Today it’s been announced that more than 50 per cent of children and young people are educated in the academy system. School trusts are no longer a policy initiative - a small project in a much larger education system. Academies are part and parcel of our education system and have been around for almost 20 years. Like all state schools, they are free to attend, inspected in the same way by Ofsted and take the same tests and exams.

It is right that the Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) takes a good look at the academy sector. But it is not right that the committee scrutinises this part of our system at the expense of other types of school structures. 

The academy sector is the most highly regulated and scrutinised of any school type. The chief executive of every academy trust is, in fact, directly accountable to Parliament. 

The Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA) undertakes its regulatory duties with the highest level of diligence, thoroughness and transparency. It investigates and publishes reports into those few trusts where things have gone wrong. Having all these reports in one place makes the problem look really significant, and makes it look like the problem is located in one part of the education sector - academies.

This greater oversight and transparency in publishing the reports has, ironically, led to the perception that there is a problem in the academy sector. There isn’t, and there have been mistakes in all schools, academies and non-academies.

It would be helpful if the PAC would recommend that we apply the same level of diligence and transparency to local authorities. We should expect local authorities to apply the same thresholds for investigation and to publish these investigations for schools they maintain on a single national portal.

In this way, we would maintain the same high standards of oversight, scrutiny and transparency for all parts of our state school system. We need to learn from the high standards in the academy sector so that we are providing the greatest possible confidence to parents and communities about schools of all types.

We must ensure parity of accountability.

Generalisation about academies

Perhaps my biggest worry about the report published today by the PAC is that it falls prey to the “generalisation instinct”. The report’s evidence seems to rely overmuch on two examples: the Bright Tribe Academy Trust and Durand Academy Trust.

The report makes sweeping generalisations about the entire sector based on these two examples. For example, the report concludes that “academy trusts do not make enough information available to help parents and local communities understand what is happening in individual academy schools”. But the evidence supporting this statement appears to come, in fact, only from Whitehaven - a single school in the Bright Tribe Trust. 

The ESFA has investigated Bright Tribe and there was clearly unacceptable practice, which I am not defending; but it is not fair or logical to conclude that all 3,054 academy trusts behave in this way. It is also overlooked that the interim leadership of Bright Tribe Trust, appointed by the Department for Education, has done so much to fix the mistakes made by the previous leadership.

The PAC should know better than to criticise a whole sector for the failure of one or two trusts.

Public confidence in our state education

It is surely a duty for all of us to uphold the highest legal, regulatory and ethical standards. Where individuals and institutions fall short of these standards, it is absolutely right that there should be an investigation and that individuals should be held to account. We are, after all, public servants and this is public money.

Alongside this sits a duty to build public confidence in our state education. One-sided scrutiny can only serve to reinforce unhelpful binary thinking and the perception that problems are located only in one part of the system.

The good news is that the English education system is a top-tier system. In systems that rely on people, there is always more to do - always more to put right - but we should do more to celebrate the strengths of state education in England.

Leora Cruddas is chief executive of the Confederation of School Trusts. She tweets @LeoraCruddas