Children must be protected from academy failures, says teachers' leader

Mary Bousted has written to Education Secretary Michael Gove following an announcement last week that Prospects Academies Trust, which runs six schools in Devon, Gloucestershire and East Sussex, is to close.

She wants Gove to oversee the development of a “proper and transparent” system to prevent children’s education from being disrupted when academy chains suddenly close.

Bousted said any such system should support the movement of a school back into local authority control until a long-term solution is decided, if that is what parents and teachers want.

She said: “At the moment, there is no mechanism for dealing with failing academy chains or sponsors who relinquish their academies, other than a kind of ‘fire sale’, whereby the Department for Education looks for new sponsors.

“An important and integral part of the mechanism must be an audit of each schools’ financial assets, and those of the chain, to ensure that public money is spent properly and for the purposes for which it was intended.

“Academy chain failures are very stressful for pupils and parents who do not find out for a considerable amount of time what is going to happen to their school and to their education.

“They are also very difficult for staff who may want to look for new jobs as soon as they can and, thus, add to the school’s problems.”

A spokeswoman for the DfE said it would take steps to ensure pupils’ education is not damaged by the closure.

She said: “We are working closely with the trust and schools to ensure they are all re-brokered with excellent sponsors and pupils’ education is not disrupted.

“We will look to new sponsors to ensure that pupils receive a higher standard of education.

“When we have concerns about the performance of academy sponsors, we act quickly – for example by stopping them from taking on new projects, so that they focus on their existing schools, and in some cases re-brokering their schools with other sponsors.”