MATs | Schools Week

Ministers urged to clamp down on all-powerful academy CEOs

Ministers have been urged to clamp down on over-powerful academy bosses after an investigation found one chief executive sacked the trust chair who suspended him. Ian Cleland, chief executive and founding member of the Academies Transformation Trust (ATT), was put on temporary leave by chair Stephen Tilsley last year over finance concerns. Forecasts showed the […]

Greenwood Academies Trust set to lose two schools

The Greenwood Academies Trust will be stripped of two schools after Ofsted questioned its ability to drive improvement without a “balanced portfolio” of academies. The trust, which runs 31 schools across the east of England and the East Midlands, has now been told by the government to rebroker the City of Derby Academy and Skegness […]

Four academies approved to hire pupils as apprentices and lend staff to train others

Four multi-academy trusts are gearing up to offer jobs to former pupils and send staff to train apprentices in other schools after successfully getting on to the new register of apprenticeship providers. The government last week published the Register of Apprenticeship Training Providers (RoATP), a list of organisations eligible to deliver apprenticeship training. Nearly 2,000 […]

Why we’ll keep looking at MAT CEO pay

It’s time for our annual chief executive pay league, a story that gets people hot under the collar and frantically sharing the paper. Some people hate it. Each year a few trusts refuse to comment on individuals’ pay and over the coming months I’ll get sharp-elbowed communications officers telling me exactly what they think of […]

Pension row delays Bright Tribe free school takeover

A long-running squabble over a pension deficit has seriously delayed a major multi-academy trust from taking over a failing school. Bright Tribe, a Cheshire-based trust with 12 schools, was meant to take over Grindon Hall Christian free school in Sunderland almost one and a half years ago after the school was rated ‘inadequate’ in 2014. […]

Wealthy academy sponsors safeguard school trips amid funding squeeze

Donations from wealthy sponsors are helping academy trusts to safeguard school trips, breakfast clubs and sports competitions as other schools are forced to axe provision as the funding squeeze bites. Ark Schools tops the table with its hedge fund sponsors handing over £6.2 million last year, an average of more than £150,000 for each of […]

Two for-profit sponsors back out of academy market

Two academy trusts set up by for-profit providers that have made millions running schools across the globe have ended their sponsorship of English academies. The Erudition Schools Trust is in liquidation after its three schools in the Midlands were rebrokered to new trusts last year. Erudition was sponsored by K12, a firm founded by a […]

11 academy trusts close their doors

Eleven multi-academy trusts handed at least £770,000 of government start-up funding are set to fold after their schools were transferred to other chains. An analysis of figures detailing every academy rebrokering in the past two years, obtained by Schools Week, shows an increasing number of trusts have been wound-up. The largest is Navigate Academies Trust, […]

More multi-academy trusts naming their own feeder primaries

Multi-academy leaders are more frequently naming primary schools within their trust as feeder schools for their secondaries, despite little evidence of any strong “links”. In its annual report, the Office of the Schools Adjudicator (OSA) said pupils attending a primary school in a multi-academy trust were given priority at that trust’s secondary schools, sometimes at […]