Government ‘confused’ over best form of sponsor

The Department for Education (DfE) seems a bit ‘confused’ over which kinds of organisations should be the sponsors of schools that need support.

Education Minister, Lord Nash, at a national conference in April this year said that he very much believes in school-to-school support, and local clusters of schools. And he urged existing academy schools to help by supporting underperforming schools near them.

Dr Elizabeth Sidwell, who was then the Government’s Schools Commissioner, told the same conference: I want more school-to-school cooperation. Good and outstanding schools have so much to offer; we are going to outstanding and good schools and asking them to be a sponsor, and they might not want to become a big sponsor.

Department for Education officers have spoken to headteachers of academy secondary schools and promoted the idea of them sponsoring primary schools. The officers indicated that the DfE wanted to offer alternative sponsors to the big chains like Harris or Oasis. And that they believed that smaller operations could provide a quality bespoke alternative to the larger one solution-fits-all provision of the larger national sponsor organisations.

Greenshaw’s proposal to be the sponsor of Camden Junior School seems to fit perfectly with what the Minister and his DfE officials want. Greenshaw is a successful academy school that wants to help a school near to it; that offers a quality bespoke solution for Camden’s improvement.

But other DfE officials say they would prefer Harris as the sponsor of Camden Juniors, and are suggesting that they favour organisations that wish to expand for the sake of it, and take on a great many schools even though they may not be able to offer them all the same high level of support.

Big academy chains may ‘over reach’

The Times on 7 January 2013 ran an article under the headline: ‘Academies growing too fast, say experts’.

The Times said that some of the organisations running academies may have expanded too quickly, reducing their chances of turning around failing schools.

Education experts had analysed the performance of schools taken over by academy chains. They recognised that the whole point of the Government’s sponsored academies policy is that a sponsor can help to improve weaker schools by taking them into their academy chain. But they questioned whether a sponsor was able to achieve the required improvement in a large number of schools at once.

The Times concluded: ‘It will help no one if academy chains over-reach.’

We share this concern.

The Harris Federation is currently expanding rapidly by taking over a number of primary schools at once. But they have no track record in improving primary schools, and could be over-stretching themselves, taking on more schools than they can really cope with.

It will be of little help to the children of Camden Juniors if, after they have taken over, we find that the resources and expertise of theb Harris Federation are too thinly stretched across all the schools they control, and they are not able to devote the resources to Camden that it needs.

The Greenshaw Trust, on the other hand, has the capacity and capability to provide the support that Camden needs; it will be focused on just Greenshaw High School and Camden Juniors, and is not trying to take on too much at once!