The Department for Education have published “The case for a fully trust-led system” to justify their policy that all schools must join a multi-academy trust.
There is a lot of description of the spread of academies in England’s schools. The statistical claims for the transformative impact of conversion to academy status is one part partial and the other part false.
Key NEU findings
- Maintained schools are more likely to improve their Ofsted rating to good or outstanding than sponsor-led academies.
- Sponsor-led academies are more than twice as likely to have their Ofsted rating downgraded to requires improvement or serious weaknesses than maintained schools.
- The document misreports Ofsted ratings for schools by governance type.
- The document hides the contextual information for the test and GCSE results for schools by governance types.
