Finding the DfE’s oversight of academy and maintained schools to be lacking, this report may interest policy makers.
Academies and maintained schools: oversight and intervention
Synopsis
According to this report the Department for Education has now demonstrated the effectiveness its interventions in underperforming schools and academies, despite investing roughly £380m annually into monitoring and improvement.
It found that the DfE relies heavily on sponsors to turn around underperforming schools, but does not collect information from them about the type of support they give. Ofsted is unable to inspect sponsors and multi-academy trusts so there is no independent source of information about the quality of their work.
The report states that there are significant gaps in the Department’s understanding of what works, and the information it has about important aspects of school performance is limited. In order to address this, the authors suggest that greater school autonomy needs to be coupled with effective oversight and assurance.