Thank you for contacting me about academies.
As you are already aware from the Chancellor's recent Budget statement and the White Paper 'Education Excellence Everywhere', by the end of 2020, it is proposed that all schools will be academies or in the process of becoming academies, and by the end of 2022, local authorities will no longer maintain schools.
Over the last five years, the academies and free schools programmes have allowed thousands of headteachers and leaders who have wanted to take this step to drive improvement in their own schools and across the system to do so. In principle greater autonomy and accountability can be secured through academy trusts, where leaders have more control over budgets and teachers' pay, can take decisions they believe will improve standards and are held to account for the outcomes.
2015 results show that primary sponsored academies open for two years have improved their results, on average, by 10 percentage points since opening, more than double the rate of improvement in local authority maintained schools over the same period. 2015 GCSE results show that secondary converter academies are performing 7.2 percentage points above the national average, with 64.3 per cent of pupils achieving five or more good GCSEs, including English and maths. However I of course recognise that many factors effect performance, including the quality of leadership, teaching within the school and funding.
I have served as a School Governor of a large comprehensive whose results have in recent years (subsequent to my involvement) been transformed having moved to Academy status. I also more recently served as a Governor of a small village school. In the latter case we were happy to remain under County control but that did not prevent occasional consideration of what benefits could be derived from joining or establishing a multi-academy trust. Small schools can do so through linking with the schools they "feed" or forming alliances of similar schools, allowing them to share resources.
West Sussex has relatively few academies compared to some other counties but I recognise that maintaining an effective critical mass of support at County level whilst also fully supporting MATs may overtime prove less effective than focussing on proper support through one route, especially one that has been successfully deployed. Under the proposals there will be a new role for local authorities, who will move away from maintaining schools and focus on championing pupils and parents.
I support the overall objectives of the policy and the concept of empowering local schools but I look forward to seeing more detail as these plans evolve.
Thank you again for taking the time to contact me.
