A key plank of ministers’ plans to expand academic selection could limit parental choice and “get in the way” of helping bright pupils, the government’s national schools commissioner Sir David Carter has warned.

Sir David has identified two “challenges” for introducing academic selection within multi-academy trusts (MATs).

In a wide-ranging interview with TES, he also:

• Admitted he lacks powers to force academy trusts to sponsor so-called “untouchable schools” that have deep-rooted challenges;

• Revealed that his new “health checks” to assess whether MATs should be allowed to expand will not be rolled out until another set of pilots is carried out next year.

The government’s grammar school consultation, which closed this week, included encouragement for “multi-academy trusts to select within their trust” and “establish a single centre in which to educate their most able pupils”.

Sir David said: “There’s one challenge around parental choice. So if you were to demarcate one of your schools as being the centre of excellence, and my child for whatever reason could not get a place in the centre of excellence, the school I have chosen becomes the school I can’t go to any more.”

Sir David Carter: no school is ‘untouchable’

The second challenge he identified involved supporting the most-able pupils.

“I think the best multi-academy trusts I work with have a really secure model for how they develop their able children,” he said. “Actually changing the structure of how education is delivered in a MAT might get in the way of that.”

Russell Hobby, general secretary of the NAHT headteachers’ union, echoed Sir David’s concerns. 

“Any selection in MATs is no better than selection inside a local authority, or in the nation as a whole,” he said.

He added: “As David has been pointing out, a MAT has the capacity to support more gifted and able students in the school they are in, and has the expertise across the whole trust while getting the benefits of a comprehensive education.”

Sir David denied that the lack of powers to compel an academy trust to take a particular troubled school was a flaw in the system.

He said he and his regional schools commissioners did not regard any school as untouchable, and the short-term solution was to ask the preferred sponsor to run the school on a contract to make an immediate impact.

Sir David told TES the longer term solution involved a “hub and spoke” strategy, where a trust would take on a cluster of schools, including the one in difficulty, allowing it to build a network.

This is an edited article from the 2 December edition of TES. Subscribers can read the full article here. This week’s TES magazine is available in all good newsagents. To download the digital edition, Android users can click here and iOS users can click here

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