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.

There is a very clear process for dealing with failing academies and a number of academies have been through it.

Oh come on, there is now because so many academies have failed that they were forced to come up with one but originally? This is an obvious example of policy on the hoof. What happens to orphan schools that no one wants? Ofsted inspecting academy chains? It's being bodged together as we go along.

We know there aren't enough prospective sponsors up north and a relative glut down south. We know that the government is desperately scrabbling around grammars, private schools and universities for sponsors.

The whole thing is a mess.

There will be plenty of other academies, either as a stand alone school or as a MAT, of a number of schools, who are going to be in the same position in the next few years.
Now that the financial situation is starting to bite, the lack of financial control in quite a few academies is going to come home to roost. It does not take a genius to work out that no school is going to readily take over another school if they are £1.3M in debt, as one of these schools is, along with a need for substantial long-term help. Having said that the financial position in some of these schools was very poor when they were in Local Authority control, so it is not reasonable to blame it all on converting to an academy.
What is now going to have to happen is that these schools will have to be found new MATs to join but I cannot see that happening with out the financial position being resolved, in other words the debts will have to be written off, presumably by the ESFA/ DfE.

I was talking to a friend who was a director of an MAT (one of the more "successful" ones)
He now sees that the whole system is corrupt
and that schools will have to go back into LA control to ensure accountability and safeguard taxpayer money
BUT
he also strongly believes that LAs should be allowed / forced to merge to ensure limited numbers of managers and the sharing of best practice

I have always been against Academies
chickens are coming home to roost

its a shame that so many children's education will be damaged by a policy for which there was never any evidence

prh45 is right, there are steps taken with failing academies and trusts. The problem is that historically, the wheels have moved slowly and given trusts too much leeway. There are many rebrokerages (when an academy is moved into a new trust) but the incoming trust has not always undertaken appropriate due diligence and takes over a school where finances are so poorly managed or there is a financial black hole, so they then either pull out just before signing, or use their reserves to support the school which then reduces the money left for other schools in the trust.

Financial notices to improve are handed out more swiftly now and are more robustly monitored, and there have recently been efficiency advisors introduced who can support trusts with financial governance and oversight. It is true that some trusts have worked through their issues with FNTIs and then had them removed due to compliance. But the average time for a trust to be under an FNTI is about 2 years.

2 years
FFS that is atrocious
Our LEA aims to turn schools round in two terms MAX
(they bring in new heads, new governors, attached inspectors, the full shebang - then again our head of children and education was one of the most successful in the country)

Research has shown that seeking to turn around schools quickly (superheads) ends up actually worse in the long term for schools than slow and sensible improvements. It encourages stuff like kicking out the worst kids and gaming the league tables.

Our LEA aims to turn schools round in two terms MAX
(they bring in new heads, new governors, attached inspectors, the full shebang - then again our head of children and education was one of the most successful in the country)

Problem is, very few LAs are that good - and they've had decades to get it right.

And before anyone says they haven't got the money to do it - if some LAs can identify and turn round failing schools in 2 terms then they all should be able to - it's about people and motivation.

I've lost count of the number of times Local Cllrs have ignored the advice of Snr Education Officers because the recommended option to improve overall standards in the area would be unpopular and lose them votes.

Either education is in the hands of business or politicians. The politicians have had their chance IMO.

noble
yes I saw that research about superheads - not a big thing round here

castiron
I know there are poor LEAs - the former head of ours was regularly seconded to pick up the pieces at others

but what he was not allowed to do was clear out the whole management and force mergers - which is often what would have caused the improvement you so rightly want

and don't get me started on elected members. I deal with those &&&&& all the time

I really believe that in ten years time we will look back on academies as total failures! The whole thing is appalling- my school was academised about 5 years ago- the only discernible differences are that the top branch are paid more, the kids get less money spent on them and the whole staff is totally disempowered. I hate it. Passionately.

Change must, and will, come.

I am truly sorry for the position you and your kids find yourselves in now OP.

Change must, and will, come.

What do you propose?

the top branch are paid more, the kids get less money spent
A few people paid verses lots of people paid. Is there evidence that LAs would have put more money into school than academies have?

How have these academies borrowed money to get into debt. I didn't think schools were to allowed to borrow money?

I just read a letter in the TES about that, Fresh.

It said Lord Harris defended the CEO of Harris academies being paid £420,000 per year (not much less than that university Vice Chancellor who is being slated in the news for being paid a ridiculous amount) because the LEA would have taken 10-15% of school budgets while the Harris Federation only skims off 4.5%.

However, apparently he neglected to mention that LEAs used to provide many services for free that you now have to pay for.

Thanks noblegiraffe so LAs charge a lot more but provide some services. MATS are cheaper but dont provide services for free. How do we actually determine which system channels most money (including services) into a school? 10-15% sounds a lot more than 4.5% even when you factor in some extras.

The thing is, good schools serving relatively affluent areas probably paid more into the LA pot than they got out. Many of those have become standalone converter academies, being Ofsted Good / Outstanding at the point the Government was giving significant financial incentives to them to convert. They remain, probably, better off as academies because their expenditure on e.g. SEN support, support for the most deprived and most disruptive pupils etc is lower than their LA payment.

OTOH, there were many schools serving difficult communities, or who found themselves in difficulties, who got more out of the LAS pot than they paid in. Schools with 60%+ FSM, schools with 40% + SEN, schools dealing with children from extremely deprived households or very large numbers of refugees etc. These have become 'forced' academies - partly because there is a statistical correlation between having high %Pupil premium and having a poor Ofsted, and vice versa (I have sorted schools in England by %Pupil Premium, and was actually horrified by the fact that the first 4 pages, all very low PP, were almost all Ofsted Outstanding, and that the last few pages, all with very high %PP, were - with the exception of some Catholic schools and a few in Inner London where the spending per pupil is HUGE - all SM or RI)

So in moving from LAs - who were essentially redistributing cash from the schools with the best intake to those with the worst - to academies, the 'easy' schools do better, cash wise, and the 'hard' schools, who used to get lots of LA help, now have to pay much more for it. Yes, the latter do get more more PP and SEN money BUT it still doesn't help in combatting the deprivation and difficulties that face many in the communities they serve.

In a nutshell:
Trust grows and gets big
Trust pays senior staff a small fortune for doing very little
Trust fails to improve schools
(Probably) senior staff get gardening leave and a package to resign
Trust folds
Chaos insues looking for a new chain sponsor in the hope they will be better tjan the last one.

Meanwhile front line staff and students get dumped on. More new management. More new rules. Probably a new uniform. Then a load of exclusions. Then throw loads of resources at y11 to get a results spike (and fail to realise a poor ks3 causes results problems).

There was a great article on school improvement rates whej schools get taken over. I think it's a 2 year spike followed by a drop.

I'm anti academies as a political entity. I think a lot of the big chains have their fingers in lots of pies and there's too much money wasted at the top. But i have to admit, smaller local MATs that act like old style federations re alright.

Not all local authorities have the same model of providing support to schools. In my LA, schools buy in the services they want from the LA which has set up businesses to offer the services who stand and fall by their own success or otherwise. If they don't sell their services to the LA schools and the academies, they don't exist. It has greatly concentrated minds on providing high quality services the schools value.

Therefore our LA schools have the vast majority of funds delegated to them and governors/head decide what service packages they want to buy. The academies may buy the services too. It is not correct to assume that all LAs take 10-15%. They don't. There is a very mixed bag of service agreements and shopping baskets!

castiron
to pick up on your question of what do we propose

• a minimum size for LEAs (eg one CEO to 100 secondary schools)
• abolition of religious and academic selection (but retain parental choice as it works in pure comp areas)
• return to LEAs the ability to provide as man places are needed
• make all areas (LEA or LAC within it) have one central specialised PRU rather than dire spread out education
• properly fund SEN schooling with shared expertise

it CAN be done

Dakota its interesting what you say about staff feeling disempowered. My ds attended an academy converter (who's deputy HT became acting HT when he started).
The one thing I said I could feel from the is that the staff were not to form any relationship with parents and were to consider themselves the experts of our children and to see us as 'just the parents'.
Is impossible to get the best from pupils of the schools idea of working with parents is by keeping them at arms length.
Staff absence and sickness was higher than I've experienced at ds current secondary that's twice the size!

cantkeepawayforever but my DD's school doesnt serve a predominantly deprived area, it is the only school in the town. It doesnt have an excuse. It is a failed school. A decade or more (in my years of association with the school) of poor management has been the problem.

I'm finding it very interesting reading about single converters because it's so true of 2 local academies.

1. affluent area - my old school which was a GM state. Remained as outstanding throughout. Few Sen and fewer FSM/PP. like to use managed moves
2. failing state school. New HT made paper for record number of exclusions. Academy converter. Spike in results despite it being proud of having only 3 lsa's. HT left and made papers again for unpopularity in new school and forced to resign left due to poor health after 8 months. Deputy ht took over. This year 55% of pupils passed maths gcse.

This year 55% of pupils passed maths gcse.
define "passed"

Gnome,

Do all children in your town attend the school - ie is the intake representative of the town?

I am not saying that all 'bad' schools - or Ofsted RI / SM schools - serve areas of deprivation (or more precisely, have deprived intakes - an area of the town i live in seems hugely affluent - huge houses line the principal streets - but those children attend private schools / grammars and the local secondary school's intake is very socioeconomically mixed indeed, with large numbers drawn from the relatively 'invisible' poor estates)

Just that, statistically, you are more likely to get Good / Oustanding if you have amongst the lowest % PP / SEN nationally, and less likely if those percentages are amongst the highest in the country. The reasons are fairly obvious, but obviously at a school by school level, the statistical correlation may not hold up.

Passed was grade 4 or above.
However they've been telling prospective parents about their 80% A-C pass rate for years and about how they are above NA.
Looking over past few years it seems like it was the quick rise after converter and has dwindled slowly since.
It's the pupils I feel sorry for. About 70 students will need to retake at college as well as doing courses from what I understand of new retake rules. It make me wonder how colleges will cope and the effect on them?

Its in ITV news tonight

cantkeepawayforever yes - this is the school most people in the town go to.