! Do you know which Academy Trust it is?
All that money thrown at Academy Executives and converting to Academies when it could have gone direct to the student resources.
I have no words.

This is the news story:

schoolsweek.co.uk/education-fellowship-trust-gives-up-all-12-schools-over-poor-performance/

Northamptonshire where 5 of the schools are is an educational black hole. Constantly poor performing across the board.

In my DD's school it has been a litany of failure. One incompetent Head after another. Failure to get even the basics right. Poor management letting down students and staff year in and year out.

Oh gosh. Do you hope that the government will let the schools be run as non academies again or that they are picked up by a different academy chain?

Is this the Trust?
www.google.co.uk/amp/schoolsweek.co.uk/education-fellowship-trust-gives-up-all-12-schools-over-poor-performance/amp/

One of the schools is close to us, and the head teacher who left to be employed directly by the Trust, in a senior highly paid role, is returning to take over the school following the collapse.

I'm not sure why the Trust thought they could effectively manage schools spread over such a wide geographic area.
Or indeed why they could manage schools at all!

Oops - sorry. Fast moving thread!!

This is terrible OP. Also that this hasn't been more widely reported. Hope your MP is being very very active on this.

OMG I thought this was going to be about the Wakefield trust which has just given back 21 schools. Two academy chains giving up their schools within a couple of days of each other.

I guess they will need to find new sponsors, but for that number of schools and at such short notice it's going to be tough. Ideally they'd revert to LA control but I don't think that's even allowed

What a total shambles. Gnome to all the parents and pupils caught up in this mess. Technically as they're academies they come under direct control of the Secretary of State so ask Justine Greening what she's going to do about it, she only did a guest post on here the other day.

Here's the story about the other chain doing this www.tes.com/news/school-news/breaking-news/troubled-wakefield-city-academies-trust-give-all-21-its-schools

It looks like The Education Fellowship gave up back in March so possibly that has come into effect at the start of the new year.

It is a shambles. My DCs' education has been marred by one cock up after another. Each time we have thought 'it cant get worse' but it has.

We have 3 secondary schools in the local town. The one managed by The Trust is the worst performing.
The other 2 schools are both Trusts managed by themselves iyswim rather than owned by a larger group.

Gnome I'm sorry your DD has had such a poor experience. I hope she will leave with some good results that let her go forward to whatever she wants to do next

My nieces go to one of the schools run by the Fellowship Trust. It literally ran the school into the ground, asset stripped it in order to support other schools in its chain which it thought had a better chance of getting a good rating. Let the building and site crumble. Stopped training teachers.

Recently various Academy chains visited the school having been asked by the Regional Schools' Commissioner to take it over. None would touch it with a barge poll due to the state it's in.

To answer what the future holds: a few massive Academy chains will take on all schools. They will swallow up the small Academy Trains and each end up being about as big a Local Authority. We will basically be back where we were but with less public accountability.

I say this as someone who was pro Academies for a long time.

There were serious questions over The Education Fellowship's financial management for many years apologies for the fail link

in 2014

no clear record of improvement from Ofsted 2015.

current organisational model 'not acceptable' in 2016

financial notice to improve from 2016

potential loss of Wrenn school from Dec 2016/Jan 2017

then funding finally terminated

My DCs went through one of the TEF schools before, during and after the conversion to TEF.

At the time of the first financial problems in 2014 I thought why isn't this a national scandal?

Then it got worse and worse.

This IS a national scandal and it needs to be reported as such. Sorry to be so naive but I had no idea things could get this bad.
You can't have a system that allows breakdowns like this when kids can only go through it once.

It should be reported widely as a massive failure and politicians held to account- if the invidiidual chains can't be .

If the law was changed by MPs to say that LAs can't take back failing academies then the law is wrong and that shoud be changed.

One very cheap and easy to implement idea to help improve accountability would be to have a governor from each school managed by the Trust attend regular meetings involving all the governor reps (strength in numbers) and the Trust to discuss broad issues like executive pay, and where the focus and funding would be targeted in that term/year etc.
Then at least if there was disagreement the schools could band together and make their reservations known. If necessary involve the DfE so they're aware of issues much sooner and have the schools themselves applying pressure to DfE to take action.

Or just get rid of Trusts and Academies completely! I've never understood how they were supposed to add value in an area that's always struggled for adequate funding.

My school converted to an academy, then it became the centre of a MAT and it is now taking over schools very quickly. While I think my MAT is fairly benign and I have confidence in the CEO, it does worry me how quickly it's happening given we are too young to have a track record of continued large scale improvement. I'm pretty sure that a chain in an area short of sponsors would be given whatever schools they liked with no real consideration as to whether they were up to the job.

And the news coming out that some Academy CEOs are paying themselves ridiculous wages because no one thought to cap their pay, and some trusts are refusing to publish pay details are particularly concerning. This is public money and it's not like there's loads sloshing around in education.

chatty it's not so much that the law was changed to say LAs couldn't take back failing academies, but that there's no mechanism by which they can do so. Academies were the solution to failing schools and no one thought what should happen to a failing academy. Some are now being passed from sponsor to sponsor and eventually no one wants them. What then?
I think there were plans to allow some successful LAs to operate as MATs.

I believe there is also no mechanism by which a school can choose to leave a failing MAT.

Thanks noble. I know very little about education policy/politics so this is helpful. I am shocked though because surely any putting public services into any market/commercial arrangement inevitably must provide for provider or market failure, and also because there are some services like hospitals and schools where the consequences of those failures would be so severe that it seems irresponsible to give them over to the market who don't bear legal responsibility whereas a LA or whoever would have a statutory obligation to provide to a decent standard.

In good news - this was on radio 4 headline news just now..

no one thought what should happen to a failing academy

That is simply not true. There is a very clear process for dealing with failing academies and a number of academies have been through it.

In this situation the most likely outcome is that the academies will end up with one or more other academy trusts.

This IS a national scandal and it needs to be reported as such. Sorry to be so naive but I had no idea things could get this bad.
You can't have a system that allows breakdowns like this when kids can only go through it once

We've had a system like that for the last 100 years; Local Authorities totally incapable of providing good quality education for DCs and as a result, whole generations, across whole counties, unable to access even basic, adequate education provision.

It was only 4 years ago that an effective OFSTED inspection framework was introduced to judge the effectiveness of LA delivery of education services - the first two inspections under that framework resulted in both Authorities deemed inadequate and Secretary of State intervention effectively removed control and it's going to take decades for the damage to be undone.

The failure of academy chains is no different - in fact, far fewer DCs and schools have been caught up in this situation, in which two chains have handed back their schools than have been affected by Local Authority failures. The latter doesn't get as much national media coverage though.

CastIron I agree that there are woeful LAs and Northamptonshire is one of them. The thing is we have gone out from one woeful situation to another.

My Dd's school isn't a failing school, it is a failed school. A decade of quick fixes which haven't worked, poor management, poor recruitment, demoralised students, staff and parents all have taken their toll.

I thought you were going to say it was this! There's obviously a lot of it about. What a monumental mess it all appears to be.

Surly this is an improvement from the previous system where failed LAs just went on for decades.

This new system allows for something to be done to try and turn these schools around.

It's come at huge wage inflation enjoyed by the hierarchy of the mat and less money for the education of the children. Just like the universities!

Some LAs were fairly good and the academy converters haven't improved at all. They just wanted to fail all by themselves!