• Special school with 'serious, widespread' safeguarding failures to get a new sponsor

    A residential special school in Worcestershire will be moved to a new academy trust after inspectors identified “serious, widespread” safeguarding failures. The boss of the academy trust in charge at Vale of Evesham School today admitted that mistakes at the school had led to “catastrophic results”, including the recruitment of a member of grounds staff…

    13.13 Feb. 10th, 2020 | News

  • Exposed: The academy trust chief who boasted he 'flicked away' safeguarding concerns

    An academy trust boss has boasted that he simply “flicked away” safeguarding complaints made by a whistleblower at a failing primary school. In a tirade to staff at Birchen Coppice Primary Academy in Kidderminster, Andrew Morrish, the chief executive of the Victoria Academies Trust (VAT), threatened to uncover and “deal with” the anonymous whistleblower who…

    5.00 Apr. 5th, 2019 | News

  • Investigation: Meet the head paid £260k to run one school

    A single-school academy trust has upped the pay of its top executive to £260,000, making him one of the best-paid academy bosses in the country. It means that the pay of Colin Hall, listed as “head” of Holland Park School, west London, has doubled in seven years, despite a letter from the government in 2017…

    5.00 Jan. 25th, 2019 | News

  • Ormiston Academies Trust got £1.1m government loan

    One of the country’s largest multi-academy trusts was lent more than £1 million by the government to help “cash flow management” last year, the second such settlement it has negotiated to takeover struggling schools. Ormiston Academies Trust, which runs 37 schools across England, received an extra £1.1 million from the Education Skills Funding Agency last…

    7.00 Jan. 18th, 2019 | News

  • Academy trust deficits rise but reserves grow for many

    The proportion of academy trusts reporting a financial deficit rose to 6.1 per cent in 2016-17 from 5.5 per cent in 2015-16, new statistics from the Department for Education have revealed. The 185 trusts that were in deficit were responsible for 300 academies (4.3 per cent of the total), and smaller trusts were more likely to find…

    13.47 Jul. 26th, 2018 | News