Academies minister Baroness Barran said the government is enabling councils to run multi-academy trusts (MATs) because it knows there are “high quality” maintained schools and it wants them to share their leadership.
Speaking at the Schools and Academies Show today, she outlined how the government’s new White Paper will allow local authorities to run MATs by becoming members of trusts.
And she urged “high quality” maintained schools and single academy trusts to share their vision and leadership with struggling schools in their area through MATs.
She said: “One of the things we proposed in the White Paper is that local authority maintained schools can create a local authority MAT where the local authority would be the members of the MAT [and] so hold the vision and values of their schools.”
The minister said the government “really believed that is huge quality among maintained schools”.
She added: “There’s great quality among some single academy trusts and there’s some great quality among MATs.
“But we need those groups of quality who aren’t currently in the MAT system to share their vision, their leadership [and] their skills with schools in their areas who are perhaps struggling, for whatever reason, so that our children get the best education that they can.
Baroness Barran also outlined the government’s plan to give itself powers to be able to move schools that get two or more consecutive “requires improvement” judgements into MATs.
Speaking at a Schools and Academies Show event last year, Baroness Barran had acknowledged that there were concerns among maintained schools about “losing their autonomy” when joining a MAT.
Research published by the Department for Education last year showed that headteachers in only 13 per cent of maintained primary schools and 22 per cent of maintained secondary schools questioned by the department were considering converting to academy status.
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